Locating Crisis

It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher in the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Stephen Dedalus of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man intuited at least one aspect of what we point to when we speak of a "crisis in the humanities." It was, in that novel, recognized by those who came "late" or "sideways" to the "feast of the world's culture." Dedalus's prescience, reiterated in the century that followed as public education, including higher education, underwent a sea change. But in the century that lies behind us, it was not only the "monkish learning" of "the world's culture" that underwent a sea change. It was also, of course, the societies that surround the world's culture. (In fact, we now understand the culture to be a pluriverse rather than singular. But the lure of the single banquet table on which the feast is arrayed is still with us.)¹

Nearly one hundred years later, in the age we live in, it's not only who is invited to the "the feast" that is the issue. Rather it is the very table itself and the structure that houses that table. And "monkish learning" or historical irrelevance is only one of the charges that haunts the structure that houses the "banquet table" and it contents. We can argue for the value of that "monkish learning"—it's a valid intellectual argument. But we cannot ignore the contexts in which the audience for that learning has moved elsewhere or simply diminished. We have, then, at least two related locations of a shifting landscape of the humanities. One is in educational institutions; the other is in the communities that surround, support, oppose, or ignore those educational institutions and their definitions of the humanities.

In response, public and academic intellectuals move nimbly² to create new relationships to the humanities in the academy and outside it, to reiterate the multitudinous ways in which art and literature and languages—to take up the fields and disciplines which most concern some of us—enrich and inform public and private lives, intellectual and social thought. Those, too, are important arguments. There is much to be said for being able to articulate clearly and practice forcefully as teachers and scholars those relationships within and to the humanities, within and beyond educational institutions. In these years, perhaps it should be a required professional skill.

Yet this "crisis" of intellectual content—Dedalus's mournful characterization of "curious jargons"—was not yet, in the early years of the twentieth century, overshadowed by quite the same structural crisis which now confronts us. In at least the second half of the twentieth century, education in the United States (the present location of at least some of us) saw radical expansion, certainly and famously in the years following WWII. It even more famously and significantly desegregated in the 1950s. It expanded again, bringing with that expansion a proliferation at the feast table. And then it began to contract, almost on the heels of—if not simultaneous with—that proliferation and the openings created in the aftermath of the social and student struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.³ If we will speak of "crisis" then, in the present, it seems clear that it is not only one of content but also one of structure, and that this latter is multiple, a "crisis" that has been accumulating over time with numerous symptoms. A partial list would surely include an increasingly radical reduction in public funding for land grant institutions; the academic marginalization of the humanities as liberal arts degree requirements were steadily reduced in the last three decades or so, widening and worsening economic conditions in more recent decades which heighten the...