
I’m an English professor, but I no longer consider it useful, valuable, or even accurate to identify with the ‘humanities’ label or to think of myself as a ‘humanist.’ Below I explain why.
In Part I of this two-part series, I offered a critique of ‘the humanities’ as a knowledge category. A key part of that critique is the claim that the tripartite division of knowledge that grew out of the late-19th / early 20th centuries and flourished until the late 20th century—the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities—is an obsolete way to categorize knowledge and to structure our institutions. Because we’ve lived for so long within this tripartite structure, it’s easy to forget that it’s just a historically specific heuristic structure, i.e. not a picture of what knowledge actually is or must ever be. So it’s likewise easy to assume that an attack on this structure—which is very much what I’m doing here—is an attack on some sacred aspect of knowledge itself.
Accordingly, my split with ‘the humanities’ (hereafter not scare-quoted, for the preservation of our collective sanity) actually started with a critique of ‘STEM.’ I’m aware that I have critics who like to psychologize my shift away from the humanities—to characterize it as a form of bitterness or self-loathing or apostasy or self-defeating naiveté—but the truth is I don’t just have it out for the poor, beleaguered humanities; I have it out for the whole of the tripartite division of knowledge, starting with ‘STEM.’
‘STEM’ is, of course, a late permutation of the natural sciences divisional category, a successful modification to give technology and engineering their rightful places in the hierarchy of value that drives scientific work. Comically, ‘STEM’ was originally conceived as ‘SMET’—the term present in National Science Foundation (NSF) documents as far back as 1993—until the NSF director smartly figured ‘STEM’ sounds a lot better than ‘SMET’ in 2001, and changed it.
The impetus for ‘SMET’ (and then ‘STEM’) was concern that US Americans at age 15 were underperforming the youth of other countries in science and math test scores, which is to say that between the Department of Education and the NSF, ‘STEM’ was from the beginning a top-down, strategic category to direct resources and positive attention toward a set of disciplines thought crucial to US geopolitical standing and what we now call the ‘knowledge economy.’
The graphic at the top of this post (reproduced below for convenience) is a slide I made for a recent talk, designed to show that whereas the cachet of ‘STEM’ has hitherto carried less applied, valued, and resourced fields such as number theory, invertebrate biology, and ecology, what’s really pulling the ‘STEM’ cart (if you like, ha ha ha) is tech and engineering clout and resources.
What this slide depicts is an important part of my critique of ‘STEM’ (hereafter no more scare quotes, I promise). I introduced it in the part of the talk in which I questioned whether STEM—which seems all-powerful—might actually be starting to fracture as a coherent institutional category. In brief, and with reference to the wheelbarrow visual metaphor above, for how long will the T and the E be willing to pull the wight of the M and the S? In more concrete terms, for how long will parents be telling their kids to ‘major in STEM’—when they really mean ‘major in tech and engineering’—before we see another institutional category springing up to account for the more lucrative and institutionally valued components of STEM and leave the biologists and pure mathematicians behind with (you guessed it) the humanities?
There’s some material evidence for this fracture I’m proposing. Math, chemistry, and biology professors are likely aware that enrollment patterns increasingly bring students into their classrooms for required, lower-level courses (sometimes called ‘service courses’) in calculus, statistics, or pre-med, just like English professors traditionally teach the bulk of required writing classes to students who probably aren’t there to study the English department’s primary object of study, which is literature.
But we also see a fracture in the STEM edifice in salary and unemployment rates for graduates. In the two charts below, the fields highlighted in blue are tech and engineering fields; in green, natural science and math fields (the rest of STEM’); and in yellow, humanities fields.
What’s striking about this data, in particular, is that for median annual salaries for bachelor’s degree holders age 25-29, the salary ranges of graduates in math, biology, and aggregated physical sciences are closer to the salary ranges for history, literature, and aggregated non-STEM graduates than to the salary ranges for graduates in technology and engineering fields. In other words, in terms of NCES salary data, a huge chunk of STEM looks more like humanities than it does the upper echelon of STEM earners in tech and engineering. This is what I mean by a fracture in the edifice of STEM.
*****
You’re right to be a little frustrated that I’ve promised you an article on why I no longer identify with the humanities but have just given you a slapdash history and critique of the STEM category. I wrote it this way because, again, there are people who’ve come to identify so deeply and enthusiastically (I mean the latter in the eighteenth-century sense as well) with the humanities that they can’t imagine someone who does what I do for a living could possibly have a legitimate critique of the humanities—or a legitimate reason to abandon the label—so must just be operating out of psychological dysfunction or personal malice. But what should be clear to this point is that whatever negative things I have to say about the humanities, I have a balance of negative things to say about STEM. This is well thought out and it’s not personal!
