Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was published prematurely, before editing was complete. This version reflects the author’s original argument in full, with citations and language finalized during editing.
Of all the clichés that literature has taught me to avoid, none seems quite as unavoidable as the “death of the humanities.” With each new threat — from artificial intelligence to academic job scarcity — arrives yet another announcement, then another defense as to why the humanities remain valuable. Perhaps one of the simplest and most compelling defenses is that students turn to these disciplines for a sense of ownership, but ownership of what exactly?
During the first semester of my year abroad at Cornell, I found myself worrying about the release of grades. I had taken primarily humanities classes for the first time in my undergraduate degree, with little idea as to how I had performed. When I mentioned this to a classmate, they reassured me, "Well, it's not like they can tell you your opinion is wrong, and anyway, the professor likes our class." In the humanities, rhetoric had its own arithmetic, one that my studies in the United Kingdom had taught me could be difficult to predict. So how had my classmate come to decide that these disciplines were simply a matter of opinion, or of taste?
Since the 1960s and 1970s, universities have seen an increasing and necessary pressure to diversify the voices represented in the humanities disciplines. Debates around the existence and makeup of the literary canon, emerging through events such as the Stanford Western culture controversy, have seen a greater push on efforts to diversify the humanities. One form of this diversification is ensuring that a greater breadth of positionalities is represented both in the works studied and among the scholars, including the students studying them. This is by no means an attack on the value of diversification. However, in a culture that accentuates the relationship between scholarship and positionality, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate critique from the individual who expresses it.
During my studies in the United States, I became more aware of the propensity for disagreement in the humanities to become politicized and to influence the way classes in these disciplines are approached. The reputation of humanities classes as grade boosts was foreign to me, coming from the U.K., where students fear a final year Nietzsche module at least as much as they do calculus. For the first time, I encountered students who attributed the alleged ease of achieving high grades in the humanities to the fact that their arguments were “opinions,” and as such, less readily deemed incorrect. As an opinion columnist, I believe relaying an idea as opinion does not grant the exemption from criticism for which one might hope. However, if accepted as opinion, ideas become more difficult to criticize, without implicating the wider belief system of the individual. This does not simply operate at an individual level, but as positionality gains relevance, at a collective level, the personhood of the author becomes increasingly significant to the views they advance.
Yet even if the assumption that it is easier to do well in the humanities is misguided, perhaps the sense of relief certain students find in the humanities is productive for the growth of these disciplines. At a time when the number of humanities majors is decreasing, less grading pressure could help make these majors more attractive to students. And what if the odd critical theory class were to produce the next Susan Sontag or Zadie Smith? There is nothing to say it could not.
However, there would be little point in welcoming students into the humanities if this comes at the expense of the very critical faculties these disciplines are designed to cultivate. Within these disciplines, we choose interlocutors, frameworks, or traditions, and are responsible for these choices. Critique therefore requires different perspectives, but it equally requires preserving a pedagogical structure in which an American professor with a doctorate in Ottoman studies is allowed to tell me, as someone of Turkish heritage, that my reading of a Turkish ghazal is weak, without fearing that this will somehow be construed as silencing the voice of a Turkish woman. Yet this fear is now so felt within the humanities that even in making this argument, I reach for a hypothetical to which I feel I have a claim. I reach for the shelter of that infamous “as a blank,” supposedly limiting my critics to only other people who fall within the smaller group of blank. I cannot escape the object of my critique.
If we create a climate in which positionality can take precedence over the authority we acquire through education, then we devalue that education. Education, by definition, is about acquisition and process. It is a state of becoming. To defend the humanities is to defend this state of becoming, to take comfort in it. This defense requires the preservation of an academic culture in which inclusion is not the same as the suspension of critique. It means identity in scholarship is understood as intellectual, shaped by research interests, educational backgrounds and views taken in their own right, the crafted rather than the inherited. Only then can we hope to prop open the door to the humanities, and still make the room worth entering.
Defne Yucesir is an Opinion Columnist and a student in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her column, In Transit, explores the relationship between politics and the academy, examining questions of disciplinarity, identity politics, and the purpose of higher education from a global perspective. She can be reached at dy362@cornell.edu.
