Beyond a “Rhetoric of Crisis”:
Contemporary Challenges in Strategic Planning & The
Critical Role of Humanities Centers in the 21st Century
Gregg Lambert,
Dean’s Professor of Humanities
&
Corri Zoli, Ph.D.
Grants & Research Consultant
Syracuse University
HUMANITIES CENTER
Founding Director Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Mellon CNY Humanities Corridor Principal Investigator
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Introduction: From “crisis rhetoric” to changed reality
Context and Trends in Funding (“Just the Facts”)—Corri Zoli
1.
2.
3.
4.
Data Collection on Humanities Health and Performance
Decline in Federal Funding for the Humanities
Student Participation: Undergraduate and Graduate Humanists
Current PhD Workforce
The Political Economy of the Humanities (“From Practice to
Theory”)—Gregg Lambert
1.
2.
3.
4.
“Crisis?” “What Crisis?”
The Quagmire of Defining the Humanities
Redefining Research: The Three Models.
From Critical Practice to Practical Theory: Framing the New Mission of
a Humanities Center
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AAAS Report, Making the Humanities Count:
The Importance of Data (2002) Robert Solow
notes: “The humanities community knows
deplorably little about what is taught to whom
and by whom, how long it takes, where
graduates and post-graduates go, what they do
when they get there, and how many of them
there are, which the sciences have long
benefited from...
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1. Lack of national data collection on humanities health and
performance (like Science and Engineering Indicators every
other year by the NSF)
2. Anti-data bias: Why?
 Anti-science source in poststructuralist critiques of
foundationalism so that an epistemological ground-clearing exercise
became an institutional prescription
 An anti-assessment attitude prevents our involvement in an
ongoing conversation with our 3 largest stakeholders: educational
institutions, the public, and government policy makers.
 Institutional elitism – the humanities have often distinguished
ourselves in the pursuit of academic elitism – not publicly engaged
scholarship with real communities—despite our declining status with
respect to scientists and social scientists, and despite our
theoretically egalitarian rhetoric.
CONTEXTUAL FACTORS AND INDICATORS
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Five Observations:
1. There is a severe decline in federal funding for the humanities: 140
million in 2007 vs. NSF 6 billion
2. That gap was not made up by private foundations or universitysponsored research: in 2002 the humanities share of all foundation funding was
2.1%; in 2006 spending on humanities R&D by universities amounted to 0.45% of
the amount dedicated to S&E
3. Undergraduate and graduate humanities degrees have declined
since the 1980s: amounting to 8% in 2004 of the share of all bachelor’s degrees
4.
awarded; 2% of all masters degrees awarded; and 8% of all doctoral degrees
awarded, placing the humanities 2nd to last in field rankings (the arts award fewer
doctoral degrees)
Jobs in humanistic occupations: Total 2.53 million, 2% of all employment in
early 2000s
 Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) data shows median years from start of grad
school to doctorate award is greater than in all other fields: 9.2 in 1979, 9.7 in 2004
5. SED data show that in 2004 the proportion of humanities Ph.D.’s
leaving the university with a job commitment was 56%
HUMANITIES INDICATORS PROJECT (2009)
HUMANITIES CENTER
NEH BUDGET ALLOCATION 1996-2007
Fiscal Year Budget Request Appropriation
1966
49.187
36.487
1967
51.849
33.258
1968
39.451
26.648
1969
60.425
35.156
1970
43.500
46.009
1971
87.111
74.119
1972
152.965
143.387
1973
188.659
184.605
1974
312.828
221.842
1975
327.881
296.562
1976
310.018
301.000
1977
347.644
330.584
1978
375.681
374.135
1979
404.311
403.286
1980
367.235
367.235
1981
337.643
335.554
1982
177.575
272.755
1983
194.313
263.632
1984
217.705
271.875
1985
235.091
261.327
1986
231.766
244.052
1987
224.386
245.771
1988
216.239
239.321
1989
228.320
248.748
1990
236.383
242.028
1991
244.229
251.637
1992
256.059
252.833
1993
260.976
247.519
1994
241.445
241.445
1995
234.791
227.532
1996
233.851
141.314
1997
170.826
138.168
1998
168.206
136.915
1999
164.571
133.956
2000
175.610
134.939
2001
170.751
136.595
2002
135.040
139.522
2003
139.031
136.886
2004
162.219
144.407
2005
167.226
142.507
2006
138.054
140.949
2007
138.191
138.338
President
Lyndon Johnson 1963-1969
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Richard Nixon 1969-1974
Gerald Ford 1974-1977
Gerald Ford 1974-1977
Jimmy Carter 1977-1981
Jimmy Carter 1977-1981
Jimmy Carter 1977-1981
Jimmy Carter 1977-1981
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
Ronald Reagan 1981-1989
G.H. Bush 1989-1993
G.H. Bush 1989-1993
G.H. Bush 1989-1993
G.H. Bush 1989-1993
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
William Clinton 1993-2001
G.W. Bush 2001-2009
G.W. Bush 2001-2009
G.W. Bush 2001-2009
G.W. Bush 2001-2009
G.W. Bush 2001-2009
Notes
Appropriation exceeds request
Watershed: budget doubled
300M+
Highpoint 400M+
Watershed: budget cut 40%
Appropriation exceeds —not by much
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The Political Economy of the Humanities
1.
