Our series of reflections on the place of the humanities in graduate education continues with this exchange between Point founding editor Jon Baskin and Michael Lipkin, the academic director of the Program for Public Thinking. Following on Ben Jeffery and Becca Rothfeld’s earlier exchange, Jon and Mike ask: What does it mean to say humanistic scholars “produce knowledge” in the first place? And is it important to ask what this knowledge is “for”?
Michael Lipkin
I’m going to roll up my sleeves and attempt a dirty, but I think necessary, job. I’m going to try to defend the humanities, or at least humanities scholarship, as it exists in its current form. I should say, before I do, that my road to something like a permanent job in the humanities has been a winding one. I remember, as a graduate student, being driven absolutely insane by how sanguine my professors were about our discipline. They were trying to reassure me, I think. But they succeeded only in making me envy and then resent them. So, to you, the reader, I say: wherever you’ve been, I’ve been there, too. I know the adjunct life. I know precarity. I know indifference. I know downright hostility. I’ve taught at diploma mills and in the Ivy League and everything in between. I understand.
What I want to push back against is the notion, expressed in Ben and Becca’s dialogue, that it’s the uselessness or the arcane or jargony character of humanities research that is to blame for our current state of affairs. Undoubtedly, most humanities scholarship is useless. In fact, all of it is useless. It’s useless because we live in a society that takes only a passing interest in culture or the arts, and no interest at all in the culture of decades, let alone centuries, past. Certainly the pressure to publish is a product of the arms race among desperate junior faculty on the job market. But, at the end of the day, this is what the humanities do. They produce knowledge. The job of the university, as something comprised of fields and disciplines, is to decide what does and does not constitute knowledge, to set guidelines for investigating this or that thing we want to know about.
To this end, I think much of the mobilizing of the affect of academic life—“passion”; “delight”—and some of its higher goals—“to investigate what it means to be human,” or even “the free exchange of ideas”—is ultimately misleading. These things do happen at the university, but they are, ultimately, means to the end of producing knowledge. There’s a key difference between poring over, say, Moby-Dick every day for a year—as some Nantucket residents do—and the kind of work you do in an English department. While the work of an academic can touch on what it means to be human, the question it really tackles is what it means to know something about Moby-Dick. Given that a thing called literature exists, what can we know about it?
Now, what is it that makes something actual knowledge? And what ensures that that knowledge is valuable? My explanation is twofold. On the one hand, in the university you get to immerse yourself in an object and learn about it on its own terms. This would be the difference between learning about the Roman Empire from a video essay, or just flipping around on Wikipedia, and the years of contact with primary sources you’d put in as a history major. But, no less importantly, academic work also involves constant critical self-reflection on the tools and methods that you, the collective you, use to approach that object. This is why so much humanities work actually frowns on trying to transmit to the reader the passion, say, a work of literature might stir in you. You are instead expected to show your work, clarify your methodology, position yourself in the field. Note that this is not the same as “rigor,” since it’s possible to read and think rigorously without undertaking any of this stuff. Nor is it the only rewarding way to engage literature, history, philosophy, whatever. It’s just a qualitatively different endeavor. To me, its substance never lay with any kind of positive upshot or understanding that it’s given me.
One irony, I think, of calling on the humanities to be more “useful” or “interesting” is that the past fifteen years or so has seen probably the widest circulation of academic ideas to the wider public I’ve known. The fascism debate, common-good conservatism, the reawakening of the labor movement, the destruction of the gender binary, all began their life as ideas in the humanities. On their own merits, too, I would argue that, in the last thirty years—notwithstanding some falloff in the past ten, because of the sheer turbulence of the job market—the humanities are better than they’ve ever been. To me, at least, since deconstruction, readings have become more iconoclastic and creative, as well as more tolerant of textual ambivalence. Since New Historicism, the zones of research around literature and philosophy have expanded in all kinds of thrilling ways. And it seems inarguable to me that the post-Theory, pre-wokeness moment, stretching from the late Eighties to the early 2010s, was better suited to meet the political and cultural situation of the present than the wider world of ideas was.
