Karla Holloway: The State of the Humanities
The Duke dean of humanities and social sciences says universities run the risk of allowing their values be overwhelmed by money issues
Monday, February 24, 2003
This talk was given Feb. 11 as part of the Wednesday Conversations series sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.
"Getting caught up in your game'when you cannot say my name'"
Destiny's Child
All of the issues that matter when considering a public address have come to bear on this discussion today. The questions of audience and tone -- the matter of length and perspective -- the necessary inquiry about authorial positionality -- where it is that I reside in the material of this talk.
As Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences, my work has interesting divisions and important intersections -- both across and within the two divisions. There are, for example, issues of practice in the arts that do not exist in the same manner for departments like philosophy and literature. There is the matter of my being a humanist and leading the social sciences. This does not, by the way, "matter" for everybody -- I spent some time a couple of weeks ago with an invitation to doff my humanist credentials and represent the social sciences only at, shall we say, another university. So in consideration of one's positions, there is evidence of a potential for certain flexibility.
Nevertheless, in considering this address, those questions of audience and tone mattered the most for me. I felt it critically important to contextualize what I want to say today for and to my colleagues in the humanities -- to situate and to focus this conversation within the acknowledged environment of a university whose work has distinguished global cultures of arts and letters and has informed natural philosophies of science and the evolutions of technology.
And herein lies the challenge.
Focus can be achieved in many ways. Ideologically and as a matter of principle, the modern university is unquestionably constructed to disciplinary diversity. As a matter of fact and as a matter of history, the way in which these universities have come to claim intellectual stature has been through an intelligent and considered curiosity and inquiry broadly shared across the arts, the humanities, and within the sciences. Indeed, the way in which studies of cultures and societies have advanced have been through the intercourse and intersections between these disciplines and scholarly divisions. Consider, for example, Michelangelo's intimate understanding of anatomy or Galileo's authorial perspicacity that earned Rome's' disapprobation and scientists' awe. It is important to recall that it was within the Universities of Padua and Pisa and that Galileo found intellectual community for the art, science, and craftsmanship that integrated his life's work.
His model that suggests to me the intellectual poverty of those who would make either light of the reasonable distinctions between us humanists and scientists or make them a contestatory divide. We and they would do better to recall the ways in which knowledge has been constructed and the ways in which depth of field is achieved in part by a field of limitless vision.
But the question for me lies not so much with the presence of the humanities and the sciences on today's campus. Instead, it resides within the ways in which we give shape to that presence and especially to the ways in which we signal academic value.
I want to say the following carefully and clearly, with both appropriate stress and critical emphasis: Today's university runs the distinct risk of allowing its institutional values to follow the money.
No doubt, and with no question of any other way for this scenario to emerge -- science and technology are hugely expensive endeavors. And let me be clear -- the expenditures are both appropriate and necessary'not merely for matters of stature, but for the absolute reason that they make necessary advances in the material conditions of our lives.
Nevertheless, I do have serious concerns about the ways in which our institutional values run a decided risk in associating themselves with cost. Following the money is a dangerous scenario. If we were to place the cost of a cello against the cost of a say, optical error detector, it seems too easy and too capricious to me if we let the disparity that seems the consequence of such juxtaposition allow us to value one more than the other.
But it is exactly the dramatic difference between these two that seems to make room and make reasonable an assignation of value -- one that associates the cost of a thing with its importance -- a sure and certain risk for us within the academy.
Why do I worry over this?
As a humanist, language, of course, looms fairly large for me as a signal of particular kinds of attention. The day I heard the phrase "science corridor" used in the discussion of the plans for the dramatic and quite architecturally stunning plans for the new library -- and the gateway it will indeed create that leads to the LSRC, engineering and biosciences facilities, was the day I began thinking about this presentation as something different than a reverie on my own research (which I had originally desired); and something instead about the way in which a caution about association, value, and name seemed important and appropriate.
