For those of us working in the humanities it is, as Charles Dickens once said, the best of times and the worst of times. The digital revolution has unleashed a range of cultural changes that are in many ways far more radical than the ones generated by the invention of the printing press over five hundred years ago, and they have made their presence felt far more swiftly. The advent of new technologies and the new forms of textual community they enable have, in turn, cast earlier technologies of writing in a new light by helping to expose many of the assumptions that had, until the last couple of decades, been so thoroughly naturalized that they resisted analysis. But if these changes have shaken up our most entrenched assumptions in critically exciting ways, it is equally true that it is hard to think of a time when the humanities were so badly besieged on any number of levels, the most serious of which has been a jarring shift in student numbers and research-funding priorities towards market-driven forms of applied knowledge. At times, the discussion can get pretty gloomy. As one former President of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff, put it in an article entitled “Crisis in the Humanities,” “one of our most common genres today is the epitaph for the humanities.” Google the phrase “crisis in the humanities” and (.27 seconds later) the search generates “about 339,000 results.”
Fortunately, in the past couple of years talk of “crisis” seems to have begun to give way to more constructive discussions about how best to respond to the pressures that face humanities teaching and research. It’s not that the picture has gotten sunnier. Numbers are still down and research funding remains at an all-time low. But a crisis mentality is rarely conducive to the sort of genuinely creative thinking that these kinds of problems demand. Samuel Johnson may have overrated the tendency of imminent execution to clarify the mind. The humanities aren’t facing execution any time soon. Even with sagging enrolments, the number of humanities majors around the world is at a level that would have been unthinkable not that many decades ago. But it is also true that these pressures have intensified the need to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, about their potential benefits to contemporary life, and about how our programs can best to structured in order to meet these challenges. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society – its various pasts and its possible futures – and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must be situated.
A conference on The Future of the PhD in the Humanities that took place at McGill University last May offered a compelling example of precisely this sort of discussion. One thing that immediately became clear to those of us who attended was just how high the enthusiasm level was. We had gathered there from across the country because we felt an urgent need to ask hard questions about PhD programs in the humanities and to try to tackle problems that people were raising, but the atmosphere was buoyant. And because most of us who attended were wearing two hats, being both academics and administrators of one kind or another, there was an unusual combination of “big ideas” thinking and practical concerns about the nuts-and bolts side of how to get to where we need to be.
Most of us left Montreal feeling like we had been part of the beginning of something important rather than having brought anything to a close. People felt that a follow-up conference one year later would be crucial in order to keep our feet to the fire and to sustain the momentum that we had generated there. We didn’t want it to be another feel-good occasion whose potential for real change quickly dissipates as we fanned back out across the country and buried ourselves in the e-mails that had been accumulating in our in-boxes.
This follow-up conference will be held here at Carleton University on May 17-18. Four of us are organizing it (John Osborne, Susan Whitney, Dominique Marshall, and myself), but it has also been developed in collaboration with the organizers of the McGill event, as well as with related organizations such as SSHRC, CAGS, and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It will feature many of the leading voices in these debates from across the country, though like last year, the real emphasis will be on the larger discussions these presentations generate.
We have organized the program around the three main issues that emerged at the McGill conference. The first is the practical question of the structure of doctoral programs. Given that the bulk of most students’ funding packages run out after their third year, are there better ways to design them? Does it make sense to front-load programs with so much course work and comprehensive exams that students have no realistic hope of getting close to tackling their thesis until the point when their funding is about to expire? But at the same time, what are the trade-offs to any changes?
A related issue is the challenge of preparing our students for the wide range of non-academic career paths that the vast majority of them will pursue. This task involves two changes. One is training. We know that humanities students develop skills that are highly valued outside of the academy but we do a poor job of preparing them to convey these strengths in ways that potential employers appreciate. But the more difficult challenge may lie in changing the culture within universities so that non-academic career paths do not seem like an inferior option.
Then there is the larger question of how we might do a more effective job of articulating the public value of the humanities to audiences within and outside of the university. Given the emphasis on applied knowledge these days, it is more important than ever that we manage to communicate why the kind of work we do matters within the broader context of larger social issues.
One of the key factors that helped to make last year’s conference such a success was the active participation of a strong group of graduate students from across the country. Like last year, we will be hosting a one-day mini-conference for grad students only on the day before (May 16th), which will lead into the main conference on the two following days. We would love to have any and all interested doctoral students participate.
For more information, visit the conference website at (https://carleton.ca/phdhums/) for links that will enable you to register and see the program. There is no charge but we’re asking people to register so that we have a sense of numbers. We hope that you can join us in May!
Paul Keen is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs. His current book project, which is forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan, is entitled The Humanities In A Utilitarian Age: Imagining What We Know, 1800-1850.