The Humanities in Crisis—A Time for Action

Over the last decade, and in the context of the fiscal crisis in the nation in general and in higher education in particular, a debate has raged over the value of humanities research. Various commentators have argued that unlike nonhumanities disciplines, fields such as English studies and other humanistic disciplines bring very little into their universities. Productive scientists in research institutions can bring in most or all of their annual salaries in external funding on a yearly basis. Similarly, productive social scientists can often cover a substantial portion of their salaries. Even faculty in professional disciplines—medicine, engineering, business, education—are expected to contribute to their salaries through externally funded research. Those of us in humanistic disciplines, however, have few sources of external funding to draw on. The federal government simply does not fund the National Endowment for the Humanities—the major federal funding agency for humanities research—at a level comparable to that of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes for Health. This funding inequity in and of itself is an illustration of our society’s value system vis-à-vis the humanities. Those who have been questioning the value of the humanities insist that, although it is appropriate to invest taxpayers’ dollars in research that can potentially develop a cure for a disease or a new way to strengthen bridges or even a revolutionary new way to teach fourth graders, it is not appropriate to fund investigations such as ‘‘Environments of Hospitality in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’’ or ‘‘Traveling Theory and Paul de Man’s Translation of Moby-Dick,’’ or ‘‘Usability Methods in Composition Pedagogy’’ (actual titles from the 2012 Modern Language Association convention). They see one set of research projects as potentially contributing to society in material ways and the other as not. This debate has dovetailed with another national debate—one about faculty productivity. State governors (such as in Florida and Texas) are questioning whether faculty in their public universities are shortchanging taxpayers by spending too much time on arcane research and too little on teaching students; as a remedy, they have advocated increased efforts to measure faculty The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies,