| Alvin Kernan is Senior Advisor in the Humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. |
A volume of essays on structural changes in the humanities since World War II, part of a series of studies of higher education sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is to be published by the Princeton University Press in early 1997. Conferences at the National Humanities Center and the University Professors Program at Boston University in the fall of 1995 identified topics for the essays, and a group of distinguished humanists was then asked to undertake writing them.
The primary question addressed in the essays is not whether change in the humanities has been for good or for bad--opinions differ so widely on this matter at present as to seem irreconcilable--but what are the nature and the extent of the changes. The authors have therefore focused on the kinds of change--demographics, patronage, reading, teaching, books, professionalism--where it is possible, if not to be entirely objective, at least to be sufficiently factual as to make it possible to discuss the issue meaningfully and provide some very useful information to people who are responsible for what happens in the humanities in the future. Francis Oakley catches the spirit of this effort when he remarks in his study of changes in the humanities classroom: "It is tempting to assume that in the absence of some formidably massive and intricate exercise in empirical investigation we are doomed in this matter of changes in humanities instruction to being cast adrift on an ocean of anecdotage masquerading as generalization or of ideology purporting to be fact. But that is a temptation, I believe, to which we should refuse to yield."
The individual essays all point toward changes sufficiently radical as to suggest that an educational revolution--a full-scale democratization of the university into, to use Clark Kerr's term, the multiversity--of the greatest consequence to our society has been and is still taking place. The extent of the change has been masked by the fact that the revolution in higher education has proceeded sporadically and unevenly--far less in the sciences than in some social sciences and the humanities. The sciences, and the harder social sciences--psychology and economics mainly--have been able to shield themselves, at least to a considerable degree, from social pressures for change by maintaining their claim to be searching for an objective reality by means of a rigorous methodology and standard truth tests. The humanities, and the "softer" social sciences--sociology and anthropology--with their much weaker conception of truth and their inbuilt subjectivity, have been much more open to social pressures for change.
An extended Kulturkampf, involving disputes over everything from freedom of speech and the Vietnam War to feminism and the referentiality of language, has fought its most violent battles in the humanities. History and, particularly, literature have been the most tumultuous combat zones, and the majority of scholars represented in this volume are, for this reason, historians and literary critics who have undertaken to refer to related humanistic fields. Just why some areas of study rather than others have been the major battlefields of the culture wars is itself a fascinating topic, but the primary thrust of this volume goes in another direction: to try, by probing a number of critical areas in humanistic studies, to delineate the shape and chart the directions of the multiversity that is coming into being. It is in the humanities, our authors show, that not only the new configuration, but also the strengths and weaknesses of the new democratic multiversities are most apparent.
Is the change permanent or in time will the humanities return to the old paradigm of truth, objectivity, and formalism? Probably not, our authors suggest. As Gertrude Himmelfarb, perhaps the most conservative of the essayists, wisely puts it: "Counter-movements, like counter-revolutions, never return to the status quo ante."
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