Humanities Professors and Their Institutions Need a Divorce

Or a really good couples therapist

Photo by Michael Olsen on Unsplash

I was raised in the church, and although I am now a card-carrying humanist I am still a sucker for parables. Here is one that I often told first-year students to explain what it meant to claim their education rather than to receive it. A young man sought out a wise man to ask him how to find the truth. The young man found the sage standing near a river. When the old man heard the young man’s question, he seized him by the neck and plunged his head beneath the water. The young man struggled until he was free and spluttered, “Why on earth did you try to drown me?” The wise man said, “When you fight for truth the way you just fought for breath, you will find it.” 

I thought of this parable recently while reading “The Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life.” Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey describe a course they designed to guide students through major life decisions. By setting a model for rational discourse with Plato’s “Gorgias” and (presumably) Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Storey and Silber Storey help students weigh a variety of choices about how to define happiness. The authors argue that people who reason toward their choices live more purposeful lives than those who follow predetermined pathways or rely upon “some mysterious voice within” to choose a life path.

The parable of the wise man at the river and the course on the art of choosing share a similar premise: No one simply receives knowledge from teachers shrink-wrapped and whole. The wise man at the river doesn’t define wisdom for the young man seeking it, he merely sets the terms for that search. Likewise, Storey and Silber Storey don’t define happiness for their students, they lay out a smorgasbord of options and provide a method for reasoning toward a personal definition of what it means to be fulfilled.

This all seems benign enough until one recognizes that “The Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life” is another plea to save the liberal arts—and, more specifically, the humanities. To wit, the concluding paragraph is riddled with imperative language.  

Colleges should self-consciously prioritize initiating students into a culture of rational reflection on how to live, and this intention should be evident in their mission statements, convocation addresses, faculty hiring and promotion, and curriculums. Doing so will hold them accountable for performing their proper work: helping young people learn to give reasons for the choices that shape their lives and to reflect about the ends they pursue. For that art of choosing is what their students most need — and what liberal education, rightly understood, was meant to impart.

The authors are arguing against something, but they are too polite to say what it is. The essay is a very cautious jeremiad that avoids the fire and brimstone about colleges abandoning their liberal arts values and focuses more on the call to grace found in Plato and Aquinas. But you can hear the brimstone smoldering in that last paragraph, can’t you?

Both authors appear to be thriving at Furman University, a private liberal arts university in South Carolina. Both are professors of Politics and International Affairs, and Storey is an endowed chair. They have also coauthored a book presumably inspired by the course they co-teach (or vice versa). Yet their final paragraph nettles me, because I can’t tell if the authors feel that their own institution is drifting away from what liberal education was meant to impart or if they feel that their institution is an exemplar for others.

Either way, the argument frustrates me with its impotence. It represents the futility of trying to defend the arts and humanities on moral grounds in an environment defined by economic power. Colleges and universities are obsessed with their market share and with shaping students into market-friendly molds. This is not a climate of “moral agnosticism,” as Storey and Silber Storey claim. It is a climate in which money is the dominant moral principle. 

Willa Cather more courageously states the problem in her 1923 essay, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” where she excoriates the “ugly crest of materialism” that threatens to transform the University of Nebraska, “that fine institution,” into a “gigantic trade school.” She rightly notes that it’s a question of power: “The men who control its [the university’s] destiny, the regents and the lawmakers, wish their sons and daughters to study machines, mercantile processes, ‘the principles of business’; everything that has to do with the game of getting on in the world—and nothing else. The classics, the humanities, are having their dark hour. They are in eclipse.” 

The only way for a humanities course on the examined life to make a persuasive case for itself within the contemporary university is to commodify or quantify its benefits, a fundamentally ridiculous exercise. Storey and Silber Storey allude to the mental health crisis on college campuses. Can they prove that their course has directly reduced rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide? Can they demonstrate, more than anecdotally, that students who have completed their course enjoy a higher return on investment in their college education? Is there a demonstrable demand for this course that will ensure robust enrollments every year? How do they know for sure that students do not suffer greater despondency after considering that they live in a culture that has largely abandoned rational discourse? 

The humanities are nearly impossible to defend within the corporate university because the benefits they offer are variable and not expressible in economic terms. Investing in a course on the art of choosing one’s life path requires faith in outcomes that will be personal, largely private, and unpredictable. In “The Land Ethic” (1949), Aldo Leopold laments a similar futility in defending plant and animal species as having inherent worth within a “conservation system based wholly on economic motives.” Just as white cedar, tamarack, cypress, and other tree species were scorned by “economic-minded foresters” in the early twentieth century because they functioned poorly as timber crops, so the humanities are increasingly sidelined for being irrelevant to the economic ideology of the university or directly obstructive of it. Foresters have learned the hard way that replacing diverse timber stands with tree monocultures is a recipe for disease and catastrophic wildfire. Universities might need to feel the absence of the humanities in some dire way to understand their benefits, which are often as elusive as the web of ecological relationships.

What Storey and Silber Storey do not say as full-throatedly as they might (though they suggest it in their final paragraph) is that the kind of course they describe can only be reliably offered if the faculty teaching it feel valued by their institution, compensated fairly, and secure in their future as faculty members. In a climate where tenure lines are increasingly replaced by adjunct or lecturer positions and resources are slashed or reallocated, the case for the liberal arts as a means to happiness feels either naive or embarrassingly quaint. 

