Read on Twitter
This conversation about @UTAustin athletics raises interesting points. Buckle up, it’s time to talk about the value of the humanities and ask how we got in a situation where it seems logical to argue sports and STEM matter more than history. https://twitter.com/EinsteinIamNot/status/1346164236721008641?s=20
First, this argument hinges on the idea that that the monetary worth of a thing is its primary form of value, and that in a free-market, democratic society, monetary investments “naturally” reflect the desires of the people.
That system of value has a name: neoliberalism, an economic and political model that has its own distinctive history – first theorized by economists at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was then embraced by politicians in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the U.S. and U.K.
I bring this up only to point out that free-market economic values are *themselves* a social construct with a history – they’re not inherently virtuous or more valuable than other types of systems of value, and they are not “natural” or inevitable. They’re just a set of ideas.
In fact, it was a group of “elites” – academics at top universities and wealthy business elites who stood to benefit from deregulation – who put neoliberal economic policies in place and worked over several decades for their adoption by politicians.
And it was non-elites who lost out as over the past 40 years, the middle class hollowed out and inequality ballooned to levels not known since the 1920s. That has impacted state universities, too, who have suffered from massive defunding. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions
In other words, though marketization as the primary form of value today seems “natural” and inevitable, there was a concerted effort to adopt market-centered systems of value. Historians can attest that market values have not necessarily always been at the center of human values.
That’s not to say that markets and economic issues didn’t matter – of course they did. But the idea that a thing should be supported and valued by society *only* if it is financially profitable? That’s quite new, and it’s a special legacy of neoliberalism.
The second leg of this argument is that a university should also be subject to market values. I am going to respond to each issue separately, because I think it’s an important conversation. I’m grateful to @einsteinIamnot for raising these issues. We don’t talk about them enough.
So let’s look at the first argument. Are the humanities valued monetarily? There are different ways to index their monetary value. One way would be book sales. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/social-science-humanities-books-grow-after-decade-of-decline-300768118.html
Book sales in the social sciences and humanities – including literature, philosophy, and history – are strong and in fact that market sector is growing. So if we’re to take the market value of humanities as reflecting public interest, it would seem the public interest is there.
We might also ask what contribution to the economy arts and culture comprises. There, too, the evidence is overwhelming: arts and culture contribute 800bn to the U.S. economy. That’s more than the transportation, construction, and agriculture. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-28/arts-and-culture-is-an-800-billion-u-s-industry
You might also ask about the financial value of a humanities degree. Here as well the evidence is clear: STEM majors may make more money initially, but humanities soon catch up. By midcareer, humanities majors often make more money. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-stem-salaries.html
So we can safely say that contrary to popular perception, there is significant economic value in fields related to humanities, arts, and culture, and that even in monetary terms, people value the arts and humanities. So why do people think the arts/humanities are not profitable?
The idea that STEM fields are the most profitable and that they therefore “deserve” more education funding was also sold to us over several decades. You can read about that history and its lack of success in this critique (in a conservative journal): https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/08/rotten-stem-how-technology-corrupts-education/
But I want to come back to the founding assumption, which is that core tenet of neoliberalism: that a thing only has value if it can be measured monetarily and that thus, we should only invest in things that are immediately profitable. What would that look like?
I think the answer is obvious – we know that as human beings we have a need for experiences and knowledge that are not based solely on their monetary value. Arts and humanities are public goods that help us learn to be reflective enough to build better societies.
And traditionally, successful human societies have understood this and have valued the humanistic, artistic, and practical/scientific disciplines equally. We need science and technology, but we also need the humanities and arts to help us understand and use these innovations.
Scientists can give us a vaccine for Covid-19. But they can’t tell us how local religious traditions, the history of political oppression, or peoples’ susceptibility to nonscientific conspiracy theories might impact whether that vaccine gets into people’s arms. Historians can.
Scientists can tell us climate change is real and how long we have to do something about it. But they can’t craft the ad campaign that will carry the emotional punch that will make climate change legislation politically viable. Filmmakers can.
Engineers can tell us how to build the AI that will transform our world in the 21st c. But they are not specialists in the unpredictable way that human beings might interact with that AI or the moral or ethical crises that may arise. Philosophers are.
More and more, people in STEM fields know this. There’s a reason that parents in Silicon Valley send their kids to arts and humanities-based Montessori and Waldorf schools. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/silicon-valley-s-tech-free-school-is-a-hit-znqclhmg6
Would we really want a world in which science and technological innovation were uninformed by the humanistic reflection engendered by history, philosophy, or the arts? Increasingly, many scientists are saying no. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/02/03/computer-scientist-urges-more-support-humanities-opinion
So back to the university. Should university departments be valued primarily for (perceived) profitability? In the 19th c., the United States built the largest public university system in the world. That system provided residents with state-funded education at free or low cost.
Why would states do this? Because they believed paying for an educated citizenry would both drive economic growth and also create a thoughtful, reflective, educated citizenry capable of governing themselves with wisdom. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-virtue-of-an-educated-voter/
Public education was viewed as a public good: much like roads, railroads, and electricity brought betterment, state investment in a broad education that includes the sciences, arts, and humanities creates educated citizens capable of building functioning, democratic societies.
That’s the value. The value of investment in education, particularly in creative, reflective fields like arts and humanities, is in the kind of society you create, not in the immediate economic return. We get to live in a society of reflective, ethical, knowledgeable citizens.
But in past 40 years, universities, too, have been subjected to the logic of profit over all. Despite the clear economic value of the humanities, we’ve come to believe otherwise, and now ask why state universities should support departments that (supposedly) don’t “make money”.
And that inequality is painfully evident at universities like @UTAustin, where the humanities are deeply underfunded compared to the sciences, business, or technology fields, and where humanities graduate students are paid so poorly they struggle to feed themselves.
And unfortunately, despite the fact that everyone benefits from living among educated citizens, there is an ongoing, systematic effort to further defund state universities. https://www.starvingthebeast.net/trailer/
It’s up to us to decide whether public universities and the economic, social, and democratic benefits they provide are valuable. It costs money to run a university. We just have to decide if it’s worth it. And we have to stop opposing sports, STEM & humanities. We need them all.