2.
3.
4.
Anatomy of a Crisis: Competing Definitions
The State of the Humanities
Three models of research
From Critical Practice to Practical Theory
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Crisis? What Crisis?
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Crisis
1.
2.
3.
4.
unexpected (i.e., a surprise),
creates uncertainty, and
seen as a threat to important goals.
Creative: the need for change. If change is not needed, then
the event is a failure
The Four Characteristics of a Crisis
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The essence of a humanities education —
reading the great literary and
philosophical works and coming “to grips
with the question of what living is for” —
may become “a great luxury that many
cannot afford.”
New York Times, Feb. 24th 2009
HUMANITIES CENTER
Through the humanities we reflect on the
fundamental question: What does it mean to be
human? The humanities offer clues but never a
complete answer. They reveal how people have
tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual
sense of a world in which irrationality, despair,
loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth,
friendship, hope, and reason.
Rockefeller Commission Report
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The same age, which produces great philosophers and
politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds
with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters. We cannot
reasonably expect, that a piece of woollen cloth will be
wrought to perfection in a nation, which is ignorant of
astronomy, or where ethics are neglected. The spirit of the age
affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused
from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn
themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art
and science. Profound ignorance is totally banished, and men
enjoy the privilege of rational creatures, to think as well as to
act, to cultivate the pleasures of the mind as well as those of
the body. The more these refined arts advance, the more
sociable men become.
18th Century Definition: David Hume
HUMANITIES CENTER
1. Question of whether there has been a “de-funding” of the Humanities &
the Arts culturally, or rather, a “de-legitimation” of the “professional”
humanities disciplines in Higher Education?
1. Whose “rhetoric” is this anyway? (i.e., does the crisis rhetoric of
professional and academic humanities accurately describe the situation
in K-12, or in increasingly globalized cultural knowledge and production
generally?)
2. Who is the “human” in the “humanities”? (i.e., the subject of the inquiry,
the one who wants to know)
3. The Slippery Slope Hypothesis: The import of “French theory” into
traditional Liberal Arts education from the 1970’s, carrying particularly
“anti-foundational” and “anti-humanist” sentiments, has been viewed by
some to precipitate a “broken contract” with the Nation. Critical Theory
is a knife that cuts both ways.
The Unresolved Problem of “De-Legiitimation” in Humanities
HUMANITIES CENTER
CAUTION! BEFORE ASSEMBLING – How Not to Define the
Humanities “Center” (institutionally, politically, globally)
The Critical Role of the Humanities Center in the 21st Century
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Three models of Research: considering humanistic inquiry as having
three modes that are not mutually exclusive and maintain a
flexible approach that is conditioned by initiative and by user:
• Traditional Disciplinary research—Viewed as pure, disciplinary,
homogeneous, expert-led, hierarchical, peer-reviewed, and almost
exclusively university-based (i.e., the trickle down theory of use).
• Transdisciplinary research: vs. static inter-disciplinarity, transforms
disciplinary frameworks and assumptions in the process of
knowledge production (eg. Perpetual Peace, TdMS)
• Publically engaged research or “scholarship in action”: integrating
knowledge production with community needs in order to create the
capacity to solve increasingly complex problems; introduces user as
an active participant in the creation of new research agendas. (eg.
Mellon Forum on Public Scholarship)
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The Mission of a Humanities Center is
•to provide shelter disciplinary research in a time of
institutional volatility;
•To temporarily house new forms of inquiry and new
research topics that cannot be readily accommodated
in existing disciplinary frameworks or curricula (always
keeping the need for new models of assessment in
mind;
•To actively construct a nexus of connectivity between
the local university culture, the surrounding
community and local cultural institutions, bridging the
divide between creation and analysis in the arts and
humanities.
• To visibly network the physical location of the
Humanities to regional, national, and international
nodes in an increasingly global university-world brain,
reinforcing the continued importance of conferences
and colloquia, even in new digital formats.
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Finally, Collaborating across units, disciplines, Colleges, and institutions is
extremely difficult and often subject to the law of entropy
1. Re-thinking fiscal habits and proclaiming the gospel of cost-sharing
2. Busting the Myth of External Funding as the Holy Grail, the perfect solution
to the humanities problem of resources.
3. Creating regional and multi-institutional Humanities Corridors to share
resources and talent – undo the compound culture of the university
4. Seeking “Radical Inter-Disciplinarity”: Reframing initiatives and proposals to
develop new approaches to familiar issues (i.e., digital humanities) and seek
funding from less traditional sources (not NEH, NEA) but from NSF.
5. Never saying “no” to a good idea because of ever-present funding
constraints. That is the job of Deans, not Directors.
6. If all else fails, start over from 1.