Faculty proposing courses featuring thinkers like Plato and Aquinas increasingly face backlash from students, as well. See the “Reedies Against Racism,” who protested a traditional course in Western Civilization in 2020. In the current student climate, it is not at all clear that reviving the classics is the way to win back ground for the humanities. Mark Bauerlein argued as much just a few months ago with the cringe-worthy conclusion that “humanities instructors need to make the humanities great again.” Bauerlein claimed that humanities faculty “[N]eed to stand up and declare, ‘If you don’t know the story of Dido and Aeneas, the last eight minutes of Götterdämmerung, what happened at Dunkirk, the First Amendment, how Malcolm Little changed in prison … you are a deprived individual.’” Take that.

The students protesting the Western canon do not consider themselves ignorant. They are woke, they are deeply suspicious of the rationalist tradition, and they see what Bauerlein tried to do there with Malcolm X. And a trustee bestride the budget that rules the university is more likely to yawn than to flinch at being called “a deprived individual.” Storey and Silber Storey make a better argument than Bauerlein’s, but they really propose something similar: that there is value in the rational Western tradition that ought to be revived, doubled down upon, and embraced…because it’s good for everyone. The rub lies in that universal evangelistic claim.

Here’s the thing. Learning the art of choosing was good for me, personally. I was able to choose my future freely because college was made affordable for me by federal grants and the privilege of a good summer job with the U.S. Forest Service. This made it possible for me to abandon plans for a career in stenography and instead pursue a life that, if not always defined by happiness, has proved immeasurably more meaningful. And I would prefer to live in a society where more of my neighbors and fellow citizens participated in Socratic discourse. But can I insist that a culture of rational reflection is the singular reason for college, or that the experiences that struck me so hard and so true are also necessary for everyone else?  

The economic stakes are much higher for students today than they were for many of us fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ago. It is difficult to practice the art of choosing with ultimate freedom if you’re deeply concerned about a lifetime of debt. Am I prepared to say that the examined life, as defined by a college curriculum, is so inherently priceless that students should be prepared to sacrifice their future wealth upon its altar? 

The liberal arts tradition is not to blame for student debt, but so long as a university education requires crippling financial obligations, the institution will always see producing earners as a higher priority than producing thinkers. Humanities professors can do little to lower the cost of a university education, and so they find themselves on fragile footing when mounting moral arguments about their discipline, even though the moral arguments might be the right ones, the only honest defense of a tradition devoted to craft, knowledge, and pleasure. 

In a previous essay, I compared higher education to corporations and communist governments. To conclude, I offer a different metaphor: an imperfect one, but perhaps instructive if one can suspend the inevitable associations with polygamy. 

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Humanities professors and their institutions are like spouses who once enjoyed a marriage of mutual respect, where the financial wellbeing of the household coexisted happily with personal passions and convictions that did not necessarily add to the family’s wealth, but immeasurably improved the family’s quality of life. Attending church, backcountry camping, and growing flowers might have placed more strain on family finances than they alleviated, but in those happier days both spouses recognized that a healthy marriage required choosing carefully when to make economic arguments against things that either partner valued highly. 

Professors like Storey and Silber Storey now find themselves advocating for values they care deeply about with an institutional partner who either begrudgingly supports them or directly denigrates them: I’m not making any more donations to that church; We can’t afford a new tent; Potting soil costs too much, and your flowers are luxuries anyway. 

Every family has to weather financial stress, and times of scarcity strain marriages when partners can’t agree on what the priorities ought to be. If one parent believes that a faith community, experiencing wilderness, or living with beauty is one of life’s basic needs, and the other parent does not, then there will be no convincing the children that braving mosquitoes and stinging nettles to sleep under the stars is good for them.

Like Storey and Silber Storey, I believe that students come to college with a purpose-shaped void and that meaningful education should help them explore not merely what they can do with their lives, but also why. But I have lost my faith that many institutional partners will support that kind of education, promote it as part of their core mission, and stand behind it even if it requires more resources than it can demonstrably produce. If the authors have found that kind of support at their university, I am happy for them. But they are astoundingly out of touch if they believe that their rationale can reach most executives. Consider, for instance, that the president of Temple University has recently compared the state of higher education to a burning oil platform, proposing that a college curriculum should be revised every year to adapt to market pressures.

I spent many years explaining to colleagues and students why it is good for everyone to be exposed to literature or creative writing (or lab science or mathematics or data analytics) even if they are not naturally inclined in that direction. For many of those years I felt like a hectoring parent trying to impart moral principles that my spouse either declined to support or actively undermined. 

I admire my colleagues who are still trying to make their institutional marriages work, but I am more like the spouse who left because of irreconcilable differences and who wastes little energy now trying to convince others that they should care about growing flowers if they do not already. Should someone ever want to learn about the varieties I prefer, the cultural stories associated with them, what flowering things contribute to local ecology, or the reasons why tending my plants brings meaning to my life, they can find me in my garden. If they do not feel the absence of flowers in their life, I’ll do my best not to accuse them of being a philistine. 

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