Should We Justify the Humanities?: A Round Table with David Damrosch, Lois Zamora, and Marianne Hirsch

“Crisis” in the humanities is nothing new to us, given our contemporary moment of economic downsizing, quantitative accountability, and professional uncertainty. Indeed, as many scholars and commentators have noted, “crisis” may be inherent to the institutional form of the humanities itself, and may have been a perpetual anxiety since the siloing of academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century. The fact that this anxiety persists despite its long history suggests that the humanities, whether in crisis or not, are in a state of evolution. Thus, while our task may or may not be labeled as saving or justifying the humanities, certainly we must take an active role in the processes through which they are adapting.

With such adaptation comes the inevitable question surrounding the role or value of the humanities, and in recent years, through both academic discourse and popular media, debates and discussions of this nature have yielded a multitude of considerations and perspectives. At the 2013 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, the ACLA’s Graduate Caucus sponsored a round table in order to work through some of these debates, and in doing so posed the question, “Should we justify the humanities?” David Damrosch, a past president of the ACLA, Lois Zamora, then the current president of the ACLA, and Marianne Hirsch, then the current president of the MLA, presented their own perspectives on the question and offered some useful suggestions, as transcribed in what follows. But the issues raised in this question certainly reflect a more complex situation than a single session can address, so it is worth considering a few aspects of the larger discussion that have emerged in recent years, both before and since the round table was held.

Defending the humanities frequently takes the form of debating the ground on which such a defense can or should be made, and many of these debates are sharply critical of traditional conceptions of the humanities. For example, as Mark Bauerlein notes in “Critical Thinking Is No Defense for the Humanities,” the argument that critical thinking is a skill learned best through humanistic inquiry, and that it thereby demands the existence of the humanities, tends to be unconvincing, particularly to those outside the humanities who argue that their own disciplines also foster such skills.¹ We also find that arguments citing the humanities as creating “well-rounded” people or more thoughtful citizens tend to face attack, for they are often aligned with the ethically problematic Arnoldian notion of cultivating “better individuals.” Frank Donoghue, in “The Traditional Rationale for the Worth of the Humanities,” responds to this conception by historicizing Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, arguing that Arnold was writing to a much narrower audience with a stricter focus in mind, and that therefore using his work as a justification for the humanities as a whole presents a problematic leap.² In a New Yorker article, “Why Teach English?” Adam Gopnik also attacks this notion, noting through historical precedent that a humanist education does not preclude someone from committing or justifying horrendous acts (he mentions as an example the well-educated, “well-bred” conveners of the Great War). Instead, he writes, “we need the humanities not because they will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.Os but because … they help us enjoy life more and endure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human. That’s enough.”³

However, as Lois Zamora argues in her talk below, the central question we must sometimes ask is not what is the value of the humanities, but rather how can we better foster them? A frequent response, which often comes from various perspectives and with various rationales, is that the humanities should become more interdisciplinary. Humanists often meet this suggestion with skepticism, however, arguing that such a move, while appealing in principle, effectively acts as a way of funneling funds out of humanities departments. Yet proponents of this idea offer a different narrative, suggesting that interdisciplinarity is not...