STEAMed Up: Or, A Defense of the Humanities through African Art History

“More welders and less philosophers.”¹ Thus spake former presidential candidate Marco Rubio in a 2015 Republican debate, describing his approach to improving the economy and reforming higher education. His strategy: increased investment in vocational training and (implicitly) decreased support for liberal arts education, epitomized by the study of philosophy. Many other US politicians and policy makers share his approach, each holding up a different liberal arts field to make their point. There’s anthropology: Florida governor Rick Scott declared in 2011 that the state “doesn’t need a lot more anthropologists,”² as he advocated for science, technology, math, and engineering degrees. More programmers, fewer anthropologists. Languages and literature, too, have been the exemplars of financially fruitless majors; Kentucky governor Matt Bevin described his approach to reform: “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors. There just will.”³ More engineers, fewer comp lit professors. And we can reach over to the other side of the aisle and right into our disciplinary home for another example of the political discourse on liberal arts. In 2014, President Obama used art history as his example in an off-the-cuff remark about earnings potential: “Folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”⁴ More technicians, fewer art historians. Fortunately, he wasn’t advocating for differential tuition or decreased funding for the humanities, but the president’s comment struck a nerve. We’re on the defensive. And, as I’ll describe, while my vantage point is the United States, this pressure on the humanities is not limited to the US.

Humanistic disciplines defend their relevance through assertions of their applicability to non-humanistic careers: the English major who becomes a CEO, the Classics major who goes on to med school. Champions of these fields also emphasize the usefulness of the skills they instill, including critical thinking, writing, research, and analysis of texts in many forms (and refer to them as skill sets, a less humanities-inflected label). It’s the same old story, as illustrated by a 1939 New York Times article that quotes an NYU dean’s defense of the humanities: “I would not belittle ability and training in the sciences but I deplore most heartily the lessening emphasis on the humanities as sound fundamental training for doctors and lawyers.”⁵

One wonders just how long the “impractical” humanities have been on the defensive in the United States. As one indication of the longevity of similar debates, in 1828, an influential report was issued by a committee composed of Yale faculty charged with addressing the mounting call to deemphasize the “dead languages” in favor of subjects deemed more relevant—a debate analogous though not identical to the one we are engaged in now.⁶ Their report defended these core courses in language that remains relevant to the discourse around the liberal arts and humanities: “Our object is not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.” The report also notes that these ostensibly impractical courses of study “teach the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought”—what could be more important in the cellphone-filled classroom of the twenty-first century?

While debates concerning the merits of purely enriching versus practical studies have a long history, the current state of higher education in the United States throws these debates into high relief. Colleges and universities are facing what can be characterized as a perfect storm of tribulations: rising tuition costs and attendant student debt, explosive growth of administrative bureaucracy, and in the larger public, economic disparity, fear of the unfamiliar and the “foreign,” and rhetorical excess (it’s always election time somewhere …). These circumstances have led to a drive to transform higher education from both the left and the right, much of which centers on greater “accountability” for colleges and universities. We live in an audit culture, with departments competing for students—or, more accurately, for Student Credit Hours— and...