On the flip side, even in academia’s heyday, most scholarship would not have “delighted” the non-specialist. Even work I think is truly great, like Friedrich Kittler’s defiantly anti-humanist readings of Goethe and Schiller—I am, God forgive me, a Germanist—has virtually no crossover appeal, not even in the country where those authors are cornerstones of the national culture. Of course, there are cases where truly great scholarship recovers, in the ultra-particularity of hyper-specialization, a kind of universality. Kittler’s reading of Don Carlos, which he argues is a kind of traumatic repetition of Schiller’s years at an “enlightened” school for the middle class run by the aristocratic regime of eighteenth-century Württemberg, is clearly not “just” an attempt to add to our knowledge about the play. Kittler advances something like a worldview—one that sees just how imbricated our highest ideals are with the systems of control they’re supposed to overcome. Clearly, this is very important! And yet, the argument, in its full drama, and its full reflective power, is only really accessible to scholars with a considered understanding of those reference points—Schiller, Don Carlos, humanism, revolution, reaction. Take the very same worldview, the very same conclusions out of that context, and it regresses into superstition: there’s no point because “they” “control” “everything.”
Kittler published that article about forty years ago. Most German studies stuff since then—and I include my own work here, believe me—is, well, not Kittler. And yet, without the collective knowledge even the most mediocre of articles helps transmit, we’d have nothing. A big fat donut hole. Most questions about the human story simply do not have nonacademic answers, precisely because answering them requires not just research, but also second-order debate and consensus about terms and definitions. Did industrialization raise living standards in the short term for agricultural laborers? Well, how do we measure what a standard is? Before concepts, approaches, ideas, even seemingly irrational and spontaneous things like affects and sensations can be of any use, they need to be hammered out the hard way, subjected to reflection and review. Otherwise, they become ideologies. In fact, I’d contend that, in this respect, the outside world is more plagued with jargon than academia is. (What does it mean, for example, to “actualize” yourself?) Or this stuff simply joins the torrent of information available to us all, which floats past you as given, self-evident, incontestable, interchangeable factoids, the daily firehose that sprays through, overwhelms, and immobilizes the mind.
I’ve tried to make the best case I can here, but I still feel like I’m sounding pretty fusty. Am I convincing you at all, Jon?
Jon Baskin
When I was working on my dissertation at the University of Chicago, I was often asked by fellow graduate students how my “research” was going. The question always made me laugh. My dissertation basically involved a series of readings of fiction by David Foster Wallace, performed against the backdrop of some very old questions about the status of literature and its relationship to philosophy. Nothing about what I was doing felt like “research” in the sense that I understood the term. I was not uncovering new facts, and I did not believe that I was producing any new knowledge. The closest technical term I could come up with for one part of what I was doing was “interpretation,” but even this struck me as a piece of jargon that obscured more than it revealed. I was thinking hard about some novels and short stories that had made a deep impression on me and then considering how they related to some works of philosophy, mostly about the role of literature in moral life, that also interested me.
It is true that the form of my dissertation was related to the disciplinary structure of the university, and that I abided by certain conventions like having to survey the “fields” I was intervening in—in this case, moral philosophy and literary studies. But when I surveyed these fields, I encountered hardly anything I would call knowledge there, either. I found instead readings and assertions and arguments at varying levels of coherence. I found, in other words, lots of people doing what I was doing.
This is one reason I have always been skeptical of the claim, common as it is, that the work of the academic humanities is to “produce new knowledge.” At the very least, I think this idea has to be specified according to the discipline. I can see how a historian might produce new knowledge—say by going into the archives and discovering previously unpublicized records. (Your question about industrialization could be usefully adjudicated in this way.) I can see how certain kinds of analytic philosophers might produce something like scientific or mathematical knowledge through the working out of complex formulas and logic puzzles. Social scientists can certainly be said to produce knowledge, although there is some question about whether this is the most important thing that they do. But for the disciplines that have always been closest to me, literary and cultural studies and continental philosophy, I find it very hard to understand what it means to produce new knowledge, or whether that is something anyone ought to be trying to do. (One solution to this problem in literary studies has been for scholars to produce “knowledge” about literature that basically just is history, or sociology. I do not think it is a good solution.)