Having gotten that part out of the way, I offer a list of reasons why I no longer identify with the humanities, and why I think it’s both strategically apt and intellectually sound to let go of this antiquated knowledge category (along with the other two). This list is not in any order of importance; just a way of cataloguing together a bunch of things I’ve touched on in other venues. I’ll probably forget to list some things, so I’ll treat this as a running list and update it (or clarify it) accordingly:
The tripartite division of knowledge is obsolete. It arose as a means of protecting each of the three divisions for growth without interference from the others, somewhat like a greenhouse for the humanities and social sciences in particular. The idea was to make sure other knowledge domains flourished through the postwar period as the cold war heated up and scientific and technological development was made integral to foreign and military policy and national defense. A fundamental feature of this way of organizing the disciplines was to wall them off from one another. The thing about walls is they work both ways: the tripartite division was highly successful in protecting the humanities and allowing for its growth, particularly when humanistic learning was tied—not unlike scientific and technological research and teaching—to a sense of national character and US exceptionalism. But the walls also prevented—and still prevent to this day—much collaboration, norming, co-strategizing, and learning between the divisions. With issues such as climate change, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ and bioengineering (e.g. OOACs) on the table, dividing knowledge work into ‘natural,’ ‘social,’ and ‘humanistic’ categories is disastrously unfit for the present and almost surely the future. The lines between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ and ‘human,’ for example, were always blurry, so we should stop treating them as hard and determinative, especially given what we have on our collective plate.
‘Interdisciplinarity’ is bullshit. This seems like a direct contradiction to item (1) above, I know, so let me explain. For lack of a nicer way of putting it, let’s call one thing Real Interdisciplinarity (RI) and another thing Fake Interdisciplinarity (FI). People working in fields with healthy and mutually beneficial collaborations—cancer research, genetics and genomics, some areas of neuroscience, just to give a few examples—usually don’t go on and on about how ‘interdisciplinary’ they are. The reason is because researchers in these areas of inquiry literally can’t do their work without drawing significantly on the knowledge bases and skills of others, whether it’s incorporating sophisticated statistical concepts in their analyses, using mathematical modeling skills and methods based in biological data collected and understood by biologists or neuroscientists, or using computational tools and concepts drawn from computer science, physics, and mathematics. These fields are highly interdisciplinary not as cool options, but out of necessity, in ways that fundamentally and enduringly change the state of the fields involved. This is what I would call RI. By contrast, FI is when scholars collaborate almost exclusively with fields within or immediately adjacent to their divisional structure, for a short period of time, without the expectation that such collaborations will change how either of the collaborating fields does their work—methodologically or otherwise—when they go back to their ‘home’ field, which they always do. Most of what ‘humanists’ consider ‘interdisciplinary work’ is FI. I don’t think the blame falls entirely on ‘humanists’ for this reality. A crucial ingredient for RI is mutual trust in the reliability and legibility of the methods and findings involved in the collaboration, and scientists thinking humanities research is bullshit is one reason why that trust rarely exists and therefore rarely emerges to transform fields through interdisciplinary work. But ‘humanists’ also tend to look at scientists as naive or neoliberal or reductive, etc. in ways that contribute to mutual misunderstanding. My contention is that by formulating domain and methodological identities around divisional structures such as humanities and STEM, we’re baking in (institutionalizing, if you like) assumptions that make RI impossible between fields that really should be working together.
‘Humanists’ tend to treat knowledge superficially. One of the complaints I get most when I question the extent to which humanities research outputs constitute knowledge is a flabbergasted ‘What do you mean??? I don’t know any humanist who doesn’t think they’re producing knowledge!!!’ In case it needs to be said, I know people working in the humanities believe they’re producing knowledge. I just don’t think that’s always true! Here we have to separate philosophy, a discipline that proudly sits uneasily within the tripartite divisions, because like mathematicians, physicists, and economists, foremost, philosophers spend a ton of time thinking very carefully and intently about what constitutes knowledge and how we’d know what or that we know in the first place. It’s not that other humanists can’t do this; it just hasn’t been an interest or a focal point. I’ve written in greater detail about this, for literary studies, here as well as in my chapter in this book. When (non-philosopher) humanists address epistemic matters, it tends to be through warmed over incantations of a relatively narrow subset of scholars since canonized as ‘theorists’: Foucault, Marx, Hegel, Freud and the subsequent scholars working within and between those theoretical traditions. It’s rare to find (non-philosophy) humanities scholarship that engages with the incredibly rich philosophical subfield of epistemology, whether it’s critical or social epistemology scholars such as Charles Mills, Helen Longino, or Sally Haslanger, or analytic philosophy of science, as in the work of Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, or Mary Hesse. This is to say nothing of engaging with disciplinarily further-flung work in theoretical and empirical social science or theoretical physics, two areas of inquiry in which scholars have to think carefully about how to make reliable claims about emergent phenomena not unlike the many cultural developments ‘humanists’ traditionally study. ‘Humanists’ routinely misuse terms such as ‘positivism’ (typically used in humanities circles as a pejorative substitute for ‘quantitative,’ although ‘quantitative’ is also frequently taken as a pejorative) and tend to adopt a critical approach that doesn’t require, but nevertheless indulges in open disdain for quantitative methods, the use of data, or just analytic epistemology in general. What this amounts to is understanding knowledge more or less either in purely descriptive terms, as ‘something I do when I’m doing something scholarly,’ or as critique of knowledge from within a very limited scope of epistemic considerations or concerns. (For my part, I think you need critique for knowledge, but I don’t think critique is itself knowledge.)
