http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/troy_jollimore_on_why_democracy_needs_the_humanities_20100423/Posted on Apr 23, 2010
By Troy Jollimore
As a professor in a large state university system, I am quite familiar with the current state of American liberal arts education, at least in our public institutions of higher learning. And I am here to tell you: The news is not good. The public universities in general are in a sorry state, languishing under constantly dwindling funding and lack of public support. Class sizes are growing even as instructors are being let go. Funds for research and other intellectual activities are rapidly disappearing. Many instructors are not being paid their full salaries. And many universities have responded to the situation, or are considering responding, by slashing if not entirely eliminating humanities and arts programs—programs frequently regarded as expensive, nonessential luxuries, in a world increasingly focused on the economic bottom line.
As a result, an ever smaller number of students have at any point during their university careers the special, indeed irreplaceable experience of sitting in a room with a small number of their colleagues and discussing difficult ideas—ideas, in many cases, that are foundational to our civilization—with an instructor who is willing to challenge them and who has the time and energy to take their thoughts seriously. The anonymity and alienation of the large lecture hall or the online course has largely replaced the person-to-person interaction that was once considered the apotheosis, if not indeed the core, of the college experience.
Individual students often fail to realize, of course, just how much of a raw deal they are getting compared to their predecessors; since they spend only four years or so on campus, they are not aware of how much more crowded their classrooms are, or how much less attention their work and intellectual progress receive from their ever more put-upon instructors. But we professors, who tend to stay around for longer, are more vividly aware of the steepness of the decline. It has been true for a while, sadly, that quite a few students were pretty much illiterate when they entered public universities. What is becoming more and more true is that many students are still essentially illiterate when they leave.
The universities’ plight simply reflects that of the country at large. The popularity of robustly and proudly ignorant politicians like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin might be the most obvious sign that the anti-intellectualism that has always haunted American public life has experienced a resurgence in the last decade or so, but the general contempt for the work of our educational institutions, and the corresponding unwillingness to provide them with adequate funding, is equally disturbing. Intelligence is mocked and knowledge is devalued: The common assumption is that anything worth knowing has already been discovered and can be instantly gleaned, cost-free, from Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the idea of wisdom has dropped out of public discourse altogether. Ask yourself: When was the last time you heard anyone use that word non-ironically? The idea that a liberal arts education might be good for anything other than indulging the effete sensibilities of a dreamy and impractical elite has fallen into considerable disrepute.
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In particular, Nussbaum identifies three sets of “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a decent world culture capable of constructively addressing the world’s most pressing problems”:
These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as “a citizen of the world”; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.more...
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