In that sense, I am sympathetic to Becca and Ben’s impulse to worry about the “uselessness” of so much of what passes for “new knowledge” in the humanities today—and possibly forever. For reasons that Becca touches on in her discussion of the Strother Center, I disagree with your claim that “without the collective knowledge which even the most mediocre of articles helps transmit, we would have nothing.” I guess it depends what you mean by “we,” and “nothing.” But we as human beings had rich relationships with many of the deepest humanistic questions and texts long before there was any scholarship at all, and I am confident that we would still figure out how to engage with them in the future even if the academic disciplines all disappeared tomorrow. This is because I believe that the most important “collective knowledge” exists in the works of art, philosophy and literature themselves. That does not mean that no knowledge at all exists in the centuries of scholarship that orbit around those works, and you have given some good examples above of the virtues of that work of careful analysis and interpretation. But I am wary of the tendency of academics to elevate the kind of “knowledge” they create over the many other kinds of (what I would rather call) wisdom that can be gained from direct encounter with primary sources.
All that said, I do think that those of us who express skepticism about the production of knowledge as the mission of graduate education in the humanities have a challenge of our own to meet, and you articulate it well. If it is perfectly possible, as I have just asserted, to rigorously read and enjoy Moby-Dick without any interpretive methodology or historical context, then why should graduate education in literature exist at all? Even if we put aside the knowledge point for a moment, you mention many of the other essential things that define an academic discipline: methodological consistency, a sense of disciplinary history and a commitment to norms and standards that define what counts as acceptable work within a specific intellectual community. I like the point about going slow and “showing your work,” which is in fact a discipline that I felt myself learning in graduate school. (That’s not to say that nonacademic writers don’t also have to show the reader how they got where they are going, but there is something different in the painstaking way you learn to do this when writing for other scholars.) And even if I personally endorse much of the vision of humanistic education that Becca describes at the Strother Center, and that is practiced for undergraduates at places like St. John’s College and Deep Springs, it seems right to me that, as far as graduate education goes, this is not a model that can plausibly replace the one you are describing.
Which leaves me at something of an impasse. I remember a professor in graduate school explaining to me that literary studies, as a field, had been in crisis ever since it split off from philology, since nobody could ever agree about what it meant to “study” novels and short stories professionally. I left that conversation thinking, and still sort of think today, that perhaps it just was a mistake to try. That said, I do not believe it would be a net gain for literature or for intellectual life for these institutions, which have provided a home and career to so many people who care deeply about literature, to disappear tomorrow. And I also believe that undergraduates would be missing something (and are, in many cases) if they are not taught by professors who have spent large parts of their life studying literature and the other arts.
One question I want to put back to you to conclude. You make the case that academic disciplines should be left alone to decide what counts as knowledge within them. And you argue convincingly, I think, that there is a danger in trying to make the work of the academic humanities “useful” or “relevant” in some shallow or trendy way. But is there any way, on your understanding, that we could ever judge a discipline from the outside at all? Because it seems to me that while you are well articulating the view from inside the disciplines, there is something missing from your picture, which is what all this knowledge is “for,” in the broadest sense. I don’t mean by that that it needs to be immediately applicable to our lives in any crude way, but surely you must believe that the knowledge and methodologies these disciplines ultimately produce have some positive role to play in human life. But if that is the case then we would want some way of being able to tell if a discipline was somehow failing to fulfill this role—if, for instance, it had gotten lost in a rabbit hole of its own making, or become too enamored of one interpretation of its history and mission in comparison to others. I can hear you perhaps saying that this is something the disciplines ought to work out internally, but what if they don’t?
Michael Lipkin
You ask a lot of good questions here, Jon. If I had good answers to them, I might have had a very different career in the humanities than the one I’ve had.
I think, what I’m moving closer to, is that I see the humanities as, on the one hand, preservative: as maintaining and debating a corpus of knowledge. And on the other hand, as critical and reflective. I guess I’m a Kantian in that way. For me, scholarship is as much about setting limits and guardrails about illegitimate uses of knowledge—and Lord knows there are plenty of them out there—as it is about passing on something positive. But it does occur to me that we have a recent object lesson in trying to make the humanities “for” something handy. Isn’t this what “wokeness” was?
