The author of the article below kindly sent me a copy of his piece calling for separation of humanities instruction from that of science. Such a tactic would even produce universities that taught one or the other but not both. The end result would be the death of universities offering a liberal education, and probably of humanities instruction as well.
This is a short but provocative read at The Dispatch, so click on the title below to read it. The author is Evan D. Morris, a Professor of Radiology Biomedical Imaging at Yale.
I’ve heard similar arguments from colleagues in the science, but I’m not sure I fully agree. The reason is that I had a fantastic liberal-arts education at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, an education that sparked a lifelong love of learning in the humanities, including literature, art, and philosophy (I am deficient in my knowledge of classical music). I am by no means a polymath or public intellectual, but I read tons of literature, go to art museums, and read a lot of philosophy for a scientist. I wouldn’t be doing that if I hadn’t studied these things in college.
Click below:
Morris’s main argument for separating science from the humanities is that the Trump administration is punishing science for the sins of people in the humanities, even if a few scientists do submit DEI-related grants. Ergo, we should preserve science, with all its virtues, by keeping it away from humanities scholars. I put below some quotes, all indented (Morris was at the Heterodox Academy Conference in NYC a month ago):
The best argument I heard at the HxA conference in defense of the humanities in today’s university was: “We cannot afford to lose all of that important cancer research.” Come again? Translation: The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us—grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences—with them. This begs the question: Do we scientists need them? Or, more to the point, must the fate of the sciences be tied to that of the humanities?
Since January of this year, the sciences have been hit with delays of some federal grants and cancellations of others; proposed reductions in indirect rate costs; and draconian budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) going forward. Keep in mind, it is the humanities that have sinned: Why else would the Trump administration’s settlement with Columbia call for an internal review of Middle East programs or for adding new Jewish Studies faculty slots? But if the humanities have sinned, why has the government targeted the sciences for funding cuts? As Willie Sutton purportedly remarked when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Most universities have divisions or departments of the humanities, social sciences, law, business, medicine, and hard sciences. But it is the latter two that bring in the bulk of federal dollars, in the form of NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
. . . . Some will claim that scientists’ hands are not clean, that we endorse rampant DEI, that we misuse science funding for bizarre investigations. But such instances are a few fleas on the fur of a noble hound. We in the hard sciences do work that is largely apolitical, and we are more oriented toward much-needed objective evaluation of data and merit than many of our brethren in the humanities. Yet, the scientists, and all their life-giving and technology-producing work, are being punished for the sins of others because we all live under one roof. I cannot see a compelling reason for our continued cohabitation.
I can! Well, I can so long as humanities are taught in a way to stimulate thinking rather than propagandize students. We all know that much of the humanities is morphing into ideological “studies” programs, but I still have confidence that somewhere in this great land English literature, music, and art are being taught in a way to stimulate students rather than propagandize them. Further, there is cross-pollination of the disciplines. Philosophy, for example (a “humanities” field) can help us straighten out our thinking about science (Dan Dennett is one example), while science can instill an attitude of doubt into studies of humanities, training students to meet assertions by saying, “How do you know that?”
I do, however, agree with Morris, as I did when I spoke at the conference, that the ends of science studies differ from those of much of the humanities:
In the university, we also see a clash of cultures. Scientists at research universities run labs that are funded by government grants. To secure those grants, the scientist proposes a circumscribed set of experiments with verifiable (or more correctly, rejectable) hypotheses. Objective truth as it applies to such narrow lines of inquiry is attainable. But objective truth cannot be achieved in the humanities—nor is it the point. Professors in the humanities are trained in a completely different paradigm and culture. Writing about art or history or religion seems to elude any possibility of objectivity that is central to the scientific process. If you are a Calvinist, there may be only one proper way to read the Bible. But that is not the same as there being one objective meaning of the Bible for all of us.
There’s a lot more to be said about this, and I hope to say it in a longer written explication elsewhere. I do agree that in most of the humanities (not all, for they include sociology and economics), the aim is not finding truths about the world, but to stimulate reflection and the realization of subjective “truths” (well, ways of thinking) that are specific to the reader, viewer, or listener. But those subjective truths are also important: imagine a world without novels, paintings, or music! How can we teach liberal arts without such subjects? Even Morris agrees with me here, but would reorganize universities to have the humanities taught by instructors:
Does this mean that scientists should strive to be illiterate or ahistorical? Of course not. We need to be able to read and write and absorb lessons from history and politics and ethics. But we don’t need to be part of a larger university to do so. For those topics that students need to learn but for which no scientist professor is prepared to teach, our Institute of Technology and Medicine can hire qualified instructors. But they need not be the world’s expert on Shakespeare or Poe to teach writing or English literature to undergrads. And for those polymathic students who want to learn their physics from a famous physicist and their Hobbes from a leading Hobbesian, there can still be such a thing as cross-registering at the nearby Institute of Humanities.
I disagree here. First of all, as scientists we should strive not to unyoke ourselves from humanities, but to improve the teaching of humanities so that they become places of inspiration, stimulation, and arguments, even if there is no objective truth to be found (I have to add that we can learn how to view paintings, read novels, and listen to music from experts so that we get more out of them. Even if humanities can’t give us “objective truths”, they can show us what we’re missing.
This unyoking is really a recipe for the death of the humanities, for students, as my friend Luana is constantly reminding me, now go to college to get jobs, not to learn, and you can’t get good jobs if you’re a humanities major. She doesn’t like this trend, but has always told me that this presages the death of liberal-arts colleges: one conclusion from Morris’s article. He ends this way:
We are at an inflection point in the public’s valuation of the academy. For good or ill, we academics must each make our own best case for our continued existence and for whatever resources we seek from the public. There is an efficiency and a clarity that can come from unyoking the sciences from the humanities. Let the market of public opinion assess each discipline on its own merits and let the practitioners of each discipline be allowed to make their own case for their continued value. That seems only fair. I am confident I can make my most persuasive case for a university of science, engineering, and medicine, if the humanities are not housed under my roof.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be buying so blithely into “the market of public opinion”, but making the case for a liberal education.
Now I have considered that my opposition to this unyoking may derive from my own history: the fantastic education I got at the liberal-arts, teaching-specialized College of William & Mary. But I haven’t given up hope that this kind of education could still be proffered to students now.
However, maybe I’m naive and unrealistic.