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This post elaborates on an idea I wrote about last week, namely that framing the intellectual work of the humanities as a service to others (other people, other disciplines, other causes) might free us from the current bind of fixating, either positively or negatively, on the uselessness of the humanities. The word “service” might sound sacrilegious, but humanities scholarship—as interested as it is in the arts—is not itself art, so why should it have the privilege (I almost typed the ‘luxury’) of uselessness accorded to the arts?

Let’s not even raise the issue of university funding and employment. Let’s talk about the marketplace of ideas. Great ideas are not only intellectually sound, but they are, in the academic parlance, “productive.” That is, they break new ground, provoke debate, suggest further areas of study, and even reanimate fields that have gone fallow. Come to think of it, great ideas often may not be bulletproof, but they still possess the power to create something of a cottage industry across different disciplines. (See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.)

The truth is, although humanities scholars tend to be allergic to the word “useful,” the currency in this economy has an undeniable use-value (valuable, as Marx defines it, “only in its use”). In fact, academics are trained to spell out the use-value of their ideas to interested audiences. This work entails describing the state of their research area(s) to date; explaining how their particular intervention promises to shake things up; and then suggesting further questions for others to tackle, in light of their contribution. In this way, an academic publication doesn’t aim to be the last word on a topic, but an invitation to engagement.

This consideration brings us closer to what I mean about putting humanities “to service,” although commonly scholars generally think primarily about serving colleagues in their field or related disciplines. What does it look like when the humanities are put in service of “outsiders”? Here are the examples that I promised in my last post: (more…)

This promises to be a long post, so let me get straight to the punch line here and explain that the text below is my attempt to get out of the intellectual stalemate in the debate on the humanities by reframing the conversation not in terms of use, but of service. If this is your kind of thing, read on: (more…)

Freakonomics’ Stephen J. Dubner recently did a two-part podcast on the true value of a college education. While part 1 gives convincing evidence for a strong correlation between one’s health, wealth, and level of education, part 2 takes a much harder look at the economic costs of a university education and, intriguingly, tries to get a handle on exactly what students learn when they go off to college. As someone who has been thinking about this question for the good part of a decade, I get tired of hearing the old chestnut that college “teaches people how to think.” It’s lazy and vague, and frankly, I can’t see how that would persuade people to fork out increasingly higher tuitions for their children’s education if they themselves haven’t had a transformative college experience. For this reason, I really appreciated how Dubner pushed his guests to spell out what they themselves got out of their college experiences, and what they hoped would stay with their students long after they’ve earned their degrees.

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