KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 2.

Issue 2. of KindleReads from DragonWeb features five articles that tackle questions pertaining to liberal arts and humanities - four of them discuss the US scene, and one (in Hungarian) poses the problems we face in Hungary.

Table of Contents

- The Humanities, Done Digitally

- The Opening of the Academic Mind

- Why Liberal Arts Matter

- Debating the Value of College in America

- Mire jó a bölcsészet?

The Humanities, Done Digitally - The Digital Campus

By Kathleen Fitzpatrick

A few months back, I gave a lunchtime talk called "Digital Humanities: Singular or Plural?" My title was in part a weak joke driven primarily by brain exhaustion. As I sat at the computer putting together my remarks, which were intended to introduce the field, I'd initially decided to title them "What Is Digital Humanities?" But then I thought "What Is the Digital Humanities?" sounded better, and then I stared at the screen for a minute trying to decide if it should be "What Are the Digital Humanities?" And in my pre-coffee, underslept haze, I honestly couldn't tell which one was correct.

At first this was just a grammatical mixup, but at some point it occurred to me that it was actually a useful metaphor for something that's been going on in the field of late. Digital humanities has gained prominence in the last couple of years, in part because of the visibility given the field by the use of social media, particularly Twitter, at the Modern Language Association convention and other large scholarly meetings. But that prominence and visibility have also produced a fair bit of tension within the field—every "What is Digital Humanities?" panel aimed at explaining the field to other scholars winds up uncovering more differences of opinion among its practitioners. Sometimes those differences develop into tense debates about the borders of the field, and about who's in and who's out.

My first stab at trying to define digital humanities came in a post I wrote in July 2010 for The Chronicle's ProfHacker blog. In that post, I wrote that the digital humanities could be understood as "a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or, as is more true of my own work, ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies."

There is, however, a specific history to the term "digital humanities," detailed by my friend (and scholar of English) Matthew Kirschenbaum in a 2010 article in the Association of Departments of English Bulletin. In 2001 the field was known as "humanities computing," and had been around for some decades, when Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, three of its key practitioners, entered into discussions with Blackwell Publishing about editing a volume prospectively entitled "A Companion to Humanities Computing." Blackwell wanted a title that might appeal to a wider range of readers, and so proposed "A Companion to Digitized Humanities." Unsworth countered with "Digital Humanities," to keep the field from appearing to be about mere digitization. And the name has stuck, helping to characterize a robust area of research and teaching supported by a number of prestigious conferences, well-received journals, scholarly societies, and even a dedicated office within the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Digital humanities thus grows specifically out of an attempt to make "humanities computing," which sounded as though the emphasis lay on the technology, more palatable to humanists in general. The field's background in humanities computing typically, but far from exclusively, results in projects that focus on computing methods applicable to textual materials. Some of these projects have been editorial and archival in nature, producing large-scale digital text collections for scholarly study. One such project is the William Blake Archive, which presents carefully annotated scholarly editions of both the writing and visual art of the Romantic-era British poet. It is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rochester, and a division of the NEH.

Tools and technical standards to support the production of such archives have been another key source of digital-humanities work, including projects like the Text Encoding Initiative or the Text-Image Linking Environment. There are projects that focus on processing those large collections through a statistical analysis of a text's linguistic features, for example, or author-attribution studies or studies that rely on data mining. And there are initiatives that are designed to help digital-humanities archives and projects become interoperable and to facilitate the peer review of these projects.

Digital humanities as it is currently practiced isn't just located in literary-studies departments; the field is broadly humanities-based, and includes scholars in history, musicology, performance studies, media studies, and other fields that can benefit from bringing computing technologies to bear on traditional humanities materials.

However, when many of us hear the term "digital humanities" today, we take the referent to be not the specific subfield that grew out of humanities computing but rather the changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanist inquiry. Disciplines such as rhetoric and composition, for instance, have long been interested in the difference that the computer makes in contemporary writing and communication, as has digital-media studies.

It's clear that there's an overlap between these fields and that which has been called "digital humanities"—between scholars who use digital technologies in studying traditional humanities objects and those who use the methods of the contemporary humanities in studying digital objects—but clear differences lie between them. Those differences often produce significant tension, particularly between those who suggest that digital humanities should always be about making (whether making archives, tools, or new digital methods) and those who argue that it must expand to include interpreting.

The terms of this tension should begin to sound a bit familiar: It's an updated version of the theory-practice divide that has long existed in other quarters of the humanities. There has long been a separation, for instance, between studio artists and art historians, or between literary scholars and creative writers, and that separation can often lead to profound misunderstandings and miscommunications. In media studies, however, we've been reckoning with the theory-practice divide for some time. After much tension between media makers and media scholars, an increasing number of programs are bringing the two modes together in a rigorously theorized praxis, recognizing that the boundaries between the critical and the creative are arbitrary. In fact, the best scholarship is always creative, and the best production is always critically aware. The digital humanities seems another space within the academy where the divide between making and interpreting might be bridged in productive ways.

Does that mean we should throw open the floodgates and declare all forms of humanities scholarship that come into contact with the digital to be "digital humanities"? Should we expand the definition of the field to include, as I've heard it said several times, "every medievalist with a Web site"? Undoubtedly not: Just as there are scholars who write about film from perspectives that don't take into account the intellectual history of film studies, and thus are not considered part of the field, there are scholars who work with digital materials but who remain outside the traditions and assumptions of the digital humanities.

That fact doesn't diminish the usefulness of the debates about the borders of the digital humanities as a discipline, however. As Neil Fraistat, director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, pointed out in a recent talk at the University of Texas at Austin, these debates can be most productive if we understand them as a means of opening ourselves to the kinds of conversations that true interdisciplinarity can support. While disciplinarity is often institutionally useful, after all—allowing for the development of centers, departments, and tenure lines—it can also be turned against its adherents, restricting their movement and disciplining, literally, the knowledge they produce.