I’m using scare quotes here because I have serious reservations about filing the cultural changes the university’s gone through over the last decade under one heading. Outside observers always overlook how incredibly fractious the university is, how many competing interests and power centers it has.
But the story, as I experienced it, was this: as an institutional stance—and that’s what it is, since wokeness produced no intellectuals—wokeness emerged out of the havoc that the 2008 financial crash unleashed on the tenure-track job market. What sane business, after all, would hire employees you can’t fire at will? Wokeness brought the grassroots energy of Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson-era Black Lives Matter into the university, to demand that the corporate university, which had crashed in such spectacular fashion, regain its lost legitimacy by joining in the struggle for equality. On the level of individual departments, the hiring of new faculty, the “rebalancing” of syllabi, and the thematization of “justices” of various kinds rested on the promise that sinking enrollments could be offset by pulling in marginalized students, reluctant to register for the existing curriculum because they didn’t “see” themselves in courses on Provençal poetry or German realism. But, more broadly, I think wokeness asked a question that rhymes with the one you’re asking—how could you, as a researcher, as a producer of knowledge, distinguish the false from the true, without eventually coming to the problem of the false society? Without asking what would make it true? Wokeness promised to save the corporate university from itself, by restoring a real, human end to humanities education.
One place you could see the effect of all of this in my corner of the world, German studies, was the job listings every year. Here you could see departments attempt to restructure the field from the bottom up, one hire at a time. Virtually every job from 2016 on “strongly preferred” a candidate who did either migration studies, or Black German studies, or the “environmental humanities,” or work pertaining to Germany’s colonial past. (Interestingly, there was also a move away from literature and toward “visual culture.”) The idea was that, to staunch the bleeding, German departments would slough off a hidebound coverage model (“German Literature 1945-1990”) and align itself with what anyone would agree were the great and urgent fights of our time, the real stuff you could see out in the streets, especially once Trump came on the scene and the liberal center had to face the possibility that the radicals had had it right all along.
I know you guys at The Point were and are, to say the least, skeptical of this project. But I think it holds some object lessons for your own demand that graduate school be more “useful.” One upshot is that attaching the end of the humanities to any larger conception of the right life means pulling them further into the battle over the institutions of civil society. So long as America remains a democracy this fight will be fought—and fought hard. Understandably so. People feel strongly about the right life!
Another lesson is that, at least within the bounds of the classroom, or in the pages of an academic journal, questions of value and purpose still have to be formed as field-specific questions of knowledge. This is something that people who think the university “indoctrinates” students never seem to grasp. A professor can give a class the most leading title in the world—“Structures of Apartheid: South Africa, Jim Crow, and Israel”—but they will still spend most of their time in class teaching central debates, points of inquiry and methodological approaches rather than conveying normative judgments (“…and that’s bad!”). Students perceive these judgments as a use of the bully pulpit anyway—sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, depending on their own orientation. In my experience, you can hector students into agreeing with you, at least in the space of an essay or a test question. But you can’t teach them to love or hate something.
You say that “we as human beings had rich relationships with many of the deepest humanistic questions and texts long before there was any scholarship at all.” We sure did—thanks to society’s division of labor into classes. One upside to this division, unjust though it was, is that for most of human history it made clear who culture was for. As late as the early twentieth century, the most common nonacademic scholar was the black sheep of a wealthy family, people like Georg Lukács or Walter Benjamin. There were definitely attempts to challenge the monopoly of the cultured class, but these, too—one example I’m thinking of here are the lending libraries that set up the mid-nineteenth-century workers’ movements—still did so with a clear sense of who was undertaking that challenge (the working class), and for whom (again, the working class), and to what end (the emancipation of the working class). This is a simplified history, I know, but the point I’m getting at here is that humanities education today exists in a far blurrier social-cultural picture, where it’s far from clear whose privilege or responsibility it is to undertake cultural inquiry. Nothing is really binding in the way it used to be. The university at least answers some of these questions. It houses the humanities because the university produces and safeguards knowledge, and literature, philosophy and so on are things we want to know about. What is there outside the university today? Just the free market—free in the same sense that someone who’s been tossed into the middle of the ocean is free to swim for it. One of the glummest experiences I have as a professor in the so-called elite context is realizing that, for almost all of my students, their humanities courses are the most sustained engagement with ideas or art they’re ever going to have before the cell door of the working world clangs shut on them once and for all. For all the news stories out there about students’ moral stridency, or their inability to read books, the most common experience I have with students is that they want more.
