Are the Humanities Doomed?

[apl68]

I don't really know how "humanities faculty" view library science.  It's been my experience that faculty of all fields tend to regard library staff, including the professionally-trained research librarians, as hired help.  The library pros are sometimes sensitive about it.  They consider themselves educated professionals who should be regarded more as peers than as support staff.  After all, some of them also have degrees--even terminal degrees--in their fields.  The members of my old PhD department with whom I continued to interact after joining the library staff seemed to feel I had come down in the world (Frankly I did too, for a long time.  Years of lurking at the fora among all the unhappy people here have since convinced me that NOT becoming a professional academic was one of the best things that ever happened to me!).  But I think that was because they felt sorry for me for washing out of the PhD program, not because they thought doing applied practical work made me inferior.  Some of them actually invited me to come back and try to finish my dissertation after my advisor left.  Apparently they still thought I had what it took.  I refused, and they didn't push it.

The thing is, library school isn't just "job training."  Our actual job training is on the job.  That's why professional-level library positions always call for years of experience in addition to the formal degree.  That's why so many of the people you meet in library school are experienced library staff trying to take their skills and credentials to a new level.  We didn't spend our time in school learning how to put barcodes on books and type up shelf labels.  We were getting a legitimate, masters' level education, with masters'-level research and everything.  Librarians aren't just jumped-up clerical staff.  We're professionals.

And a good humanities education is usually a key part of preparing us for that.  I have found, and continue to find, my humanities education tremendously relevant to my work.  Libraries are about information, and information is about much more than just IT.  I don't think it's any coincidence that most librarians I know have a humanities background.

[polly_mer]

I've ended up reading some interesting things recently so I want to go back to:

I review the syllabi for the wide range of courses in my program, and I don't see anyone drily droning on about factoids and dates, or recycling decades-old material, or any of the old clichés.  I do think some of the material is challenging, and requires students to dig in to the subject -- ethical questions, and historical questions, and a lot of it presented without fancy PowerPoint with animated graphics and stuff.  A lot of professors are still teaching as if entertainment culture had not subsumed most of what our students experience outside the classroom.  Is that good or bad?  Opinions differ.

Another possibility for why people devalue the humanities is that freshman take classes and are expected to be able to make some original-enough contributions in the good classes where the goal is indeed digging in and doing real critical thinking.  For example, a thread on the old fora (https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,264300) started with:

I just read a paper that largely repeats what I said in class. It is an articulate paper by one of my better students, so I guess he was paying close attention, but with some exceptions I am reading my own observations. What to do? I felt like marking every place where he repeated what I said, but I held back on that. This guy is bright and contributes to class. I don't want to savage him, but can't let this slide either. What would be an appropriate grade and what would be an appropriate comment?

The subsequent discussion indicated that whether the best solution was a B, C, or redo to incorporate more original thought or at least a wider literature review to bring together more ideas depended strongly on the institution expectations.  However, the point was clear that the student should be bringing original thought to this paper.

The idea that everyone capable of a college education can do humanities is explicit in the general education requirements.  The list of classes meeting general education requirements seldom have 300-level chemistry classes, but may have 300-level literature classes.  Indeed, at one point, Super Tiny College was redoing the general education requirements and one question was "where is the upper-division humanities elective requirement?"*

If it's true that a primary reason for a college education is to be an informed citizen and general education requirements reflect the needs of being an informed citizen, then the value of expert judgment in the humanities is lessened in many ways because so many non-experts have had enough of a taste to think we can do something useful and productive.  Few people think that taking an intro class in physics followed by watching The Science Channel for a few years makes them anything like a real physicist.  However, one of the clear messages of a college education is that reading some books, thinking, and then discussing with others are valuable activities that informed citizens should be doing and you don't need to be the absolute expert in the field to be having these discussions.

One possibility that I'll throw out for consideration is perhaps the humanities are victims of their own success if the true situation is most humanities faculty doing great things in their required classes so that random college-goers think they have learned enough to disregard most expert judgement as merely being one of many equally good options.

Thus, the net effect the general public is the same for exposure to the best teachers as to the worst teachers: some exposure to the humanities in college results in a devaluing of someone else's expertise in humanities subjects because it feels like something anyone can do.


* The answer came back that we can't possibly staff a wide array of upper-division humanities electives so go find out what "electives" we can get the big departments to agree are valuable to them to put as their recommended course in junior/senior year.  We can offer one history elective, one English elective, and one philosophy/religion elective each term and they each have to be full at 20-30 students.  The "tiny" college part is that the entire number of people declared as juniors is indeed between 60 and 120 students.

[mamselle]

I don't really know how "humanities faculty" view library science.  It's been my experience that faculty of all fields tend to regard library staff, including the professionally-trained research librarians, as hired help.  The library pros are sometimes sensitive about it.  They consider themselves educated professionals who should be regarded more as peers than as support staff.  After all, some of them also have degrees--even terminal degrees--in their fields.  The members of my old PhD department with whom I continued to interact after joining the library staff seemed to feel I had come down in the world (Frankly I did too, for a long time.  Years of lurking at the fora among all the unhappy people here have since convinced me that NOT becoming a professional academic was one of the best things that ever happened to me!).  But I think that was because they felt sorry for me for washing out of the PhD program, not because they thought doing applied practical work made me inferior.  Some of them actually invited me to come back and try to finish my dissertation after my advisor left.  Apparently they still thought I had what it took.  I refused, and they didn't push it.