The state of things in digital humanities today rests in that creative tension, between those who've been in the field for a long time and those who are coming to it today, between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, between making and interpreting, between the field's history and its future. Scholarly work across the humanities, as in all academic fields, is increasingly being done digitally. The particular contribution of the digital humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do, as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the digital humanities, are allowed to remain plural.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is a professor of media studies at Pomona College and a contributor to The Chronicle's ProfHacker blog.

Source URL:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DigitalHumanitiesNow+%28Digital+Humanities+Now%29
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The Opening of the Academic Mind

How to rescue the professoriate from professionalization

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that's always in crisis. The academy is too distant from the concerns of everyday life, or else it's too politically engaged. The academy has become completely irrelevant, except for the fact that it's too relevant. We ought to be grateful to our universities for this. Academic wrongheadedness is one of the few things people across the political and cultural spectrum can agree upon.

One popular way of describing the failure of the contemporary academy is to complain that it no longer produces special things called "public intellectuals," so it is either a great relief or a rule-proving exception to read a blazingly sane take on the academy's troubles by one of the few professors who pretty safely deserves the term. Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas manages to do many things in four short essays—describe the changing self-conception of the university, identify the difficulties behind curricular reform, and analyze the anxieties of humanities professors. But the book's chief accomplishment is its insistence that what we take for academic crises are probably just academic problems, and they are ours to solve.

Menand is a dialectical thinker. He has inherited the wry historical sensibility that runs from William James and John Dewey through Lionel Trilling and Menand's strongest recent antecedent, Richard Rorty. This is to say that he understands that most new problems were once solutions to old problems. His new book suggests that contemporary higher education's biggest problem is professionalization. The academic department has become a guild, and, like any self-regulating bureaucracy, its errand is to replicate itself. To draw on an example close to Menand, who is both a member of Harvard's English department and an unfailingly interesting cultural critic at The New Yorker, the result is that "the university literature department is not especially well suited to the business of producing either interesting literary criticism or interesting literary critics." What it does well, of course, is produce good literature professors.

And this is precisely the issue: Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals, initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation. Professors worry that any general-education requirements, any attempt to make a college education seem relevant in a specific way, will be too "presentist" or "instrumentalist." They have been taught to think of their own work, which is accountable only to the internal standards of their profession, as something pure, something unrelated to the messy business of the world. But this belief itself was only ever dreamed up as a solution to different problems, and once we understand it as a matter of historical contingency, we shall presumably be better able to deal with its consequences.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the American college faced several obstacles. It was still largely in thrall to theological obligations, and scientists had to contort themselves to seem religiously legitimate. It was also watching its student base disappear to the newly emergent professional schools. The man responsible for the sweeping institutional reform that created the modern research university was Harvard President Charles William Eliot—"the greatest professionalizer in the history of higher education," Menand calls him in his Pulitzer Prize-winning intellectual history of pragmatist thought, The Metaphysical Club.

In the course of his 40-year tenure starting in 1869, Menand explains, Eliot became "identified with almost everything that distinguishes the modern research university from the antebellum college: the abandonment of the role of in loco parentis; the abolition of required coursework; the introduction of the elective system for undergraduates; the establishment of graduate schools with doctoral programs in the arts and sciences; and the emergence of pure and applied research as principal components of the university's mission." Eliot's most "original and revolutionary idea" was to require a college degree to enter professional school. This established the educational model that still obtains: liberalization first, then specialization. Universities assumed the role of credentializing professionals, and the professoriate was on the way to becoming a guild.

This transformation gave the professoriate a new autonomy, but at a price: If professors wanted academic freedom, insulation from the demands of the commercial marketplace, they had to start thinking of what they did in nonvocational terms—as the pursuit of specialized knowledge for its own sake. This self-conception helps to explain why the attempt to construct a general-education curriculum has been so fraught. General-education requirements are designed with the idea that there are some nonnegotiable ends to a college education—to provide, for example, the "social glue" that bonds disparate Americans to one another, or to generate productive minds for the purposes of Cold War defense—but professors have been socialized to believe that what they do can't be reduced to something so vulgar and utilitarian.

"The instinctive response of liberal educators is to pull up the drawbridge, to preserve college's separateness at any price," Menand writes. "But maybe purity is the disease." His point, and it is an important one, is that academics only believe that "the practical is the enemy of the true" because that was part of the bargain Eliot struck. But this misunderstands the original point of academic freedom. Eliot didn't promote academic professionalization because he thought that professors ought to have no truck with the wider world. He did it because he thought that if professors were answerable only to one another, and responsible for the perpetuation of their own system, they would produce better scholarship—scholarship held to its own standards, not the standards of the open market. But knowledge is important, in the end, not because it flatters the pretensions of its producers, but because it helps us achieve our purposes.

The ultimate problem is this: How do you create a system for the production of knowledge that is, on the one hand, rigorous and peer-reviewed and, on the other, committed to aims and obligations beyond its own survival? The professoriate itself is well aware of the dilemma, Menand observes, and has enthusiastically promoted what sounds like a solution: "interdisciplinarity." The hope is that if professors join in conversation with one another, they'll remember to be interesting to people outside their building.

Theoretically, this solves everything. The disciplines are still accountable only to themselves, but they're also engaged with something broader—i.e., other disciplines. They are still autonomous without being hermetic. Except that, Menand explains, interdisciplinarity finally does nothing to alter the ways in which the individual disciplines produce their professors. Rather than a therapy for academic neurosis, interdisciplinarity is in fact yet one more symptom of it. "Interdisciplinary anxiety," he writes, "is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into aimless subjectivism or eclecticism."

