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Save the humanities. Save my job.

THERE’S A BATTLE going for the survival of the Humanities both in the UK and in the States. Sides must be taken so I’ll come out straight away and declare myself for the Humanities. Why?

Firstly, because it means I’ve got a job. Let’s not decry naked self-interest. I can’t make a living out of writing my own poetry but I can out of teaching other people’s.

Secondly, I have a vague and perhaps typically liberal idea (in the old-fashioned sense) that it’s a Good Thing. I don’t believe it civilises us or makes us better people but I do think it can bring us individually a great deal of lasting pleasure. Whether it justifies studying Humanities at university I don’t know but it did allow me four years of book-reading, drinking and lounging around at the taxpayers’ expenses many decades ago.

That’s enough of the serious stuff.

University College London and 4Humanities have joined forces to big up the Humanities, which they see as under attack and subject to unjustified criticism. This means they’re fighting on two fronts. One is against the stupid Daily Mail-reading public who don’t see the point of what they do and the other is the awful Tory-led Coalition who don’t see the point of what they do. I suspect if the awful Tory-led Coalition were putting more money their way and saying how wonderful the Humanities were they’d be quite happy to abandon the general public to their diet of chips and bigotry.

I suspect if the awful Tory-led Coalition were putting more money their way and saying how wonderful the Humanities were they’d be quite happy to abandon the general public to their diet of chips and bigotry.

An early salvo in this culture war comes in the form of a blog post headlined, “Calling All Humanists: Let’s Reach Out and Touch Someone!” and published alongside what they call an “infographic” – a pdf entitled “The Humanities Matter!” The exclamation mark is profoundly important, betokening as it does the urgency and seriousness of the matter. Academics aren’t given to this kind of public announcement, so you’d better pay attention.

It makes a number of statements, some of which I’d agree with, eg “The Humanities are about what it is to be human”. Yes, sounds spot-on to me. “The value of the Humanities is more often in the questions posed than in the answers found”. Fine, though I’d quibble about “more” and argue that perhaps it’s what we discover while trying to answer the questions that’s just as important as the answers themselves.

BUT THEN THERE are the jokes.

One of the stats they pull out is that 6.5 percent of people read poetry and 4 percent write it. There’s no way 6.5 percent of the population read poetry. If they said they do they’re lying.

As for only 4 percent writing the stuff, that’s a big lie, too. If it were 44 percent, I’d believe it. Anyone in the business will tell you that far more people write (or want to write) the damn stuff than read it. And no one reads it.

No points for the profs on that score, then.

No points, either, for the sneaky propaganda: so, the Humanities “foster social justice and equality”, do they? No, they don’t. They’ve got nothing to do with fashionable left wing campaigns. Just as they’ve nothing to do with developing “informed and critical citizens”. Informed and critical individuals, yes, but “citizens”? No. “Citizens” reeks of social engineering and the idea that people have no status or importance except in relation to the state. It’s one of those words, like “hegemony” or “Chomsky” that is guaranteed to rouse the Viking berserker in me.

All of this propagandising is consonant with the views of the majority of academics, however, whose undeclared aim is to produce cohorts of the politically-correct eagerly awaiting the downfall of late capitalism. Equal thoughts all round, comrades. Democracy depends on it!

Then there’s the plea for academics to be taken seriously. According to the infographic, critics say academics create work that is “inaccessible to the general public”. Quite, but I’d be crueller and say that most of it is utterly irrelevant to the general public.

THE ONE POSITIVE, though, is that an academic paper is going to be read by far more people than a new book of poems. Even if the readers are all other academics.

Profs 1; Poets 0. I know which side of that stat pays my wage.

Support the Humanities? But of course!

Michael Blackburn.

 

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