That leads me to one way I would answer your challenge about the need for “outside” checks on the development of humanities disciplines, which is by reorienting them dramatically around the teaching of undergraduates. Undergraduates, if you think about it, hold a conciliatory middle position between yours and mine—they’re neither in the discipline, nor are they part of the general public. If a corrective is going to come, I think it will come from the day-in, day-out contact we have with them. Certainly, the demand is there. A course on Kant’s moral philosophy will have a waitlist. So will a class on Marx. Or Freud. I taught snoozed-on Swiss realist Gottfried Keller to a full capacity seminar by calling it “Bad Romance.” (Score one for unwoke German studies, though we did do a lot of gender theory.) We owe it to our students to meet that demand, and to grow it. And here, by we, I mean humanities professors.
So I suppose in the end I am comfortable saying that humanities research does have an end—in determining what we pass on to students and how we pass it on. One belief I hold closely, which I do not think is shared in elite grad programs, is that it is the responsibility of the discipline to produce great teachers. At Columbia I quickly learned to avoid the celebrity professors at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, who were routinely terrible at laying out their ideas and, as a result, brought the worst habits out of the starstruck grad students in their classes. (“How do we… think the political?”) I learned to teach in the adjuncting salt mines. There, student disinterest and institutional hostility were seen as givens to be overcome with strategy, creativity and energy, not a reason to start catastrophizing.
I think you and I are in agreement that the times call for a kitchen-sink experimental approach to teaching, and Jesuitical zeal in recruiting students. Honestly, it’s this, more than anything else, that is my beef with “woke German”—if a class on “Minor Literature” packed in students by the dozens, I’d say, go with God. Looking at it cynically, the bigger undergraduate enrollments are, the weaker the case for slashing the programs, the greater the need for professors to teach them. Take the university’s logic and flip it on its head: If there’s demand, then surely there has to be supply?
More than that, it’s been my experience that engaging the basic questions of your discipline year in, year out with undergraduates who know absolutely nothing of them channeled up into my research, shaped what questions I thought needed answers, pointed me in a direction, helped me find a voice. I think that’s precisely the kind of reorientation the humanities need as a whole. Who knows? Maybe we might learn something.
Jon Baskin
OK, so, to start with your discussion of wokeness. Nothing you say about the way that wokeness attempted to become a justificatory structure for various humanities departments, including your own, at a certain historical moment seems wrong to me. But I’ve already conceded above that I agree with you about the academic humanities not trying to be of “use” in some shallow or trendy way. Moreover, the example you give of what happened in German departments during that time seems to me a perfect illustration of a situation where a discipline appeared ready to abandon core facets of what its mission had long been understood to be, without, for the most part, having undertaken any internal deliberation about the matter. The question I asked above was, Don’t we need some way of being able to judge when a department goes down this path and fails to self-correct? Doubtless, the professors and students who were posting and competing for the jobs in German that you mention above would describe what they are doing as “producing knowledge.” So what licenses you to say that this restructuring of German studies represented a wrong turn for the department, or that the knowledge it was producing was not “field-specific”? You must be operating with some set of criteria that allows you to make such a criticism. You are part of German studies, but your side was not winning this debate, to put it mildly. My question was whether there is in such cases any role for the public, or for some outside authority, to play, or whether we all have to stand deferentially by and allow departments to always decide for themselves what counts as knowledge at any given moment. I think it only makes sense that, if we are to defend the importance of graduate education and the disciplinary humanities, whether politically or intellectually, we have a responsibility to develop mechanisms for self-correction and self-criticism that make us accountable to some wider conception of what we are doing. If we don’t, we’ve certainly seen some of the options for who will step in and do it instead.
