Former Cornell provost and Prof. Emeritus Don Randel, music, spoke at a meeting of the Board of Trustees Friday. In his speech, Randel, now President of the Mellon Foundation, highlighted the importance of the humanities to the nation and Cornell, where he was a member of the faculty for 32 years. The speech is published in part below.

Simply put, the humanities at Cornell not only represent one of its great traditional strengths. It is the presence of the humanities alongside its other great strengths that gives Cornell a unique position on the landscape of higher education and defines what is or aught to be its singular edge in a very competitive environment. …

I’m a relentless opponent of the familiar rankings of institutions, especially those of the U.S. News and World Report. But even if one takes them the least bit seriously, there will always be arguments about the rankings within any given discipline — whether Cornell’s ag or engineer or humanist is a bit better or not quite as good as its leading competitors. But what is fact, and not mere opinion, is the uniqueness of the particular combination of strengths that defines Cornell. Cornell’s challenge, then, is only how to capitalize on that combination by ensuring that these strengths do not merely cohabit in the county of Tompkins in the state of New York, but that they engage one another in what can and should be uniquely fruitful ways. I do not wish for moment to slight what the humanities at Cornell can and should derive from the presence of Cornell’s other schools. …

Both love and the humanities are their own reward, and they have been central to what makes life worth living for as long as human beings have left any record of what they care about. The value of love and the humanities has endured. And the nature of that value does not change much over time. To describe that value its necessarily to say that things in one sense or another have been said many times before. …

We [humanists] advocate a set of activities that do not bring it big research grants, that cannot guarantee students their future employment or the respect of the general public — activities whose contribution to gross domestic product and job creation in a period of economic decline, or indeed in any period at all, is not easily described. Unfortunately, we live a nation with a deep anti-intellectual streak, steadily declining attention spans and little interest in learning the lessons of history and how they might help us think about the future. For the most part, we have invested in our intellectual life over most of our history only when it can be justified in terms of contributions to gross domestic product, national defense or increased longevity. We do this without thinking too much about if the sources of GDP are appropriately distributed across the citizenry, what is about our nation we that we are actually trying to defend and from whom or what, and who it is that ought to have access to increased wellbeing and longevity and why one would want to live longer in the first place. [Applause] Not surprisingly, then, advocating for the humanities has lately seemed to have taken an instrumental turn. …

The single most powerful and useful justification for the humanities — namely their contribution to leading a richer and more meaningful life. About this assertion we must not apologize or even be hesitant. 

The place of the humanities — and I would add the arts — is the subject of national debate as well as of debate within colleges and universities. One could become discouraged at the quality of the debate knowing that a significant numbers of our elected representatives favor eliminating all together the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the arts. …

The arguments summoned in behalf of the humanities and the arts in the national debate are most often the instrumental arguments. This is simply because these are most often the arguments that work in our society. Scientists know this very well. What matters is what contributes to the national defense and the gross domestic product… The contribution to GDP has been taken up with relish by the arts community. The arts are good for business. The arts create jobs apart from the jobs of the artists themselves. The arts cause people to get on airplanes, ride on trains, drive their cars, hire babysitters, eat in restaurants, drink in bars, give to their public radio station, although this may cease to be a problem if they get rid of all public radio stations. But all of this essentially places the arts in the domain of entertainment, rather like professional sports. This, too, is an interesting comparison, for the public has often been prepared to offer huge subsidies in forms of stadia and other infrastructure to professional sports franchises that are after all big and sometimes very profitable businesses, while being rather more reluctant to support nonprofit humanities and arts organizations in similar degree. …

There is, then, a national cultural debate of which the debate within higher education is only a part: How is it that we might make the humanities and the arts in a college or a university — if not in national life — more than mere entertainment or the idle pursuit of the well-to-do? How do we make the humanities and the arts more than the veneer that we would like to apply to our students and ourselves — perhaps so that our engineers would seem a little less geeky? How do we ensure that the humanities and the arts are a crucial part of the intellectual fabric of the institution? This entails thinking about what the intellectual fabric of the institution ought properly to be and what we are attempting to bring about in the lives our students and anyone else who forms a part of the community. This, in turn, entails thinking about what a college or university truly stands for and the means by which it demonstrates what it stands for. This is not the about the value proposition of the institution — what kind of a job you will get if you study here and how much more you will make over your lifetime in consequence of your degree. This is about the values proposition of the institution — what truly matters in life and what makes it worth living. This is, of course, what the humanities and the arts are all about. …

To study greats works of literature and philosophy and history is to explore how thoughtful people have tried to make sense of life and how to live it. This is very much more subtle and complicated than taking a course in or reading on how to behave in polite society of people like oneself. 

There are still more practical arguments for the pursuit of the humanities and the arts in a young person’s life. A great many young people seem to be guided first and foremost by a wish to accumulate a substantial wealth even beyond the quite understandable goal in these uncertain times of earning a decent living capable of adequately supporting a family. Many — too many — of them have too narrow a view of what might lead most effectively to success in pursuit of their livelihood. Whatever the technical and practical skills that might be thought necessary, the difference will be made in the quality of the imagination and curiosity that guides them. The successful entrepreneur is a person who has confronted a body of information and succeeded in making sense of it, of finding meaning in it that the competition had hitherto missed. This is exactly what scholars and artists in all fields do. The exercise of the mind on hard books or works of art or observations of other people or nature is the single best preparation for a profession whatever. I will quote only two people from the world of business. The first is an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur of our time about whom we have sadly read a great deal in recent days: Steve Jobs. He remarked: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” The second in John Rowe, chief executive of Exelon, the largest electric utility in the nation. He remarked: “If anyone thinks that reading Samuels Pepys or Geoffrey Chaucer has nothing to do with running a large, politically involved public utility, that would simply prove that they have never read Pepys or Chaucer or run a public utility.”

Poets should have the last word, and they probably always will. We remember them and how they help us understand long after we have forgotten their contemporaries in most other walks of life. Cornell’s own A.R. Ammons, in his long poem titled “Garbage,” captures beautifully what it is that makes art of a piece with science and every other scholarly pursuit, and thus how it is, that what all of us actually do throughout college and university, is both one and the same thing. He wrote the following lines: “Art makes life just as it makes itself: An imitation. Art makes shape, order, meaning, purpose where there was one none or none discernable, none derivable. Life too, if it is to have meaning, must be made meaningful. If it is to have purpose, its purpose must be divined, invented, manifested, held to.” Jorge Luis Borges also wrote some lines about how it is that art and the study of it should be central to the lives of us all. In a translation by W.S. Merwin: “At times in the evening, a face looks out at us from the depths of a mirror. Art should be like that mirror, which reveals to us our own face.” 

Thank you very much.