Science is vital, but humanities have a relevance beyond measure

Published on Tuesday 1 July 2008 22:05

NOWADAYS, in country after country, policymakers have become obsessed with the need to strengthen science education. But what about the humanities – all those disciplines (literature, history, languages, and so forth) whose relevance to economic competitiveness is not so obvious?

We need the humanities only if we are committed to the idea of humanity. If the humanities have become obsolete, then it may be that humanity is losing its salience.

I do not mean that we are becoming "less human" in the sense of "inhumane." If anything, we live in a time when traditionally human-centred concerns like "rights" have been extended to animals, if not nature as a whole. Rather, the problem is whether there is anything distinctive about being human that makes special demands of higher education. I believe the answer continues to be yes.

Today, it sounds old-fashioned to describe the university's purpose as being to "cultivate" people, as if it were a glorified finishing school. However, once we set aside its elitist history, there remains a strong element of truth to this idea, especially when applied to the humanities. Although we now think of academic disciplines, including the humanities, as being "research-led," this understates the university's historic role in converting the primate Homo sapiens into a creature whose interests, aspirations and achievements extend beyond successful sexual reproduction.

The university began with the humanities at its heart, but today it is playing catch-up with the natural sciences. This is because the natural sciences have most closely imitated the productivity measures associated with industry. The result is a "bigger is better" mentality that stresses ever more publications, patents, and citations. Yet this agenda tends to be pursued without much concern for how – or if – these measures feed into something of greater social, cultural, and even economic relevance.

The Science Citation Index, originally designed to help researchers discern aggregate trends in increasingly complex sciences, has helped measure productivity. But now these trends are routinely converted into norms against which the performance of particular universities, departments, and even individual researchers is judged. What is most easily measured has become confused with what is most worth measuring.

But, more profoundly, this entire line of thinking neglects the distinctly transformative capacity of the knowledge in which the humanities specialise. An adequate assessment of this capacity requires looking at its multiplier effects.

As with John Maynard Keynes's notion that returns on public investment must be measured as the long-term consequence of other investments that it stimulates across the economy and society, so, too, with the knowledge generated by the humanities.

This idea is lost in today's cost-accounting for universities, which treats what transpires between teacher and student in the classroom as akin to what happens between producer and consumer in the market.

Today, it is hard to believe that in the heyday of the welfare state, universities were both more elite and more publicly funded than they are today. Back then, it was assumed that the benefits of academic training accrued not only, or even primarily, to those who experienced it but also, and more importantly, to the rest of the population, whose lives were variously enriched by the application of the arts and sciences.

Of course, this enrichment included such practical benefits as medical breakthroughs and labour-saving technologies. But the enrichment provided by the humanities was no less enduring, though its subtler nature makes it harder to track. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Keynes, every time we turn on the television, read a newspaper, pick up a novel or watch a film, we are in the thrall of one or more of the dead humanists who set the terms of reference through which we see the world.