Respecting and Perspectivizing the Humanities
The Newbery Library and Illinois Humanities Council brought Jim Leach, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to Chicago on Friday. In Leach's brief comments, and in the introductions by various Newberry and Illinois Humanities Council leaders, two words kept popping up: respect and perspectives. These seemed to be the keywords, or at least the buzzwords, of the evening. The humanities, in the remarks of the event, centered around emphasizing respect across lines of cultural and political difference; and from there, developing the abilities for Americans to navigate among mutiple perspectives.
Leach's own short remarks were intriguing because rather than pretend to be a heavy-duty humanities scholar, he spoke of how the humanities shapes his sense of public service, particularly his experiences as a politician (Leach served in the US House of Representatives, representing southeastern Iowa, from 1977 to 2006).
He admitted immediately that one of the things that he liked about his new job is that everyone he meets in the humanities knows more about the field than he does. He then spoke about what he did know, which is recent national politics. Leach invoked Thucydides to critique what he saw as the bad foreign policy of neoconservatives, who he described as "pseudo-realists." (More of the Thucydides-Iraq War debates that I think Leach was referring to here).
But Leach packed his critique within a larger point: that the neoconservatives and also recent conservatives in the domestic health care policy debates seem to miss the key aspect of the humanities, which for Leach is that it broadens, contextualizes, and complicates simplistic constructions of reality itself. The humanities can build a multi-perspectival worldview. Not a relativistic worldview, but also not a unitary one. Instead, ideally, the humanities is a kind of resource for trying to make politlcal policy out of respecting perspectives.
Of course, that's a tall order, easily overrun by vitriol and nasty tactics and distortions and worries and other things, but it is the ideal, and it was nice to hear someone from outside the humanities and more in the governmental sphere speak to both its promise and its practicality.
The only sore point of the event was that there was no time for a question and answer session. Sure, Chairman Leach had to catch a flight, but a question and answer period really is essential for the very kind of respectful perspectivizing Leach described.
- Michael J Kramer's blog
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Lovely
What a very generous new director to speak of his new colleagues---and what an interesting account of his presentation. Thanks so much.
humanities and critical consumption
I wholeheartedly agree that a Q&A would have been beneficial. When you have a room full of people interested in promoting the humanities, you gotta mine it for information! What struck me about the event was something said in the introduction, which was that the numbers of students studying in the humanities has fallen even as the numbers of college students have risen. Although almost everyone can name a teacher or college professor who changed their lives with a book, poem or expanded worldview, the respect given those who choose to study in the humanities field are somehow looked upon as less serious about their education as those in the hard sciences.
The solution to this problem will be long in coming, and needs to start with how we market our skills to incoming students. My public speaking students, most of whom take class on the science end of campus, often laugh when I tell them I love reality TV or when I show beer commercials, computer ads, or talk about Us Weekly. They stop giggling when we analyze them for hidden allusions to ethnicity/race, gender, literature or religious undertones. You can literally see the moment when they get it. When they come back with their own varied, critical, intelligent examples, it illustrates how essential an education that focuses less on formulas and numbers than critical thinking and social interaction is to ones collegiate and social education.
Is Humanities Enrollment Really Declining?
Kim,
Thanks for the comments. You'll be interested (and maybe relieved?) to hear a counter-argument to the declining student interest in the humanities from none other than our fall guest in the Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual Research Workshop, Michael Berube! This is from his blog, in a post titled "Tough Times."
Michael
Addendum
Here is the prepared text for Leach's Chicago speech: www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/09112009.html.webloc.
Addendum Take 2
From the NEH website, here is the prepared text for Leach's Chicago speech: http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/09112009.html.webloc.