This does not mean that that planned archway and its opening to engineering and the LSRC will not do exactly that -- that it will not, in effect, be a "science corridor." But naming a thing -- saying a name -- sometimes signals attentiveness. Such attention begs the question: How, and in what circumstances and with what consistency do we hear the names of the humanities and arts spoken?
One of my fields of study -- linguistics, suggests it is reasonable to find significance through a frequency analysis -- the numbers of times a feature of speech appears and the significance assigned to that appearance through various statistical analyses. (Yes, I have done that chi-square thing.) But, unfortunately, one need not run a frequency analysis to determine where the weight of name-saying lies in universities that are making extraordinarily dear investments in the sciences and technology.
Destiny's Child repeats its title lyric, again and again as a provocative insistence of a named presence into the mix of what matters. And, yes, as the song's lyrics assert, the absence of that name-saying is suspicious, the challenge of the lyric is: "If you ain't running game, say my name, say my name."
How do we know something is important to the university in these days? It absolutely cannot be by following the money. It's an insufficient and finally an impoverished -- and I use this adjective quite intentionally -- marker of significance and intellectual value -- at least in the ways that should matter in a community that values ideas and knowledge and the spaces that it makes available for those ideas and that knowledge to flourish. There are appropriate and clearly crucial ways in which financial offices make monetary decisions that allow for a diversity of students and faculty -- and make available and sure the financial support systems that these absolutely need.
But our investment of attention and time and energy to making room for these on our campus need not have an associative consequence in the ways in which we value them.
Given the societies in which we live, I am, nevertheless, unhappily convinced that this is difficult to do. This is partly because budgetary decisions and discussions about finance take up a great deal of time. And we are wont to make a relational association between the expenditures of time and money. But part of the work we do as academics, even when we are administrators, is to disavow artificial parallels. If we are to secure the intellectual value of university education and honor its history of inquiry and ideas, these values should finally bear little relationship to how much it has cost us to secure them.
That said, the responsibility, and indeed the intellectual honesty here to recognize the ways in which finance has some administrative field-specific weightiness is ours, as humanists to understand as well. I recall the advice I shared with a colleague considering administrative work who said that she was interested in the ideas and vision, not the budget. It was my strong suggestion to her first not to share that with anybody else, and second, to make certain that the first thing she knew and understood, deeply and well, was the budget and allocation process. Being absolutely and irrevocably invested in a culture where capital matters, and one in which it is undeniably the case that budget will impact certain decisions, means that the scholarly cultures that have been ours, and that have encouraged us to look to the university for our resources without full sense of or participation in the strategic allocations of these resources must be revised.
The times have changed, colleagues, and a hue and cry about the change would undoubtedly be interesting and absorbing, probably even publishable; but will finally do us little good. The humanities, traditionally, has not made good and productive use of external funds for programming and support in ways that are consistent with the availability of those funds. But frankly, we had better become better acquainted with external processes of funding. The review process inherent in these funding mechanisms are important feedback for us -- and, from my perspective, a reasonable adjudicator of the funds requested from my office, for example, for a wide variety of activities and ideas that have not had the opportunity for comment and consideration from anyone other than the person making the request.
This insularity is not reasonable. Furthermore, it simply does not make good financial sense for an administrative office to fund a request for which there may be outside dollars available. It is certainly an administrative responsibility to make these processes transparent and to facilitate them; and also to step in when there is no external potential. But the divide of internal humanities and external science funding is unrealistic and untrue. If we do not familiarize ourselves and our students with these venues, if we do not look outside for opportunities, we are enabling the support of an artifice that cannot easily make these kinds of decisions without pitting one discipline against the other and that frankly, is not a useful comparative.
There is no reason other than habit -- the habit of anticipating internal support -- that weds us to these expectations. This is simply and surely a habit we have to change.
Modern university infrastructures that support our spaces of work and inquiry appropriately anticipate that its faculty reaches outside to bring funding to it that will contribute to its intellectual vitality -- whatever the discipline, to the extent that these resources exist. Saying that it costs less to support a humanist's ideas than a scientist's is a superficiality that forwards nobody's agenda -- especially ours, and further it plays to that sense that this is gamesmanship.