The thing is, library school isn't just "job training."  Our actual job training is on the job.  That's why professional-level library positions always call for years of experience in addition to the formal degree.  That's why so many of the people you meet in library school are experienced library staff trying to take their skills and credentials to a new level.  We didn't spend our time in school learning how to put barcodes on books and type up shelf labels.  We were getting a legitimate, masters' level education, with masters'-level research and everything.  Librarians aren't just jumped-up clerical staff.  We're professionals.

And a good humanities education is usually a key part of preparing us for that.  I have found, and continue to find, my humanities education tremendously relevant to my work.  Libraries are about information, and information is about much more than just IT.  I don't think it's any coincidence that most librarians I know have a humanities background.

This is both at the crux of one part of the issues feeding into the perception of a loss of rigor or dimensional tensile strength in the humanities, and a symptom of the exchange in values between "information" and " knowledge."

I ran into a situation based on this problem at the BnF in February. The Reference desk in Manuscripts used to have two or three highly skilled, eminently qualified people working there who were both published scholars in their fields AND librarians who located books and exchanged green and orange plastic placards for manuscripts.

Now, there's one person, staring at the computer, clearly IT savvy but with no understanding of the need to see a physical book when the digital pages were there for all to consult. The collapse of the force field lines running between or among perception, study, knowledge, interpretive depth and comparative background, down to single threads that say, "Data." "Picture." "Text." etc. take the whole enterprise to a flat plain of "ho-hum, yeah, info" because it makes more sense to put a computer guy there instead of a fully-aware, well-trained 《bibliothecaire》or 《archiviste》whose degrees match what apl68 has described, along with the experience and background required.

I'm wondering if this needs a thread of it's own, or if it serves the greater good by being a significant 5opic within this thread, in fact.

But in my world, librarians are definitely more than factota in search of a desk to file their nails at....

M.

[Hibush]

We have not discussed doom since last summer, but if history is our guide this thread will never die.

There is good news in the form of a new opportunity. There have been various news reports lately about how artificial intelligence is studying how we use written language, and coming up with all kinds of bias in the resulting predictions. That's not exactly surprising, except to the computer scientists at Google et al.

This has created a substantial business opportunity for humanists who study how we use language.

From a NY Times article (soft paywall):

One executive said, "vetting the behavior of this new technology would become so important, it will spawn a whole new industry, where companies pay specialists to audit their algorithms for all kinds of bias and other unexpected behavior. This is probably a billion-dollar industry."

All one needs to do to get some of that action is to learn to speak like a disrupting startup techie.

[marshwiggle]

We have not discussed doom since last summer, but if history is our guide this thread will never die.

There is good news in the form of a new opportunity. There have been various news reports lately about how artificial intelligence is studying how we use written language, and coming up with all kinds of bias in the resulting predictions. That's not exactly surprising, except to the computer scientists at Google et al.

Just to clarify: if algorithms produce "biased" predictions, the problem is unlikely to be with the algorithms themselves. If the data  which the algorithms process are non-representative, then the results will indeed be biased.

[pgher]

We have not discussed doom since last summer, but if history is our guide this thread will never die.

There is good news in the form of a new opportunity. There have been various news reports lately about how artificial intelligence is studying how we use written language, and coming up with all kinds of bias in the resulting predictions. That's not exactly surprising, except to the computer scientists at Google et al.

Just to clarify: if algorithms produce "biased" predictions, the problem is unlikely to be with the algorithms themselves. If the data  which the algorithms process are non-representative, then the results will indeed be biased.

Or perhaps, the algorithms replicate and even exaggerate our human biases.

[spork]

Two points:

• Regarding apl68's "I don't really know how 'humanities faculty' view library science": it's been my experience that faculty of all stripes are quite ignorant about how to effectively teach information literacy and research-based writing skills to undergraduates, whereas librarians are often pros at it, and faculty remain willfully ignorant that librarians possess this expertise.
• Regarding polly's response to hegemony,"freshman take classes and are expected to be able to make some original-enough contributions in the good classes where the goal is indeed digging in and doing real critical thinking": I doubt this is a realistically-achievable outcome for the vast majority of first-year college students. For a substantial number it barely happens even in the senior year, via some kind of thesis or other culminating research project. For example (speaking from the standpoint of my wife, whose academic specialty involves analyzing texts, especially those in a language other than English), making even a minimally-original contribution requires multilingualism and quite a bit of familiarity with a whole corpus of literature, and these are skills that just don't get developed in the typical undergraduate. The default then becomes assignments that ask for a synthesis or reaction to a few previously-published, easy-to-understand works on the subject at hand. And then that devolves for the instructor into identifying plagiarism because a large portion of undergrads think purchasing a paper and getting an A is what best serves their interests. Put more simply: it's difficult to teach literature or history that even superficially touches upon contemporary Iraq when students are completely ignorant of the 2003 U.S. invasion, subsequent occupation, and rise of ISIS. Trying to use a specific example to illustrate broader themes becomes a tortuous, frustrating process.

