Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century

I've posted a new working paper. Title above. Access here:

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/49499060/
Crisis_Among_HUMANITIES_DISCIPLINES_in_the_Twenty_First_Century
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3878413
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352889160_Crisis_Among_HUMANITIES_DISCIPLINES_in_the_Twenty-First_Century?_sg=Laf0czucfCXXnkmYbLk587b52jeBZW5r4vy4yzyL-loD3AhmzUp-1FOxZNI9vqACdAm_4JZ8k_iARLK8giKDQfvz5DSIlhpSN1u6qFbc.9Vs5efO7P439dL2HDU_CFGCrQPVwQtd711fH3CnHSxgXWmp85PImLB1qcmMbE_dF9kx1zXdxEA2hRIV94WJEkQ

Abstract, contents, and introduction below:

Abstract: In Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, Reitter and Wellmon have provided a timely account of the nineteenth century debates in the German academy that shaped the structural armature of the modern research university. Discord and discontent are inherent in the institutional culture of the humanities, making humanists exquisitely tuned to see attacks coming at them on all fronts. The argument is illustrated and extended by observations from J. Hillis Miller, an eminent literary critic, and opportunities literary critics have missed in using the Internet to reach citizen-humanists and enrich civic life. I use Plato’s The Crito and Goethe’s Faust as two examples of core humanities texts that have enriched and guided my own life.

Contents

Adrift in the twenty-first century 3
Permanent crisis among the humanities [Afterthoughts on an essay-review] 5
A perverse sense of intellectual honor is driving humanities scholars to disciplinary seppuku: Some personal reflections on the book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age 9
The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy [and the larger search for truth] 20
Appendix: A short chronology of career events 27

Adrift in the twenty-first century

“Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century” is oriented toward this book:

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

It unfolds in two phases stretched roughly over three sections. The first phase is about the academy and encompasses the whole of “Permanent crisis among the humanities” and most of “A perverse sense of intellectual honor is driving humanities scholars to disciplinary seppuku” (pp. 3 to 15). The second phase is about me and my relation to the academy and continues through last major section of the paper, “The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy” (pp. 15 to 26). One might well ask why that second phase exists at all as it is only about me and not the academy. I will get to that shortly.

Reitter and Wellmon argue that the institutional shape of the modern research university took shape during the course of debated in the German academy during the nineteenth century. Those debates organized the intellectual field into two divisions for the first time, the sciences and the humanities. The humanities were charged with achieving an impossible intellectual unity in pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake while at the same time producing citizens for the nation-state, all based on knowledge inherent in ancient texts. I illustrate these contradictory requirements with several recent quotations by the late J. Hillis Miller, a distinguished literary critic. I then point out that one consequence of continuing to fight an imaginary enemy grounded in the nineteenth century is that literary academics have missed many opportunities to advance the disciplines of literary criticism through the technology of the Internet. Because the institutional mission of the humanities includes skepticism about science and technology it was more important to question and oppose this technology than to use it to advance humanistic understanding.

In then go on to illustrate the value of ancient texts by discussing the importance of Plato’s The Crito to me, first in resisting the war in Vietnam – The Crito is a classic text of civil disobedience, but then in defining my relationship to the academy after I’d been denied tenure and was unable to secure another academic post. In time, however, I came to more or less reject the academic itself, which I explain in some detail in “The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy.”

What is the connection between my personal story and the larger story? It is clear that one of the difficulties I had in securing another academic post is the fact that I made extensive use of the cognitive science in my research, that put me on the wrong side of the humanities-sciences divide decreed in those nineteenth century debates. Contemporary students of the so-called digital humanities face resistence to their work for the same reason, not to mention the many literary critics who have come to call on cognitve and evolutionary psychology.

And what are we to make of the many junior faculty who are admonished to play it intellectually safe until they get tenure, assuming that they are on tenure track? That of course is not a practice confined to the humanities. It exists across the board. As does the extensive use of “permatemp” adjuncts in undergraduate teaching. And then we have the fact that more and more basic research – knowledge for knowledge’s sake – is taking place outside the academy, especially in the computational sciences. And then we have all those citizen-humanists who are creating reference works of various kinds on the web.

All of which is to say that the academy is fraying, and has been for some time. And at least some of the difficulty can be attributed to the impossible terms of that bargain struck in the nineteenth century. In that context my personal story is simply at the extreme end of one axis defining the space of institutional decay. What will be required to transform this arena of decay into the emergence of new institutions, ones suited to the intellectual and civic demands of the 21st Century? Surely that will require a clear recognition of the inadequacy of traditional institutions. And that is where my story belongs, for it tells how I came recognize that existing intellectual institutions are no longer adequate to free and unfettered inquiry in search of truths as yet unknown.

* * * * *

I have been working on another document while completing this one, “The road to Xanadu led to Mars: I went one way, you all went another,” which is about ideas the forced me away from the professional mainstream. I have included an appendix that contains a short chronology of events common in the two stories (p. 27).