By
Michael Bérubé
Monday,
April 7, 2014 8:00 EDT
Last
week, Adam Weinstein asked on Gawker: Where Is the Humanities’ Neil deGrasse
Tyson? Coming on the heels of Nick Kristof’s badly-framed and much-derided call
for professors to speak more broadly and openly to nonacademic audiences (as if
we don’t already do that, every chance we get), Weinstein’s question was easy
to misframe and deride. Also, it was on Gawker, so it was all the more tempting
for academics to dismiss, as if it were a “which obscure humanist are you?”
quiz on Buzzfeed.
But
it’s a very good question, and Weinstein asked it as someone who believes in
the humanities. Laments about the decline of the humanities are one of the few
growth areas in the American intellectual economy, so why shouldn’t there be a
“Cosmos”-like show devoted to explaining what’s been going on in the humanities
for the past thirty years, and why it matters?
And
it’s not about undergraduate enrollments, or high school, or grade school.
Tyson happens to be entirely right about who needs shows like “Cosmos”:
The challenge has been adults… All the adults are saying, “We need to improve science in the world. Let’s train the kids.” I’ve never heard an adult say, “We need more science in the world. Train me.” I’ve never heard an adult say that. It’s the adults that need the science literacy, the kind of literacy that can transform the nation practically overnight.
But
the same argument could be made, a fortiori, about the humanities– on behalf of
all the people who don’t use sentences with “a fortiori” in them. The humanities
are, after all, about human cultures and histories; and in recent years, they
have also been about the boundaries of the human (in relation to animals,
artificial intelligence, and the ecosphere) and facets of being human that had
long been underacknowledged (in queer theory and disability studies and the
medical humanities). It’s really quite fascinating stuff, and I don’t say this
because I’m a humanities professor. Quite the contrary: I became a humanities
professor because this material is really quite fascinating stuff.
