Willard McCarty in Humanist drew our attention to the Anthony Grafton article, “Britain: The disgrace of the universities” (New York Review of
Books) about “what is happening now to British universities, King’s College London in particular”.
Accept the short term as your standard—support only what students want to study right now and outside agencies want to fund right now—and you lose the future. The subjects and methods that will matter most in twenty years are often the ones that nobody values very much right now. Slow scholarship—like Slow Food—is deeper and richer and more nourishing than the fast stuff. But it takes longer to make, and to do it properly, you have to employ eccentric people who insist on doing things their way. The British used to know that, but now they’ve streaked by us on the way to the other extreme.
It seems we are passing some threshold like the boiling frog. In the humanities we got used to being slowly starved in a genteel fashion that left us keep some dignity like the frog in slowly heated water. The drama in the UK and elsewhere, where cuts are deep and vicious, should provoke us to think about the humanities and its defense. In humanities computing we smugly feel immune to the cuts as we are the “newest new thing” that shouldn’t get cut, but we could find ourselves alone, without the vital neighboring fields like paleography, philology, and philosophy that we depend on. Actually, I don’t think we are any longer the new new thing – we just pretend to be so out of habit. Perhaps we should start preparing to be the tired recent thing that can be discarded to make room for the newest new thing.
How then to make the case for the humanities when we have so little experience advertising our wares and so much distaste for marketing? Are we doomed by our very fastidiousness and critical stance?