Academics reporter Scott Levi checks in on Alan Brinkley’s recent piece in Newsweek:

Former Columbia University Provost and the Allan Nevins professor of history Alan Brinkley recently wrote a piece for Newsweek on the growing need to rescue what threatens to become endangered in American universities that increasingly stress scientific and technological knowledge: the humanities.

Brinkley begins by discussing the history of academy throughout the 20th century. While the American academy venerated the “hard sciences” for the first 50 years, viewing it as a panacea to extremely varied problems, things changed radically halfway through. The university rerouted this passionate enthusiasm in the second half-century instead toward the humanities, rationalizing that the Western foundations of ideas like liberty, reason, and equality could act as an ideological sword against the godless communist world.

And nowadays, when the U.S. is, Brinkley argues, described rather truthfully as behind in science, technology, and engineering, the humanities unfairly suffer. Not only do humanists often rank among the lowest-paid faculty members, but budget cuts tend to go first to the humanities, and humanists, by nature of their trade, rarely obtain grant money. Brinkley advocates for rethinking the role of the humanities in producing young minds:

“But the idea that institutions or their students must decide between humanities and science is false. Our society could not survive without scientific and technological knowledge. But we would be equally impoverished without humanistic knowledge as well. Science and technology teach us what we can do. Humanistic thinking can help us understand what we should do.”

Citing the Columbia Core Curriculum as a model, Brinkley insists that universities pay more attention—financial, administrative, and thematic—to the humanities. Intertwined with the sciences, the humanities are just as needed as are the sciences:

“It is not surprising that many of our greatest scientists are also deeply committed to humanistic knowledge and values. Nor should it be surprising that many humanistic fields find scientific tools
essential to their work.”

As doctoral programs experience budget reductions and humanistic disciplines enmesh with related social science fields, Brinkley’s comments resonate intensely at Columbia. The forces affecting the reshaping—for better or for worse—of the humanities are both local and general, with institutes, centers, adn departments at Columbia exemplifying both types.

Take the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, which contains both humanists and social scientists studying in various languages. “We are massively under-funded,” anthropology professor Rosalind Morris and then-associate director told Spectator in December 2008, mentioning the “extremely minimal administrative funds” for its graduate program.

Another development on the local scale: the past few years have experienced a push to divide national literature departments into tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions, or professors and lecturers to save money and redistribute workload. The result allows for those who want to focus on research to focus on research, and those who want to focus on teaching to devote their time to that. But it’s also led to resentment and discontent among lecturers who have taken the same educational route as their professor colleagues but feel as if they lack job security.

On the macro level, disciplines have gotten lost within each other as professors increasingly engage in interdisciplinary efforts. The ICLS once again shows this, as it unites social scientists and humanists in a non-departmental capacity. Its former director Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature Andreas Huyssen offered his insight on the whole field of the humanities in 2008. “The humanities are under the gun,” he said. “But they are still as necessary as ever in the educational project.”