[Wahoo Redux]

Two points:

• Regarding apl68's "I don't really know how 'humanities faculty' view library science": it's been my experience that faculty of all stripes are quite ignorant about how to effectively teach information literacy
• Regarding polly's response to hegemony,"freshman take classes and are expected to be able to make some original-enough contributions in the good classes where the goal is indeed digging in and doing real critical thinking": I doubt this is a realistically-achievable outcome for the vast majority of first-year college students. .

You people must teach in some weird places certainly different from the places I teach at.  Personally I've never been at a school which disrespected their librarians.

And then there's this.

[apl68]

Two points:

• Regarding apl68's "I don't really know how 'humanities faculty' view library science": it's been my experience that faculty of all stripes are quite ignorant about how to effectively teach information literacy
• Regarding polly's response to hegemony,"freshman take classes and are expected to be able to make some original-enough contributions in the good classes where the goal is indeed digging in and doing real critical thinking": I doubt this is a realistically-achievable outcome for the vast majority of first-year college students. .

You people must teach in some weird places certainly different from the places I teach at.  Personally I've never been at a school which disrespected their librarians.

When I worked in a university library I don't recall faculty being disrespectful, but I do recall an awful lot of cluelessness.  Stuff like putting seven copies of an audio cassette on reserve in a media center with only three listening stations...expecting physical books from ILL in just two or three days...trying to ILL items that had only just been published...submitting repeated ILL requests that were all going to the same few libraries, because the requester apparently didn't realize that simply submitting more requests for a rare item didn't necessarily increase one's chances of getting it  (We kept getting requests for the same issues of an obscure 19th-century periodical for months on end.  The handful of libraries that had the item had only the same handful of microfilmed surviving issues--what the faculty member wanted clearly no longer existed). 

There was the prof who shut down the whole circulation desk for about an hour when he trucked in a whole office full of materials that he'd had checked out for the past year and had to renew all at once.  And the one who accidentally turned out the lights on the whole circ area, but in fairness how was he supposed to know that isolated switch would turn off everything?

Now and then librarians and staff would try to suggest collaborative ways to help faculty improve an assignment from a pedagogical or logistics perspective.  Sometimes the faculty member would work with us, sometimes they wouldn't.  Some of the degree-holding librarians would feel that they weren't getting due respect as colleagues.  In fact that seems to be something of a perennial complaint among academic librarians.  I recall our librarians getting upset at a suggestion to make all library staff wear name tags.  They felt that having to wear tags would stigmatize them as hired help or something.  I was only a paraprofessional library assistant back then myself, so I didn't feel that entitled to respect in the first place.

[mamselle]

Librarians who publish get a certain degree of respect but it's due to the publications, I think, more than anything else.

Having time to do that has to be difficult, but I've known a few who do it.

M.

[Hibush]

CHE today has a paywalled op ed from Charlie Tyson, a Harvard English graduate student arguing that the humanities are terribly harmed by an intense focus on self-reassurance. He does not say "doomed", but encourages critically thinking about the nature of the problem and getting out there (e.g. outside the MLA community) and doing something productive about the situation.

Here are some salient points  Twitter link

The best arguments on behalf of the humanities articulate ideals that allow us to measure our own efforts at teaching and research in relation to a set of standards. Reassurance lit, by contrast, is indiscriminate, assuring each of us of our value, often in grandiose terms. Several problems follow.
The most basic is that a realistic appraisal is always more convincing than an inflated one.
Second, the habit of indiscriminate reassurance makes it more difficult to address weaknesses in the field.
Third, the defensive posture of mandatory reassurance has begun to shape research agendas.

That is a pretty tough critique! Especially for someone about to go on the job market, though likely with some success.

What is missing from the essay is an indication of what would be productive for making the field thrive. (Is that because he is an expert on indolence, or an editor cutting the essay short?) A return to rigorous scholarship is a tacit prerequisite, but what is the nature of engagement with society?

Perhaps the essay stimulates forumites to provide some specifics.

[spork]

Item #1 on my list for making humanities thrive: learn to communicate the way the non-academic world communicates, to reach a non-academic audience and possibly become more influential. E.g., Tyson's essay needs to be cut in half, express an argument that non-academics find relevant, and be published somewhere other than The Chronicle.

[mamselle]

Writing for journalism will do that for you.

M.

[Hibush]

Writing for journalism will do that for you.

M.

+1 When I started as a faculty member, we has a former newspaper editor doing communications. She drilled into me "don't bury the lede". (Scientists bury it just as well as humanists, just differently.) That admonishment has helped my academic writing tremendously. If someone wants to know what point I want to make, they should be able to find it right at the beginning.

[mamselle]

Yes. And a column-inch limit focuses the mind marvelously.

M.