It’s with this in mind, though, that I like so much your proposal to reorient graduate school toward the teaching of undergraduates. At some level, every graduate student is already training to be a professor, but everyone knows that, in many programs—if not the majority—learning to teach undergraduates is fairly far down on the list of priorities, and often goes unrewarded professionally. It’s a familiar point—perhaps to the point of being overstated—that there is no necessary correlation between those who are great researchers and those who are great teachers. But you point in your proposal to a reason that graduate schools ought to think more about undergraduate teaching that goes beyond the need to produce better pedagogues. As you say, undergraduates can be that “outside” check on the pathologies and prejudices that might otherwise corrupt a discipline from the inside. Undergraduates show up every year fresh from eighteen years with their families and in most cases will reintegrate, four years later, into the “real world.” Excepting the small percentage who want to become academics themselves, then, their interest in the humanities is likely to be motivated not by a desire to contribute to the professional literature in a discipline but rather by basic questions about how to live in and understand the world.
In a way, this brings us back to Becca’s suggestion, at the end of her exchange with Ben, that “a good guiding principle for the humanities moving forward, perhaps, is this: if there is no way to explain to a curious and thoughtful civilian—my private word for nonacademics—why this question is relevant to her life, then perhaps it isn’t relevant, period.” You’ve made an argument for why “relevance” can be a dangerous criteria for judging the questions we deem worthy of research, and I am persuaded by your point that, if we are going to preserve graduate school in any form, disciplinary professionals need to have some level of autonomy in choosing which questions and topics interest them. Another potential challenge to meeting Becca’s criteria, I thought when first reading it, would be in coming up with ways for academics to test whether their questions were compelling to a “curious and thoughtful civilian.” But this discussion suggests a solution to both issues: every college and university has a constantly replenishing population of curious and thoughtful civilians coming onto their campus each year where, if things are designed as they should be, they will come face to face with the graduate students and professors in the various humanistic disciplines. If judging and evaluating the extent to which those disciplinary professionals are able to interest the students in the basic questions of their disciplines were to become a larger part of the evaluation of graduate students, this might go some way toward restoring what many (including me) believe to be a broken social contract between institutions of higher education and the public. The research universities get taxpayer money, as well as large spheres of autonomy in graduate programming in return for… what? In the sciences, discoveries may be made which cure diseases and improve quality of life. In the humanities, I still think most “civilians” would say that the endpoint is to produce teachers capable of inspiring students—“before the cell door of the working world clangs shut on them,” as you put it—with an appreciation for the fundamental questions, problems and texts that lie at the core of humanistic education, and by extension in the intellectual history of every academic discipline. This proposal would encourage graduate schools to hew closer to that mission, even without giving the “public,” imagined as some vague entity that can be measured by opinion polls, any right to interfere directly in their internal workings.
Of course, things are not designed as they should be right now, or we would not be having this conversation. And I guess I am less sanguine than you are that the students will simply show up if universities provide them with more humanities professors or marketing materials favoring the humanities. As you say, the message that it’s more practical to major in business than in comparative literature is broadcast by our entire society, and underscored by the obscene cost of higher education. In addition, I experienced firsthand in my undergraduate education a literary studies department that, having not thought hard about their curriculum for undergraduates or whether the problems they were focused on were of any interest to their classes of “thoughtful civilians,” managed to alienate large numbers of their own students, and would later lose significant percentages of them not only to computer science or business but also to a (just as useless professionally, but much more self-confident about its purpose) creative writing major.
The only viable solution to this problem, in my experience, is the core curriculum, which I first encountered when I came to University of Chicago as a graduate student. I became an immediate partisan of the Core when I had the privilege of teaching in it, and even before that, actually, when I saw the effect it had on the campus culture there. (Just the idea that every student had read certain of the same books transformed the campus into an intellectual community in a way I had never experienced previously.) What had never occurred to me before now though is how important the revitalization of core curriculums could be to the survival—and hopefully more than survival—of graduate education in the humanities. Not only is a core curriculum the most effective way for a university to communicate how much it values the humanities and ensure a steady stream of students for future humanities Ph.D.s to teach, but, depending on how it is set up, it can do exactly the thing you suggested had happened to you, by compelling graduate students and professors to regularly consider the meaning and relevance of the foundational texts and questions of their disciplines, not to fellow professionals in their fields, but to the undergraduate who just arrived on campus from the suburbs of New Jersey and already has plans to major in economics or biochemistry. (An underappreciated key to the Core working at the University of Chicago was that every professor on campus, no matter how famous, was required to teach in the Core every few years, and then required to attend weekly meetings with the other professors who were also teaching that quarter. Being at these meetings, and hearing some of the colossally accomplished professors from philosophy, classics, political science and sociology discuss how their students were responding to the week’s reading in Plato, or Nietzsche, or Max Weber, was a defining experience of graduate school for me. It also made me realize precisely what had been missing from my undergraduate education, where there was no evidence of such discussions ever having taken place.)
I want to finish with just one further thought, which is partly—but not only—about vocabulary. You began this exchange speaking about the virtues of “producing new knowledge” in a discipline, and we’ve ended it talking about the ways that graduate schools could do more to emphasize the transmission of knowledge to future generations. Not only knowledge, but also the questions, the debates, and the notable texts and chief insights that have defined the history of their disciplines. To me, one term that has been missing from our discussion—although you came close to it in talking about the “preservative” function of the disciplines—is “tradition.” Any good graduate student will acknowledge that it is necessary to learn the history and the traditional interpretations of one’s discipline in order to be able to add new knowledge in the first place. But another thing I like about finding ways to bring the college student’s perspective more centrally into the process of graduate education is that it might rebalance our conception of graduate education toward what I consider to be an equally important—and perhaps more legible, to the public—function that the disciplines have as custodians of traditions of thought, as defined by the discipline’s continuous engagement with, and revitalization of, its originating questions and subjects. This is not about idly venerating those traditions but it is also something different than considering them only as launching pads for something new—or merely as ripe objects for “critique.” You mentioned the pressure in German Studies to move away from “its hidebound coverage model (“German Literature 1945-1990’),” and I always wonder in such cases where the pressure is coming from. Who is bored by this coverage model—the professors or the undergraduates? I doubt it is the undergraduates, who have never read this foundational literature before. Perhaps the model of graduate education we are discussing would help prevent the graduate students and the professors from getting bored by it, either.
Stay tuned for further reflections in the coming weeks.
Further reading from The Point’s archive…
Ben Jeffery and Becca Rothfeld’s initial exchange in this series of reflections on graduate education.
Robert Pippin’s remarks on incommensurable domains of knowledge.
Justin Evans on the English department and the “politically progressive humanities.”
A survey of college students on what they think college is for.
Image credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf2-06141, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
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I tend to think that the best defense of the humanities is they preserve a space for thinking beyond utility, which is why they tend to appear useless in a social context that reduces us to use value. But, as you’ve noted here, it’s impossible to justify paying obscene prices for something that’s beyond the frame of utility.
At my own institution, I’ve been focused on the core curriculum for that reason. It’s dismaying how many of my colleagues (even in the humanities) tend to treat it as nothing more than a series of hoops to jump through or boxes to check. That feels like a major obstacle.
If we accept that people _do_ want to think about the humanities, about ideas, and I think people quite broadly do—these might be strange examples, but the amount of listeners and followers people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson have has always felt like an articulation of this—then I wonder if maybe the problem is not one of convincing people of the value of the humanities but one of explaining to people why the humanities have to be so difficult or "jargony" (whether they do or not and to what degree is maybe worth investigating and maybe what part of the checking process, whether internal or from the outside, might look like). But expressing this to "civilians" and undergraduates alike might involve walking a fine line between acknowledging that many people do, or attempt to, meaningfully engage with the questions of how to live and “what it all means” every day (not making people feel like we’re saying “it’s actually so complex you couldn’t possibly understand”) and still conveying somehow that there may always be deeper to go, and that the difficulty of reaching the depth or complexity is worthwhile.
I have a lot of questions about difficulty, about vocabulary or jargon as it may be, and about what kind of knowledge the humanities produces; I agree with Isaac below that more exploration of whether interpretation is knowledge might be interesting, also because it might help clarify what kind of claims are feasibly made about what the humanities offers. I know that a lot of talk of justification and use is dreary and besides the point for some, but, as someone who cares a lot about the humanities but tends temperamentally more with Jon in that I am not sure if knowledge is what it produces (or at least I am not sure what kind of knowledge it could be said to be), I cannot escape the issue of what else we are doing it for!