s Europe entered the 15th century and, by small steps, the modern era, something funny happened in education. Alongside rigorous classes in law, medicine, and theology, courses began springing up in Latin, poetry, and history. These liberal arts were first called ‘humanae litterae,’ which means ‘literature with a human focus.’ The medieval mindset of scholastic facts opened up to the more uncertain dream of creating civically responsible citizens
Now our universities boast broad programs in science, business, engineering, and yes, the sprawling and often ill-defined realm of the humanities. But after reading Samya Kullab’s article “UTSU and OPIRG restructuring debate,” it occurred to me that we might be near the tail end of the movement those upstart humanists brought to the fore half a millennium ago.
Clear from the debate on the Faculty of Arts and Science’s spending cuts was anger that Dean Meric Gertler did not consult the departments before proposing the amalgamation of six departments and axing several programs. Professor Tavakoli-Targhi, chair of the Department of Historical Studies, even compared the university’s leadership to the Bush administration.
As lamentable as these proposed cuts are, Tavakoli-Targhi’s statement captures the misdirection of anxiety at the ‘five year strategic plan,’ a title that suggests Soviet policy-making rather than educational reform. We can blame Dean Gertler or David Naylor for the new focus on business, engineering, and applied sciences, and the lack of consultation before streamlining comparative studies. However, it is a mistake to read these decisions as a top-down Bush-Cheney-style move. Faculties need to follow the money, especially when they saddle $22 million in annual deficits. UTSU President Adam Awad was closer to the mark when he observed that hard-to-market departments are perishing.
These departments are not only dying out at the University of Toronto. Institutions across Canada, America, and the UK are slashing grants to humanities departments. Recessions spell doom for public arts initiatives, but there has been a slower shift at play decades before the present one.
After World War II British governments began experiments in opening up higher education, then a playground for the rich. Provincial universities with lower tuition rates made an undergraduate degree more affordable, much to the upturned noses of writer Kingsley Amis and scholars who prophesized the watering down of academia. In Canada and the United States the undergraduate degree was brilliantly marketed to Generation X as a necessary step to adulthood.
It is, however, hard to build a good liberal arts program from scratch. You can pump money into state of the art facilities for a biochemistry department, and chances are you will have a better department. But if Nipissing copies reading lists from Oxford literature classes it will likely not produce Oxford graduates. It is elitist to suggest it, but perhaps democratizing university spread thin the humanist tradition.
Clear enough is how eliminating research grants dulls the competitive edge an academic field should have. Competition is crucial to producing talent: it takes a thousand mediocre writers snapping at each other’s heels to push one or two icons into the spotlight.
That is not to put down the 99.99 per cent of BAs who do not become luminaries. The humanist approach has always been focused on personal development rather than material reward. Once again, this is impossible to define in the same way as going into med school leads to becoming a doctor. Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago links the “ethical mode” of education to the health of a self-analyzing democracy in her book Not for Profit.
The societal benefit is incalculable, but money is not. The prestigious fields of engineering and technology get generous federal funding and attract foreign students, who pay much higher fees than domestic students. Quite rightly, the university wants to keep up its international reputation in scientific research, building on past breakthroughs in genetics and cancer. English students might be quietly revolutionizing literary criticism, yet this is not going to make front page news.
For better or worse, the operative question in our inter-connected world is that of use. The playing field has been levelled by globalization. Degrees have narrowed and specialized to keep up with an increasingly specialized workplace. Detractors of the nebulous humanities will call it a useless remnant of pre-modernization.
We will have to get used to the reduced role of liberal arts programs, at least for the time being. Luckily, education tends to swing like a pendulum between trends. If specialization and fact-based learning are perceived to go too far, Keats and Yates will get their own courses back. If Nussbaum’s suggestion that the critical voice of democracy will suffer without the humanities, then we may see the field enter into a rebirth — a second renaissance.
