In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Page 2Ain’t No Sunshine: Crisis in the Humanities III
  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher

Advocates for the advancement of the “neoliberal arts” just found a new champion in the Sunshine State.

Speaking to a business group in Tallahassee recently, Florida Governor Rick Scott summed up the crisis facing the humanities by attacking the use of state funds to support liberal arts education.

“How many more jobs do you think there is for anthropology in this state?” asked Governor Scott. “Do you want to use your tax dollars to educate more people who can’t get jobs? In anthropology? I don’t.”

Quibble if you will whether a finance major is more likely to get a job today after graduation than a philosophy major—or whether a young accountant is a better potential employee than a newly minted anthropologist—when the budget gets tight, liberal art programs are the first to be scapegoated.

When the State University of New York had to cut $640 million from its budget last year, the president of its Albany campus cut its classics, theater, French, Russian, and Italian programs.

And the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Howard University both proposed eliminating their philosophy programs.

Howard’s proposal is particularly disappointing because the American philosopher Alain Leroy Locke, architect of the Harlem Renaissance, was a founder of the department and chaired it from 1921 to 1953.

Though cuts and proposals for program elimination like these are becoming more commonplace within the corporate university—and usually draw opposition from many corners of the academy—it is a particularly disturbing sign of the times when a celebrated Historically Black University that counts Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison among its many distinguished graduates considers the elimination of philosophy from its offerings.

But such are the times in which we live: where philosophy, theater, and classics programs—programs that directly link the academy to its formation over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece—have to fight to survive.

Is it possible for anyone who knows or cares anything about Greek drama or philosophy to even suggest their elimination from the academy? Is our educational system so economically bankrupt that we must make it intellectually bankrupt as well by eliminating foundational areas of study?

Governor Scott asked, “Do we need to do all those programs, rather than the first thing is we’ve got to raise tuition every year?”

By this, he means, in hard economic times, universities should not be asking whether to raise tuition.

Rather, they should be asking whether they should eliminate the philosophy department. Scott is far from alone in advocating this sentiment. In fact, this seems to be the major way state governments have been responding to budget shortfalls.

And given that the National Governors Association estimates that state governments control nearly two-thirds of all higher education funding, there is major reason for concern within the liberal arts.

All liberal arts departments are fair game for cutbacks, if not closure, in the age of the neoliberal university.

Responding to charges like those of Governor Scott and actions that serve to shut down active liberal arts programs is perhaps the most daunting challenge facing the humanities today. Why?

Without state support for humanities education within the university or advocacy for existing liberal arts programs, we risk diminishing our capacity to produce critically engaged and socially committed citizens.

Liberal arts majors excel at persuasive communication, critical thinking, and cultural awareness. We need to put these skills to use in defense of the disciplines we value.

The humanities are only as relevant to contemporary society as we make them. Yet to assess them solely on their employment potential reduces their value to its most trivial dimension. Once we lose our capacity to understand and ability to demonstrate the value of seminal yet difficult areas of study such as philosophy, much more is at risk than their diminishment as academic disciplines. We risk diminishing our democratic values and associated way of life.

The state legislator or university president who did not major in a liberal arts discipline cannot be expected to champion how they impact lives or their role in society. It is...

pdf

Share