If Menand, whose print persona is ordinarily so unruffled, can seem a little frustrated about the academy's lack of clarity about this stuff, it's because he really does think that something is wrong. He concludes the book with a discussion of a study by two sociologists that shows how overwhelmingly center-left the politics of academics are. In the 2004 election, he notes, 95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush. This is sure to be taken up by the few remaining culture warriors as proof of the disloyalty of the American professoriate. But Menand, in the context of a book about the trade-offs of professionalization, reads the situation differently. The fault is not with the politics themselves; academics are usually careful to keep policy out of the classroom. It is with the homogeneity. The system is simply replicating itself too smoothly.

The Marketplace of Ideas is a diagnostic book, not a prescriptive one, and Menand's proposals for how we might invigorate the academic production of knowledge are added as afterthoughts. He thinks we ought to shorten the length of study required for graduate students; the fact that it takes three years to get a law degree and close to a decade to get a humanities doctorate, he writes, is just another symptom of professors' anxiety about the worth of their trade. We also ought to invite more applications from students who might not have self-selected as academic specialists. The notional aims of the academy—the lively and contentious production of new scholarship—would be better served by making academic boundaries more permeable rather than less.

But in the end, Menand's proposals, smart and coherent though they are, seem less important than the case study provided by his career. He has managed to stay accountable at once to his colleagues in English departments and to his audience of general readers, and he has pulled this off without sacrificing either rigor or range. Menand is proof that an academic can be a great prose stylist, and that a journalist doesn't have to be a dilettante—and that having a commitment to one community enriches one's contribution to the other. He makes it hard to take seriously the rhetoric of crisis, and helps us get on with the important business of creating the problems of the future.

Source URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2241555/pagenum/all/#p2
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Why liberal arts matter

By Michael S. Roth

Since I am now president of Wesleyan University, I guess we all got more than we bargained for.

My parents were part of a wave of Americans after World War II whose confidence in the future and belief in education helped create the greatest university sector in the world. Students from all walks of life began to have the chance to acquire a well-rounded education, and it was on this basis that Americans created a vibrant culture, a dynamic economy and a political system that (after many struggles) strove to make equality before the law a fundamental feature of public life.

A well-rounded education gave graduates more tools with which to solve problems, broader perspectives through which to see opportunities and a deeper capacity to build a more humane society.

In recent years university leaders in Asia, the Mideast and even Europe have sought to organize curricula more like those of our liberal art schools. How, they want to know, can we combine rigorous expectations of learning with the development of critical thinking and creativity that are the hallmarks of the best American colleges?

But in our own land we are running away from the promise of liberal education. We are frightened by economic competition, and many seem to have lost confidence in our ability to draw from the resources of a broadly based education. Instead, they hope that technical training or professional expertise on their own will somehow invigorate our culture and society.

Many seem to think that by narrowing our focus to just science and engineering, we will become more competitive. This is a serious mistake.

Our leaders in government, industry and academia should realize that they don't have to make a choice between the sciences and the rest of the liberal arts. Indeed, the sciences are a vital part of the liberal arts.

Students and professors aren't crossing departmental boundaries to be fashionably interdisciplinary. They join forces to address specific problems or in pursuit of particular opportunities.

Dr. Joseph J. Fins, a history-literature-philosophy major at Wesleyan, is now the E. William Davis, M.D., Jr. Professor of Medical Ethics and chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Joshua Boger, a philosophy and chemistry major at Wesleyan, founded the biotech chemistry company, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, to "transform the way serious diseases are treated."

Diana Farrell, an interdisciplinary social science major at Wesleyan, helped restructure the U.S. auto industry as a deputy director of the National Economic Council.

Government officials and academic administrators should realize that innovation in technology companies, automobile design, medicine or food production will not come only from isolated work in technical disciplines. Effective vaccine delivery programs, for example, require technical expertise, but they also require cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning.

Similarly, scholars in the humanities must recognize that some of the most interesting work in history, art and philosophy now involves the active participation of scientists. The growing field of animal studies, for example, brings together interpretative and analytic skills along with contemporary scientific research.

A pragmatic, broadly based education that encourages bold inquiry and regular self-reflection recognizes the increasingly porous borders among disciplines and departments.

Education isn't just an object that you use to get started in a career; education is a catalytic resource that continues to energize and shape your life. Education enhances your ability to develop new skills and capacities for connectivity that allow you to solve problems and seize opportunities.

I hope that parents across the country can still believe in this form of education as they attend graduation ceremonies across the country. America should not retreat to a narrow, technical education in hopes that it will make us tougher in global competition.

We should have confidence, as my parents did, that a broadly based, liberal education will help our young people lead lives of creative productivity, lives in which they can make meaning from and contribute to the world around them.

Source URL: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-21/opinion/roth.liberal.education_1_liberal-arts-sciences-colleges/3?_s=PM:OPINION
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Debating the Value of College in America

By Louis Menand

My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.

At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.

I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I assigned my new students the same readings I had assigned the old ones. I understood that the new students would not be as well prepared, but, out of faith or ego, I thought that I could tell them what they needed to know, and open up the texts for them. Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?”

I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

I could have answered the question in a different way. I could have said, “You’re reading these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” This reflects a different theory of college, a theory that runs like this: In a society that encourages its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being. College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing.

In performing this function, college also socializes. It takes people with disparate backgrounds and beliefs and brings them into line with mainstream norms of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored, but students have to master the accepted ways of doing things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It’s a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.

