Humboldt’s gift

In 2010, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the best thing about America was its universities—above all, its public universities, which had no equal in his Europe. He described what it was like to come upon one:

You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears … a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

Today, American universities are cutting back—pushed by state legislatures, their own administrators, and the federal government. Last year, Indiana University Bloomington began consolidating or closing more than 100 academic programs—many of them in the humanities—to satisfy a new state law that sets minimum thresholds for how many degrees a program must produce. The same logic has gone federal. A new U.S. Department of Education rule, finalized in June, will strip federal student loans from programs whose graduates don’t out-earn a worker with only a high-school diploma.

Harvard has done the same to its graduate ranks. Last October it moved to cut Ph.D. admissions in its Faculty of Arts and Sciences by more than half, the arts and humanities down about 60 percent and the German department projected to lose every one of its Ph.D. places.

Last year, too, the chancellors of Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University convened a commission to examine what they called “the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials,” along with “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” in those fields. The commission reported back that humanistic scholarship had indeed been corroded by “politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”

What’s going on?

Chad Wellmon is the Commonwealth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia and the author of After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work. Wellmon says most humanistic scholarship isn’t incurably politicized—you can always pick out an egregious example, but the bulk of it is neither poor nor brilliant, just ordinary and a little dull. And the humanities are too small a part of American higher education, he argues, to carry the blame for what’s gone wrong across the whole system. That’s not to say the field hasn’t had its share of stridently political faculty; but the deeper point, Wellmon says, is what the complaint about politicization exposes—a university no longer able to shield its scholars from political pressure while still convincing the public that their work serves it. The scholarship is being squeezed inside the university, and that squeeze may be pushing intellectual life out of it altogether—which might not be a bad thing …

Gustav Jönsson: What do you make of the report’s claim that the quality of scholarship in the humanities has declined?

Chad Wellmon: It’s an odd document, I have to say. A committee report, so the authorship is vague by design—and it has a strange form of address. Two university chancellors convened the committee, and the report is addressed explicitly to them; then it reaches further and says it’s meant not just for those two but for every president, chancellor, and administrator in America.