The death of the humanities has been announced so many times that, by this point, one would think the body was already six feet under. But to speak of dying, again and again, is also to speak of survival. Is it worth asking what is killing the humanities now if it seems to survive every crisis? Perhaps so, but we may be searching a little too far for the killer.
There is no better way to rally an army than to identify an external threat. Each time concerns arise about whether ChatGPT will stop students from writing their own essays, or whether corporate America has any role for the study of William Wordsworth, scholars of the humanities rush to the discipline’s dying defence. But what happens when the threat is not external, but internal? When the very people who see enough value in the humanities to study or teach it unknowingly deliver the most incisive of attacks? What was once a well-meaning emphasis on inclusion is gradually becoming part of that internal threat.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, there has been an increasing and necessary pressure to diversify the voices represented in the humanities disciplines. Debates around the literary canon, the Stanford Western culture controversy and so forth, have seen a greater push on efforts to diversify the humanities, to show that different positionalities are represented both in the works studied and the scholars, which also includes the students studying them.
This is by no means an attack on the value of diversification. However, attempts to diversify the humanities have undeniably influenced the culture of the humanities education by contributing to one in which positionality carries weight, and a critique of an argument can be read as an invalidation of the individual who expresses it. Within this logic, disagreement risks being misconstrued as an attack on who has the right to occupy space within the discipline.
The propensity for disagreement to become politicised contours the way humanities classes are graded, particularly within the United States. 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. At Cornell, many humanities classes use structures reminiscent of contract grading, in which components are either marked by completion or by perceived effort. We often attribute grade inflation in the humanities to subjectivity. Yet, the issue is not subjectivity in itself but what this subjectivity can afford: the possibility that students are graded not on the quality of the work they produce, but the individual, and even identity, of which this work is considered representative.
Even if the politics of identity contributes to grade inflation, perhaps this is not such an issue. 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 to welcoming students into the humanities, if this comes at the expense of the very critical faculties these disciplines are designed to cultivate. It is critique that must be democratic. While this means enabling access to the humanities, it equally means 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 Middle Eastern woman. Yet, this fear is now so felt within humanities, that even in making this argument, I reach for an example 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.
If we continue to create a climate in which leverage is rooted in inherent characteristics rather than in the product of an 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 defence 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.