If you like the first theory, then it doesn’t matter which courses students take, or even what is taught in them, as long as they’re rigorous enough for the sorting mechanism to do its work. All that matters is the grades. If you prefer the second theory, then you might consider grades a useful instrument of positive or negative reinforcement, but the only thing that matters is what students actually learn. There is stuff that every adult ought to know, and college is the best delivery system for getting that stuff into people’s heads.

A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive.

It wasn’t always like this. Before 1945, élite private colleges like Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a privileged social class. Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five boys from Groton applied to Harvard. Four hundred and two were accepted. In 1932, Yale received thirteen hundred and thirty applications, and it admitted nine hundred and fifty-nine—an acceptance rate of seventy-two per cent. Almost a third of those who enrolled were sons of Yale graduates.

In 1948, through the exertions of people like James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, the Educational Testing Service went into business, and standardized testing (the S.A.T. and the A.C.T.) soon became the virtually universal method for picking out the most intelligent students in the high-school population, regardless of their family background, and getting them into the higher-education system. Conant regarded higher education as a limited social resource, and he wanted to make more strait the gate. Testing insured that only people who deserved to go to college did. The fact that Daddy went no longer sufficed. In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five per cent. By 1970, it was twenty per cent. Last year, thirty-five thousand students applied to Harvard, and the acceptance rate was six per cent.

Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year, partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally, and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford eighteen per cent.

But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since 1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.

There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.

If you are a Theory 1 person, you worry that, with so many Americans going to college, the bachelor’s degree is losing its meaning, and soon it will no longer operate as a reliable marker of productive potential. Increasing public investment in higher education with the goal of college for everyone—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. Education is about selection, not inclusion.

If you are friendly toward Theory 2, on the other hand, you worry that the competition for slots in top-tier colleges is warping educational priorities. You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes. The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges are much less expensive—the average tuition is $7,605—and there are also many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education, and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé. Education is about personal and intellectual growth, not about winning some race to the top.

It would be nice to conclude that, despite these anxieties, and given the somewhat contradictory goals that have been set for it, the American higher-education system is doing what Americans want it to do. College is broadly accessible: sixty-eight per cent of high-school graduates now go on to college (in 1980, only forty-nine per cent did), and employers continue to reward the credential, which means that there is still some selection going on. In 2008, the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only a high-school education, it was $31,283.

There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher education. Students all over the world want to come here, and some American universities, including N.Y.U. and Yale, are building campuses overseas. Higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better life. It is sometimes pointed out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts. It is unnecessary to point out that most of us are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it pretty emphatically.

“Academically Adrift” (Chicago; $25) was written by two sociologists, Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia). Almost a third of it, sixty-eight pages, is a methodological appendix, which should give the general reader a clue to what to expect. “Academically Adrift” is not a diatribe based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data, which is what books critical of American higher education often are. It’s a social-scientific attempt to determine whether students are learning what colleges claim to be teaching them—specifically, “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly.”

Arum and Roksa consider Theory 1 to be “overly cynical.” They believe that the job of the system is to teach people, not just to get them up the right educational ladders and down the right career chutes. They think that some people just aren’t capable of learning much at the college level. But they think that people who do go to college ought to be able to show something for the time and expense.

The authors decided that, despite a lot of rhetoric about accountability in higher education, no one seemed eager to carry out an assessment, so they did their own. They used a test known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or C.L.A. The test has three parts, though they use data from just one part, the “performance task.” Students are, for example, assigned to advise “an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed,” and are shown documents, such as news articles, an F.A.A. accident report, charts, and so on, and asked to write memos. The memos are graded for “critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing.”

The test was given to a group of more than two thousand freshmen in the fall of 2005, and again, to the same group, in the spring of 2007. Arum and Roksa say that forty-five per cent of the students showed no significant improvement, and they conclude that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

The study design raises a lot of questions, from the reasonableness of assessing learning growth after only three full semesters of college to the reliability of the C.L.A. itself. The obvious initial inference to make about a test that does not pick up a difference where you expect one is that it is not a very good test. And, even if the test does measure some skills accurately, the results say nothing about whether students have acquired any knowledge, or socially desirable attitudes, that they didn’t have before they entered college.

There are other reasons for skepticism. It’s generally thought (by their professors, anyway) that students make a developmental leap after sophomore year—although Arum and Roksa, in a follow-up study completed after their book was finished, determined that, after four years, thirty-six per cent of students still did not show significant improvement on the C.L.A. But what counts as significant in a statistical analysis is a function of where you set the bar. Alexander Astin, the dean of modern higher-education research, who is now an emeritus professor at U.C.L.A., published a sharp attack on Arum and Roksa’s methodology in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and, in particular, on the statistical basis for the claim that forty-five per cent of college students do not improve.

Even leaving the C.L.A. results aside, though, “Academically Adrift” makes a case for concern. Arum and Roksa argue that many students today perceive college as fundamentally a social experience. Students spend less time studying than they used to, for example. In 1961, students reported studying for an average of twenty-five hours a week; the average is now twelve to thirteen hours. More than a third of the students in Arum and Roksa’s study reported that they spent less than five hours a week studying. In a University of California survey, students reported spending thirteen hours a week on schoolwork and forty-three hours socializing and pursuing various forms of entertainment.

Few people are fully reliable reporters of time use. But if students are studying less it may be because the demands on them are fewer. Half the students in the study said that they had not taken a single course in the previous semester requiring more than twenty pages of writing. A third said that they had not taken a course requiring more than forty pages of reading a week. Arum and Roksa point out that professors have little incentive to make their courses more rigorous. Professors say that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and promotion decisions. It’s in professors’ interest, therefore, for their classes to be entertaining and their assignments not too onerous. They are not deluded: a study carried out back in the nineteen-nineties (by Alexander Astin, as it happens) found that faculty commitment to teaching is negatively correlated with compensation.