I am reminded of a moment in Toni Morrison's novel "Tar Baby", where Jadine's aunt reminds her, in a moment when her niece suggests that it may be her "turn" to care for her relatives: "Turn? Turn? This ain't no game of bid whist sugar." The reality here is that this university is our collective community, and the ways in which it might make viable its scholarly aspirations is a matter of principle as well as fact -- we need not take turns to stand on principle.
But, at the same time, institutions would benefit from the employment of our particular talents to remind it to say our names, to pronounce us within and into its institutional conversations and priorities. That is our indication that we have its attention, if not the bulk of its financial resources. A pronounced absence is a silence that is unacceptable. This is, after all, the critical work that many of us do -- attending to lacunae, interpreting absence, making sense of silence. It is not, however, my intent to suggest the impetus for this emphasis, this name saying, comes only from outside of the humanities. What is our role in urging these conversations forward, and where are our engaged collective voices? Consider, for example, what conversation might emerge if we were to lead rather than audit the discussions surrounding one of the emerging issues in academic humanism -- publishing and the university press. Since most of our work is dependent on their viability, and our vitality is determined by theirs, the administrative discussions circulating about subvention seem oddly displaced from the department communities for whom they matter the most. Should the university subsidize the manuscripts of its junior faculty at whatever university press they might land? Would such privilege complicate the tenure process? Or should a university instead more substantially and better support its own press? But'that is just one specific potential focus for our leadership. Other questions emerge around the consequence of listening to, or for, the silences. Would this mean naming an arts and humanities corridor? Would it mean in administrative address shifting a discussion to making the humanities and arts the focus rather than the add-on to a conversation about the materia of a university's day? Would it mean some assurance that the knowledge and interests of administrative teams are as diverse as the faculty they represent? It may be that my ruminations on these matters are a consequence to an office location that some of you know I am not particularly fond of -- the basement in the Allen Building. In my office late one night not too long ago, it occurred to me that I could entertain, even though I admit the resemblance is somewhat meager, a key moment in the masterwork of writer Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man." His title character meets, in his epic adventures, a man working in the basement of a paint factory. Some of you know the nuances of this story. But those are not my focus this afternoon'no matter the subtle appeal. But those "lower regions" to use Ellison's vocabulary, do, nonetheless, provide an interesting line of sight. Undoubtedly the basement does have its own problems with field of vision, perspective, and prejudice. These have surely not escaped me. But Ellison also writes that from the perspective of the basement that "you can't forgit down here'they got all this machinery, but that ain't everything, we the machines inside the machine." We've work to do, colleagues -- in understanding better the new terrains of our field work; in negotiating the parameters of a 21st- Century university and especially in training our students to understand and to appreciate the ways in which our work and support matter and are generated both within and without our campuses. And it is precisely in the same ways in which we must claim for our own interests the financial cultures which are at work within our fields. When I noted, at the beginning of this talk, that I had specific concerns about audience and tone, among others matter -- one issue I was certain of was that I did not need to explain for this audience the substance of the humanities. There has been much written and talked about that does this quite well. And neither did I want this to be a plea for place among a growing list of priorities within the university. I think of it instead as a mindfulness about the ways in which we work contributing more substantially to the ways in which the university responds to out space within it. A local politic is only as good as it agenda. If our own politics within a university does no more than make the humanities and arts a calendar listing of events and activities, then we've abrogated the power of place. I see no need to be in that position -- especially in a moment when ethics must be centered into a conversation about genomics; or an art museum grows amidst us without calling our name or our expertise into the process. We, for whom the legacies of language and letters matter the most, have an absolute responsibility to use our perspectives and talents to call attention to the collective and the individual value of that work. To hear ourselves named is one way in which we might have confidence that the university might disclaim a "one-to-one match" (to use the language of development) between dollars and values. To remind it that we are listening, is the way in which we might energize a political presence that has considered the cultures of our work and placed them, with both considered and informed judgment, more strategically into the space where that work must happen.
