Less verbigeration, more talking to teenagers

There is no shortage of arguments for preserving the liberal arts. A sampling of recent and prominent ones includes Gregory Petsko’s open letter to the President of SUNY-Albany, where several humanities departments will soon be folding; Eva von Dassow’s speech to the U. of Minnesota regents; Martha Nussbaum’s argument for privileging human development over economic development in educational efforts; and Louis Menand’s account of how humanities professors have turned their disciplines into professions, rather than into vehicles for developing transformative ideas. At National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson proves that it’s not just politically liberal professors who think the liberal arts need to survive, defending the humanities’ central position in preserving cultural heritage.

All of these arguments are as excellent. They are also almost completely beside the point.

It’s true that to save departments that do not graduate future millionaires or produce patentable research, defenders of the humanities need to take their case to university administrators, boards of regents, state legislators, and the general public. At their best, the above examples attempt to convince these groups. At their worst, they are mere catechesis, attempting to convince people like me who already believe.

This is why it is at least as important to convince 16-to-19-year olds, recent veterans, and community-college students. In other words, people who don’t have the power to authorize the creation or destruction of academic departments but who, simply by majoring in liberal-arts disciplines in larger numbers, would become the most compelling case to maintain and even increase support for these fields. If Nussbaum or Petsko could show that students at run-of-the-mill public universities were clamoring to study Classics or literature, then it becomes much easier to make the case to the legislature that these programs need support.

I will have much more to say about this in the future, and I’d love to hear your evaluation of the kind of pro-liberal-arts argument we typically see. For now, I want to concentrate on the failings of one particular argument (conveniently, the shortest).

Of the arguments mentioned above, von Dassow’s is boldest, addressing actual university decision-makers and calling them to task for their misplaced priorities. I am confident, though, that no regent was moved by von Dassow’s appeal. Not because the regents are so in thrall to the corporate model of the university that they cannot appreciate any alternative vision of education. Rather, because her tone is bitter and sarcastic. She lectures the regents, and she does so in the condescending manner that academic rivals sometimes adopt in conference presentations. Call it an occupational hazard. But if she lectures to her students with the same tone, then they probably can’t stand her, seriously diminishing her effectiveness as a teacher. Similarly, her compelling indictment of the university is lost amid an icy barrage of ten-dollar words.

I am reasonably well-educated, and I had to look up “etiolated” and “verbigeration.” She says “verbigeration” with considerable relish – the sour kind – as if to drive home the point, “You are corporate functionaries; I am a genius.  I know more five-syllable words in six different dead languages than you, monolingualists, do in a living one. Who are you to judge whether my job is worth doing?”

Von Dassow is certainly doing worthy research. It is probably fair to say that no one else on earth understands as well as she does certain aspects of civilizations quite alien to us. For that reason alone, she and others like her should have the opportunity to continue their research with adequate support. But the tone of her speech probably made more than one regent think, “Do we really need a Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies?”