Still, Arum and Roksa believe that some things do make a difference. First of all, students who are better prepared academically for college not only do better when they get to college; they improve more markedly while they’re there. And students who take courses requiring them to write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty pages a week show greater improvement.

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though. The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

Neither Theory 1 nor Theory 2 really explains how the educational system works for these non-liberal-arts students. For them, college is basically a supplier of vocational preparation and a credentialling service. The theory that fits their situation—Theory 3—is that advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work.

Theory 3 explains the growth of the non-liberal education sector. As work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland Security. Close to fourteen times as many master’s degrees are given out every year as doctorates. When Barack Obama and Arne Duncan talk about how higher education is the key to the future of the American economy, this is the sector they have in mind. They are not talking about the liberal arts.

Still, students pursuing vocational degrees are almost always required to take some liberal-arts courses. Let’s say that you want a bachelor’s degree in Culinary Arts Management, with a Beverage Management major, from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Hmm. I might have taken a wrong turn in my education somewhere.) To get this degree, U.N.L.V. requires you to take two courses in English (Composition and World Literature), one course in philosophy, one course in either history or political science, courses in chemistry, mathematics, and economics, and two electives in the arts and humanities. If your professional goal is, let’s say, running the beverage service at the Bellagio, how much effort are you going to put into that class on World Literature?

This is where Professor X enters the picture. Professor X is the nom de guerre of a man who has spent more than ten years working evenings (his day job is with the government) as an adjunct instructor at “Pembrook,” a private four-year institution, and “Huron State,” a community college that is evidently public. The academic motivation of the students at these schools is utilitarian. Most of them are trying to get jobs—as registered nurses or state troopers, for example—that require a college degree, and they want one thing and one thing only from Professor X: a passing grade.

Professor X published an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about his experiences. David Brooks mentioned the piece in his Times column, and it provoked a small digital storm. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” (Viking; $25.95) is the book version. The author holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (he teaches composition and literature), and he writes in the style of mordant self-deprecation that is the approved M.F.A. mode for the memoir genre. He can be gratuitously snarky about his colleagues (though not about his students), but he’s smart and he’s generally good company. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” has the same kind of worm’s-eye charm as Stephen Akey’s “College” (1996), a story of undergraduate misadventures at Glassboro State College, though “College” is funnier.

Professor X has entwined his take on teaching with episodes in his personal life involving the purchase of a house he could not afford and subsequent marital tension. These parts of the book are too vague to be engaging. If you are going to go down the confessional path, you have to come across with the lurid details. We never find out where Professor X lives, what his wife does, what his kids are like, or much else about him. This is a writer who obviously enjoys the protection of a pseudonym. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is one of those books about higher education that are based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data (sort of like this review, actually), but the story is worth hearing.

Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps pushing them through the human-capital processor. They attend either because the degree is a job requirement or because they’ve been seduced by the siren song “college for everyone.” X considers the situation analogous to the real-estate bubble: Americans are being urged to invest in something they can’t afford and don’t need. Why should you have to pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper? To show that you can tough it out with Henry James? As Professor X sees it, this is a case of over-selection.

It’s also socially inefficient. The X-Man notes that half of all Americans who enter college never finish, that almost sixty per cent of students who enroll in two-year colleges need developmental (that is, remedial) courses, and that less than thirty per cent of faculty in American colleges are tenure-track. That last figure was supplied by the American Federation of Teachers, and it may be a little low, but it is undeniable that more than half the teaching in American colleges is done by contingent faculty (that is, adjuncts) like Professor X.

This does not mean, of course, that students would learn more if they were taught by tenured professors. Professor X is an adjunct, but he is also a dedicated teacher, and anyone reading his book will feel that his students respect this. He reprints a couple of course evaluations that sum up his situation in two nutshells:

Course was better than I thought. Before this I would of never voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a desire to pick one up and read. I really like [Professor X], this is why I took the course because I saw he was teaching it. He’s kind of enthusiastic about things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people, which helps make the three hours go by quicker.

Professor X blames this state of affairs on what he calls “postmodern modes of thought,” and on the fact that there are more women teaching in college, which has had “a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought.” He also takes some shots at the academic field of composition and rhetoric, which he regards as low on rigor and high on consciousness-raising. This all seems beside the point. Professor X’s own pedagogy is old-fashioned and his grading is strict (he once failed nine students in a class of fifteen)—and he hasn’t had much luck with his students, either.

When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like. Someone who has reached the age of eighteen or twenty and has never been a reader is not going to become a writer in fifteen weeks. On the other hand, it’s not a bad thing for such a person to see what caring about “things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people” looks like. A lot of teaching is modelling.

Professor X has published a follow-up essay, in The Atlantic, to promote the book. He’s on a mini-crusade to stem the flood of high-school graduates into colleges that require them to master a liberal-arts curriculum. He believes that students who aren’t ready for that kind of education should have the option of flat-out vocational training instead. They’re never going to know how to read Henry James; they’re never going to know how to write like Henry James. But why would they ever need to?

This is the tracking approach. You don’t wait twenty years for the system to sort people out, and you don’t waste resources on students who won’t benefit from an academically advanced curriculum. You make a judgment much earlier, as early as middle school, and designate certain students to follow an academic track, which gives them a liberal education, and the rest to follow a professional or vocational track. This is the way it was done for most of the history of higher education in the West. It is still the way it’s done in Britain, France, and Germany.