The humanities in decline is a cause, not a knowledge category. When I say that ‘humanists’ tend to lead with politics and values instead of knowledge, I don’t mean every single person working in the humanities disciplines. Rather, I mean humanities institutions have made a strategic choice—in response to scarcity and decline—to conceive of the humanities foremost as a cause—a thing to be saved, like the whales or the manatees—and a set of causes, primarily the advancement of social justice. (In case I have to say, I think social justice is good; I just don’t think social justice as filtered through the academic humanities is the best or most effective way to achieve the outcomes I advocate for in my non-work life. In other words, this is not a conservative critique of the humanities.) The gambit is to show the relevance of the humanities by appeal to a set of political and social values that doing humanities stuff or reading literature or history or watching film, etc. and critiquing it is supposed to deliver, thereby making us better people and our society more just. It’s the other side of the coin of conservative Great Western Civilization Books approaches to the humanities, which are also foremost about character and values above knowledge production and validation. The evidence for this is all over at the institutional level. The largest grant-funding body in the humanities, the Mellon Foundation, has revised its mission statement to significantly confine its funding to social justice projects, rather than humanistic research at large. Scholarly trade organizations are framing their conferences and missions explicitly around activist outcomes. ‘Critical’ humanities subfields—‘critical health humanities,’ ‘critical x studies,’ ‘critical environmental studies,’ etc.—have emerged expressly around causes, more evidence of the relevance gambit. To be very clear, I don’t think these are bad or unworthy causes—far from it—but rather that for any kind of activism that requires knowledge work, the knowledge needs to be credible, countenanced, and reliable beyond the confines of the discipline to be effective, and too much of humanities institutional programming is just skipping the knowledge steps and moving straight to desired activist outcomes.
I want to do new work. Or, specifically, new work that isn’t particularly welcomed within the institutional structures of the humanities because it (a) incorporates what I learn from fields such as epistemology, computer science, and statistics but (b) is not pitched as a critique of epistemology, computer science, and statistics and (c) is aimed at audience for whom ‘humanists’ typically don’t write, i.e. audiences in those other fields, and more. Identifying with the humanities doesn’t get me any particular currency in other fields—for reasons highlighted in the items above—and…
… it doesn’t even get that many people who identify with the humanities much in terms of resources and support. Recalling item (1), there was a time when the humanities was a successful institutional category—when it could reliably fund professorships and research at a scale roughly commensurate with public interest in academic humanistic fields and the ambitions of humanities scholars. This is, to put it mildly, no longer the case. So I think we’re reaching a point—or have already reached a point, depending on how you see it—at which the returns of being a ‘humanist’ are so far diminished against the penalties for being a ‘humanist’ that it’s worth challenging the category. And the penalties are significant. Humanities scholars wouldn’t be lamenting the impact of neoliberalism, etc. if it weren’t clear that the term ‘humanities’ largely functions as a pejorative, or the butt of a joke about the overeducated and underemployed (whether there’s anything to it in reality or not, it persists), as a thing in perpetual crisis and decline. It’s comforting enough to tell the ‘they hate us ‘cause they fear us’ story, but the left isn’t exactly out in force standing up for the humanities, for all the purported social justice benefits. So I think it’s worth asking: Do we really need this label? Do we really need to organize ourselves and our institutions around it? That’s not the same as questioning whether any of the work we actually do day to day is worthwhile. I wouldn’t do what I do if I thought it was useless; I wouldn’t survive it. But to what extent do I—do you—need the humanities as a label, as a concept, as an institutional category, as a way of organizing knowledge, to do your best work?