2015/10/28 by Stefan Collini
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #University Challenges and Reforms #Digital Humanities and Scholarship
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtv029
The humanities form a relatively small part of the modern research university, but they bulk very large in all discussions about the ‘idea’ or ‘purpose’ or ‘future’ of universities. This may not simply be because those who dilate on these matters are drawn disproportionately from humanities disciplines. It may also be because the discourse about the humanities has become a locus (and in some respects a placeholder) for wider anxieties about changing relations between culture and democracy, and between society and economy, as well as anxieties about the potentially damaging effects of professionalization and specialization. These anxieties have real objects as well as, like all anxieties, their exaggerated or phantasmatic features, and it is not always easy to distinguish between them. It is certainly true that, if we are to talk intelligently about the future of higher education in the twenty-first century, then we are seriously in need of a vocabulary and conceptual framework that challenge the ritualistic invocation of economic ‘growth’ as though that were a sufficient, or even a wholly intelligible, human end. Reflecting on the character of what we value about the humanities can often look to be the most easily available way to generate such a vocabulary.