Until the twentieth century, that was the way it worked here, too. In the nineteenth century, a college degree was generally not required for admission to law school or medical school, and most law students and medical students did not bother to get one. Making college a prerequisite for professional school was possibly the most important reform ever made in American higher education. It raised the status of the professions, by making them harder to enter, and it saved the liberal-arts college from withering away. This is why liberal education is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the high-status professions. And this is what people in other parts of the world mean when they say they want American-style higher education. They want the liberal arts and sciences.

Assuming that these new books are right (not a fully warranted assumption), and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roksa believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated—their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected—and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.

If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.

These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.

This is why “Why did we have to buy this book?” was such a great question. The student who asked it was not complaining. He was trying to understand how the magic worked. I (a Theory 2 person) wonder whether students at that college are still asking it.

Source URL: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all
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Mire jó a bölcsészet?

Kovács András Bálint

A helyzet

A humán műveltség és a humán diszciplínák tudományos presztízsének csökkenése mára olyan méreteket öltött, hogy az alapjában rengetheti meg ennek a foglalkozási területnek a működését. Röpke ötven év alatt a társadalmi értékrendben a történeti alapú humán műveltség helyét átvették a természettudományos és mérnöki ismeretek, valamint a szórakoztatás. Lényegében egy olyan helyzettel állunk szemben, amelyben azt kell folyamatosan bizonyítani, hogy a bölcsészet nem haszontalan időtöltés. Nemrég olvastam egy francia pszichológus tollából egy cikket, amely amellett érvelt, hogy mégsem kéne beszüntetni az irodalomoktatást a gimnáziumokban. (Lásd Anne Reboul: La fiction, la narration et le développement de la rationalité, Institut des Sciences cognitives, Lyon.) A cikkből kiderül, hogy 2007-ben komolyan felvetődött az az ötlet a francia oktatási minisztériumban, hogy az irodalomoktatást fakultatívvá tegyék. Tíz évvel ezelőtt egy hasonló ötletet mindenki kinevetett volna, négy éve már érvelni kellett ellene. A folyamat nem ma kezdődött, gondoljunk csak arra, hogyan tűnt el ötven év alatt az általános görög-latin kultúra a társadalom művelt rétegeiből is, de mára vált olyan méretűvé, ami arra kényszerít, hogy föltegyük a kérdést: hogyan lehet elejét venni az egész világon terjedő korlátolt tudománypolitikai utilitarizmusnak, ami oda vezetett, hogy a jelenlegi angol kormány minden állami támogatást megvont a társadalom- és humán tudományok, valamint a művészeti területek egyetemi oktatásától. Ezeket az angol egyetemeknek mostantól a tandíjakból kell fenntartaniuk. Erre nem válasz az, hogy a „kultúra önérték". Erre csak olyan válasz adható, amely e barbár tudománypolitika számára is érthetővé teszi, hogy mire jó a bölcsészet. Mondhatjuk, hogy sajnálatos dolog, aminek tanúi vagyunk, de nem mondhatjuk, hogy nem kell róla tudomást venni. Kollégáimmal folytatott beszélgetéseim során három markáns véleménnyel találkoztam: 1) Minden elveszett, a bölcsészeti kultúra mint olyan lassú halálra van ítélve, amelynek első jeleit most tapasztaljuk. 2) Ez az egész nem így van, ez csak felületi változás, a bölcsészetet vissza kell zárni a maga elit köreibe, ahol ugyanúgy műveltetik, mint eddig. 3) A bölcsészet adaptálódhat ehhez a helyzethez anélkül, hogy beleveszne a puszta efemer funkcionalitásba.

A probléma

A hasznosság kérdése a bölcsészet vonatkozásában elsősorban mindig a politikával kapcsolatban merült föl. Az elmúlt negyven évben olyan foglalkozási ágak jöttek létre, elsősorban az amerikai bölcsészetben, amelyek a társadalmi és kulturális kérdésekkel való foglalkozást közvetlen ideológiakritikai és társadalmi alkalmazás szempontjából közelítik meg. Ezek lényegében mind a kulturális antropológia egyfajta konkrét kritikai, politikai alkalmazásai. Ezek a foglalkozások megnyitottak a bölcsészeten belül egy olyan irányt, amelynek társadalmi hasznossága már kétségtelen, tudományossága azonban nagyon is kétséges, hiszen alig leplezetten meghatározott politikai álláspontok alátámasztására szolgál, ennek révén azonban a klasszikus bölcsészeti tanulmányok közvetlen „haszontalansága" még jobban kiviláglik. Így a bölcsészet a „haszontalan tudományosság" (például ókortudomány, összehasonlító irodalomelmélet, esztétika, filozófiatörténet) és a „hasznos tudománytalanság" (média-, feminista-, nemi szerep- stb. tanulmányok), a látszólag önmagáért való metodológiai szigor és a nehezen hasznosítható tudástömeg, valamint a tudományosan nehezen megalapozható efemer funkcionalizmus között őrlődik.

Közben az elmúlt ötven évben a tudományos „termelés" és a felsőoktatás ipari méreteket öltött, és ez az ipari jelleg átterjedt a bölcsészeti termelésre is. A tudomány iparosodása szükségessé tette a termelés szabványosítását, kvantitatív és közvetlen hasznosság-alapú minősítését. A humán tudományosság művelését ugyanabba az ipari logikába kényszerítették bele, amelyben a természet- és mérnöki tudományok működnek, és amelynek a bölcsészettudományok nem vagy csak kis mértékben tudnak megfelelni. Ez volt az ára annak, hogy a humán tudományokat a társadalom továbbra is elfogadja tudománynak, és hogy a humán tudományok is ipari méretűre növekedhessenek, amit viszont maguk a bölcsészek is ambicionálnának, hiszen a tudományos mérce itt már ugyanúgy nemzetközi, mint a természettudományban.

