The Humanities, Higher Education, & Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth (review)

The familiar dirges of the 21^st century higher education lament decreases in state funding, challenges to academic freedom, and the disintegration of the liberal arts. While these three funereal songs are well known to the professoriate and higher education scholarship, Bérubé and Ruth provocatively question what is really being buried and by whom.

In their slim but dense volume, Bérubé and Ruth propose three interconnected arguments:

1. 1. The humanities are not dead.

2. 2. The tenure-track professoriate is dying.

3. 3. We are unsure what the later of these aforementioned deaths may bring.

While these individual arguments do not always neatly flow in the switch-hitter prose of the two authors, they offer powerful insight into why the humanities are essential to the future of the human project and why the professionalization and deprofessionalization of faculty have a significant effect on departmental politics and higher education writ large. Finally, Bérubé and Ruth explore how it may take lessons of these "dying" arts to understand what wholesale change is required in faculty hiring practices to dig-up and enervate the truly dead—that which we once called a cadre a professional faculty.

The first chapters allow both authors to individually stake their claim in the larger conversations detailed in the third and fourth chapters. Bérubé's candid and unapologetic writing style challenges the reader with sophisticated philosophical discourse while throwing in accessible explanations and examples (citing Judith Butler and The Simpsons' Kent Brockman in the same stream of logic). However, instead of offering another full-throated defense of the humanities (à la Nussbaum, 2010; Scobey, 2015), he pulls from his own work with disability theory to show the worth of humanities. So engaging and effortless is his rhetoric, it is easy to forget that the chapter ostensibly distances itself from the humanities, higher education, and academic freedom. Only at the end is the reader awoken by Bérubé's declaration that

An education in the humanities is not a guarantee, or a guarantor, of anything. But it may very well enhance our capacity to imagine incommensurability—and to question whether the incommensurability in question is really an incommensurability or just a dispute masking a broader underlying agreement. And it may very well enhance our capacity to deal with incommensurability when we see it. The question here is nothing less and nothing other than the question of how we, individually and collectively, are to lead our lives.

(p. 53–54)

Bérubé argues the value of humanities by operationalizing the humanities. The larger question he poses about the universal and the efforts of mankind to reach it (if it indeed can or should be reached) takes the reader on a short tour of how the tools of the humanities can help make sense of the human condition, the context in which we live and work and love, and the ways that we can affect the lives of others through the ways we interpret and apply those dead or dying sciences of language, philosophy, art, and literature. In what seems to be a rather vulnerable moment, Bérubé suggests that what humanities is, "is a certain kind of knowledge or wisdom that is timeless and universally valuable to the human spirit" (p. 29). He makes the case that humanities are not simply what one does, they are the doing, the doer, and what has and will be done.

Ruth's chapter, while far more lexically conservative than Bérubé's, offers an honest and vulnerable account of her time as a department chair at Portland State University and how her actions and inactions both countered and reified the mechanics of higher education that produced professional inequality and inequity. Her narrative always comes back to the recognition that the three-tiered state of faculty (tenure-track, non-tenure-track, and adjunct) is the result of...