Az ipari méretű termelést csak ipari méretű befektetéssel lehet feldolgozni, amire a bölcsészetnek is szüksége van, amennyiben a nemzeti területen kívül is szeretne releváns eredményeket elérni. Az ipari termelés azonban a piaci megrendelés, a marketing és a konkrét, kézzelfogható eredményekhez kötött projektlogikán alapul. A bölcsészetnek azt a paradoxont kell megoldania, hogy egy alapvetően a hagyományban legitimálódó tudáshalmazt és gondolkodásmódot, amely elsősorban nem a gyakorlati hasznosság, hanem egy hagyomány szabályai szerint épült föl, és célszerűsége magának a hagyománynak a megismerése és karbantartása, utilitárius szempontból is legitimálni kell. Vagy másképp fogalmazva a kérdést: „Hogyan lehet olyan tudástermelési rendszert előállítani, amely egyrészt szigorú és ellenőrzött, másrészt olyan célokat és kötelezettségeket követ, amelyek túlmutatnak a saját túlélésének feladatán?" (Lásd Gideon Lewis-Kraus: The Opening of the Academic Mind - How to rescue the professoriate from professionalization, 2010. jan. 17., slate.com.)

Ehhez újra kell definiálni azokat a szerepeket, amelyeket a bölcsészeti tudás ellát egy kultúrában. Ehhez három alapproblémával kell szembenéznünk, és tisztáznunk kell ezeket a „hasznosság", valamint a tudományos módszertan szempontjából.

Első probléma: A bölcsészek elsősorban gondolatokkal és azok megnyilvánulásaival - művészet, filozófia, nyelv, társadalmi intézmények, tárgyi kultúra, történelem -, leírásával és értelmezésével foglalkoznak. Az ezekről tett állítások értékének (amikor nem politikai ideológiák alátámasztását szolgálják) közvetlenül nézve semmilyen más mércéje nincs, mint az, hogy ezek az állítások mennyire képesek elterjedni az egyéb hasonló területen tett állítások között, és mennyire veszik át közöttük az irányító szerepet. A gondolatoknak elsősorban a gondolatokra van hatásuk. Másodsorban, és ezen keresztül, különféle pszichológiai és személyiségbeli tulajdonságok áttételével a viselkedésre, ezen keresztül pedig azokra a társadalmi érintkezési formákra és intézményekre, amelyek a viselkedésen alapulnak, és ezeknek az intézményeknek, érintkezési formáknak már lehetnek gazdasági, egészségügyi stb. hatásai. Az az út, ahogy a társadalomról és a kultúráról kialakított gondolkodás „hasznosul", nagyon hosszú; a gondolatok és azok konkrét hatásai közötti áttételek közvetlenül nehezen érzékelhetőek, és főleg, mai ismereteinkkel előre kismértékben tervezhető és nagymértékben kiszámíthatatlan módon működnek.

Második probléma: Társadalmi és kulturális területen nagyon nehéz biztos állításokat tenni, mivel nehéz elválasztani egymástól azt, ami van, attól, amiről csak gondoljuk, hogy van. Ez pedig nagyon egyszerűen abból következik, hogy a társadalomban és a kultúrában a legtöbb dolog csak azért van, mert sokan azt gondolják, hogy van. A szavakkal való cselekedetek nem megfoghatóak, mégis konkrétan érzékelhető hatásuk van. Egy műalkotás nem attól az, ami, hogy megfogható tárgy, hanem attól, hogy arról a tárgyról sokan azt gondolják, hogy műalkotás. Sokan erre a sajátos tényre vezetik vissza a természettudományok és a humán, illetve társadalomtudományok különbségét: ez utóbbiak nem tudnak elvonatkoztatni az emberi szándékoktól és értékektől, mert tárgyaik szándékoktól és értékektől függnek. Ha ezek megváltoznak, a tárgy is megváltozik, míg a vas atomszerkezete nem fog átváltozni az aranyéba attól, hogy ezt nagyon sokat szeretnék.

Harmadik probléma: Ma már nincs komoly ember, aki azt gondolná, hogy a konkrét társadalmi, morális és kulturális jelenségek valami Istentől adott vagy a természet által belénk drótozott esszenciák volnának. Többé-kevésbé mindenki elfogadja ezek kultúrafüggő, konstrukció-jellegét. Így viszont úgy tűnik, hogy a humán tudományokban keletkezett kategóriák esszencia nélküliek, még mondvacsináltságukban sem állandóak vagy általánosíthatóak. Ennek következtében a róluk szóló ismereteknek és értelmezések látszólag összehasonlíthatatlanok egymással, lehetetlen közös módszertant alkalmazni rájuk.

Úgy vélem, hogy a humán és társadalomtudományok fent felsorolt három alapproblémája nem vezet végzetesen a szubjektivizmus, a megítélhetetlenség és a megismerhetetlenség zsákutcájába, s ezért a bölcsészet nem egyszerű hagyományőrzés, amely lényegében a szórakozással egyenértékű kategória.

Abból, hogy a szellemi kultúra és annak konkrét hatásai között hosszú és kiszámíthatatlan átmenetek vannak, még nem következik, hogy ezek az átmenetek megismerhetetlenek. A kiszámíthatatlanság csak a nagyfokú komplexitásnak és a változékonyságnak a következménye, nem pedig az elvi kiismerhetetlenségnek. Ezek az átmenetek valahogy működnek, és ez a mód nem elvileg megmagyarázhatatlan, hanem csak rengeteg gyakorlati nehézségbe ütközik. A bölcsészet tehát nem varázslat vagy misztérium, hanem, többek között, ezeknek az áttételeknek a kutatása. A filozófia, az esztétika, a pszichológia legalapvetőbb kérdései ezekre az átmenetekre vonatkoznak. Az ezotériától épp az tudja megmenekíteni a bölcsészetet, hogy nyitott marad ezekre a kérdésekre, és nem zárkózik be az „önmagában való megértés" vagy a „végső dolgok megismerhetetlenségének" elvontságába. A kérdésfeltevés módjától függ, hogy ez a nyitottság megőrződik-e. Kant esztétikai kérdésfeltevéseinek máig mintaszerű volta abból adódik, hogy kategoriális elemzései nyitottak a szociológiai és a pszichológiai elemzésre.

Abból, hogy a kultúra és a társadalom tárgyai konstrukciók, nem következik, hogy ezek nem léteznek, hogy ezeket csupán a nyelv konstruálja, tehát az ezeket leíró fogalmaknak sem kell valami létezőre vonatkozniuk, és rájuk meg nem vonatkoznak ugyanazok a szabályok, amelyek bármely más kézzelfogható tárgyról szóló tudományos leírásra vonatkoznak. Ezek a létezők normák és gondolatok, amelyeket változatos kifejeződési formáikban (művészet, jog, filozófia, társadalmi intézmények) lehet tetten érni. Nem az a kérdés, hogy az ezekre vonatkozó kategóriáink társadalmi és kulturális konstrukciók-e. Evidensen azok. A kérdés az, hogy mi következik ebből. Az elmúlt harminc-negyven év posztstrukturalista humán tudománya megelégedett azzal a rutinszerű gyakorlattal, amely különféle módszerekkel kimutatta a nyugati elitkultúra „esszenciális" fogalmainak relativitását és ideológiai, történeti konstruáltságát. (Ahogy egy kedves kollegám mondta szellemesen: „Mi azzal foglalkozunk, hogy mi nincs.") Ez a kritikai magatartás fontos állomása volt a nyugati humán tudománynak, amelyet a hatvanas évekre már korlátolttá tett a felvilágosult racionalizmus populáris kultúrát semmibe vevő merev elitizmusa. Arra a kérdésre azonban ez a típusú gondolkodás már nem tud választ adni (mert föl sem teszi ezt a kérdést), hogy van-e a sokféle konstrukció mögött valami közös, amely megalapozza azt a tényt, hogy ezek mind emberi konstrukciók. (Tehát, hogy „mi van".) A bölcsészet feladata, hogy a végtelen kulturális diverzitást olyan esszenciális kategóriák segítségével próbálja megközelíteni, amelyek mind többet tudnak megmagyarázni ebből a diverzitásból, még ha nem tudják is visszavezetni ezeket kevés számú átfogó törvényszerűségre. A doktriner antiesszencializmus ugyanolyan terméketlen, mint a doktriner esszencializmus. A humán és társadalomtudomány kategóriáinak általános érvényűsége olyan kérdés, amelyet nem lehet előítéletek alapján eldönteni. A tudomány abban a pillanatban áll meg, amikor az egymásból következő kérdések beleütköznek a „megismerhetetlen", az „összehasonlíthatatlan" vagy a „felfoghatatlan" falába. Ebből következően nemcsak a történeti filológia szigorú szabályainak kell megfelelni, hanem lehetőleg olyan kérdéseket is kell föltenni, amelyek nyitottak más tudományterületek magyarázóelvei előtt, és átfordíthatók ezek hipotéziseire. A bölcsészet nemcsak akkor hasznos, ha politikusok és ideológusok hivatkozni tudnak az „eredményeikre", hanem akkor is, ha más tudományterületek önmaguk számára is értelmes kérdésfeltevéseket találnak bennük.

A természettudományos elméletek sem alkotnak egyetlen zárt homogén rendszert, ahogy a bölcsészeti teóriák sem. De ebből nem az következik - mint ahogy ezt a posztmodern „tudomány" megpróbálta elhitetni -, hogy a természettudományok is csak „szövegelnek", hanem az, hogy a bölcsészeknek sincs megengedve, hogy „csak szövegeljenek". Az elméletek eszközök. Nem az a cél, hogy egyetlen átfogó elmélet létezzen, hanem az, hogy az elméletek egy pontosan meghatározott perspektívából magyarázatot és ne csak szubjektív értelmezést adjanak egy jelenségről.

A humán tudományok alapvetően olyanok, mint a többi. Nem elvileg, hanem csak gyakorlatilag különböznek a természettudományoktól. Problémáik valóságosak, elvileg megválaszolhatóak és nem a misztérium vagy az egyéni vélemény körébe tartoznak. A bölcsészet nem retorikus véleménymondás, hanem az emberi gondolkodás önreflexiója. A gondolatokra, valamint az emberi együttélésre vonatkozó folyamatosan változó normaképzés - művészet, filozófia, jog, történelem, nyelv - gyakorlata és magyarázata. Be kell látnunk, hogy ez ma iparszerűen működik. Ennek az iparszerű működésnek a szabványait kell úgy kialakítani, hogy az alkalmazkodva a gyakorlati különbségekhez, ne az autógyártásra vagy a marketingre hasonlítson, de a minősége mégis megbízhatóan megítélhető legyen. Csak így tudjuk elérni, hogy a humán tudomány értékét ne pillanatnyi gyakorlati hasznosságával vagy politikai következményeivel mérjék, hanem úgy, ahogy az igazából hat: a gondolatok erejének mércéjével.

Source URL: http://www.es.hu/kovacs_andras_balint;mire_jo_a_bolcseszet;2011-04-06.html
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KindleReads from DragonWeb - Issue 2.

http://www.dragonweb.hu/projektek/e-konyv/#kindlereads

June 9, 2011

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