“What Are You Doing Here?”
HFA Symposium Keynote
April 16, 2014
Kate McCarthy
Comparative Religion and Humanities
The title of my talk tonight is a simple, un-ironic question: “What are you doing here?” It’s a real
question. If you are in this room tonight, you are either a student committed to and good at work in the
arts and humanities, or you are a faculty member who has mentored such a student, or you are a family
member who has provided loving support (and probably many bank transfers), or you are a friend who
has accompanied a student through one of those late-night “I just can’t look at this project for another
minute” crises of confidence. These investments all suggest that we are a roomful of people who
believe in the value of the arts and humanities. But this is not supposed to be the case.
Most of the students presenting their work this evening are part of the No Child Left Behind generation,
who were taught to the tests, whose schools gutted their art and music and creative writing programs as
they fought for fewer and fewer crumbs of public funding. Their generation is supposed to be good only
at filling in answer bubbles and making pretty PowerPoint presentations. And yet they are here tonight
talking to us about such things as Sartrean freedom, divinity and monstrosity in art, and reconciling the
digital/physical divide. How did this happen?
As a supporter of the arts and humanities, you cannot have escaped in the past year or so widespread
reports of their demise. An October New York Times headline declared “As Interest Fades in the
Humanities, Colleges Worry,” and another in December warned “Humanities Studies under Strain
around the Globe.” The Huffington Post predicted in August 2012 “The Looming Arts Crisis in Higher
Education” while the New Republic got our attention last July with its restrained headline “The Decline
of the Humanities—and Civilization.” That same month, the Wall Street Journal, moving from analysis to
accountability, asked “Who Ruined the Humanities?” It’s a wonder any of us sleep at night.
While these hand-wringing reports do present a sobering picture of undergraduate interest in and
national support for the humane sector of higher education, the reality may not justify the recent
histrionics. First of all, while it is true that between 1966 and 2010 degrees in the humanities fell from
14% to 7% of the total number of bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally (Harvard University Arts and
Humanities Division 2013), most of that decline occurred in the 1970s following a high peak in the
1960s. In truth, as two history professors writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out, if we
apply a slightly longer time frame, say from the 1940s, what we really see is a period of “large scale
fluctuation with a bubble in the middle.” In fact, they note, a larger proportion of the student
population is studying in humanities fields today than did so until that bubble decade of the 1960s
(Grafton and Grossman 2013). What’s more, if fewer students are opting to major in these disciplines
since the 1960s, it may be the result of wider social changes that aren’t all that bad. Heidi Tworek
proposes, for instance, that the decline in humanities degrees is in large part a product of women
broadening their academic choices beginning in the 1970s, opting more for the pre-professional fields
for which they were historically deemed unsuitable (2013). I have a hard time generating much anguish
over that.
1
So perhaps we should all just relax. In their own take on the supposed crisis in the arts and humanities,
English professors Paul Jay and Gerald Graf argue in an Inside Higher Ed essay that humanists should be
done already with what they call our “ritualized lamentation” for the field. But is lamentation perhaps
called for?
The Book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible opens with these lines:
How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!
How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations!
She who was a queen among the provinces has now become a slave.
We may not be Jerusalem laid waste by the Babylonians, but some of us on this side of the campus can
surely relate. Many of our HFA departments are ghosts of what they were when I arrived here twenty
years ago. We have lost faculty and majors in depressing numbers. And as the university begins to
emerge from a period of unprecedented reduction in public funding, the new normal seems to define
the value of college education in language that most of us were never taught to speak.
My colleagues know that the campus has recently begun the process of renewing the university’s
academic plan. As a first step in that process, all campus stakeholders—faculty, staff, students, and
administrators—were invited to participate in a series of “possibility conversations” at which groups of
us brainstormed our visions for the future of education at Chico State, what obstacles we face, and how
we might overcome them. Summaries of those 61 conversations were recently made available to us,
and I spent some time last week combing through the 250-page report. Here are a few
recommendations that emerged from one of those conversations (Academic Plan Committee 2014, 2327):
• Redefine the inward looking academy to think more like a business.…
• We need to be industry driven….
• Industry needs to be a part of the university; they should be integrated and should have the
ability to vote to keep them engaged….
• Eliminate General Education.…
• Do not provide limited staff resources to support degree paths that do not align with the state’s
workforce needs.
Let the lamentation begin. We are mostly insulated from comments like these here in the PAC and in
Trinity and Siskiyou Halls. But these are the thoughts of our colleagues here on a college campus. What
must they be saying in corporate lunchrooms and on talk radio and in legislative conference rooms?
While the big numbers might not evidence a national crisis in arts and humanities enrollments, we
clearly face at least a perception problem: How on earth do studies of literature, art, philosophy,
religion, language, music, and theatre align with the state’s workforce needs? In other words, what are
we doing here?
Lamentations emerge in a religious context of desolation and grief crying out for help to a god who has
absconded. Ritualizing the anguish in poetry and song allows the stricken to clarify what has happened,
and why, and why it matters, and what must be done. Perhaps the keening for our academic traditions
serves a similar purpose.
The defenses of the arts and humanities that emerge from these laments can usually be sorted into two
types: the humanist-as-utility-player argument and the high-minded-humanist argument. The first finds
2
our salvation in the transferrable skills that one acquires in the course of a liberal arts education. You
may have been studying 18th century British literature, but what you were really learning, unlike your
business major roommate, was how to read difficult texts, how to write cogent paragraphs, how to sort
good arguments from bad, how to apply theories to new contexts; all of which will give you an enviable
edge as project manager for that software company or account rep for that medical devices firm or any
of the other six or seven careers you are likely to pursue over the next forty or fifty years. This argument
tends to work well with parents. The second argument disdains the notion of utility and insists that the
arts and humanities have their own intrinsic worth, that your charge is nothing less than the
preservation of civilization and that to ask about questions of practical value is akin to selling out. This
argument is sometimes heard among students whose loans have not yet come due.
But these two arguments, of course, present a false choice. I have never met a student who decided to
major in comparative religion or history because it would teach him how to craft a sharp business
memo, or in art or music because it would make her a creative problem solver on a marketing team,
though these are no doubt common outcomes. And I certainly know of many who, at some point, after
deflecting the awkward question from relatives and peers for years, have finally asked of an advisor,
“Um, really, what can I do with this degree?” The question of utility must be raised, and yet the love of
the thing for its own sake—the play, the poem, the idea—must be honored. To insist that the arts and
humanities are not for profit, as Martha Nussbaum does in her book of that title (2010), is not to say
that they lack utility, but to specify the kind of utility to which they should aim. The work of this college,
the kind that we will hear shortly, should not be conceived of as the luxury of elites, or as a diverting
pastime that must be put away when you put on your grown-up shoes.
The real value of the arts and humanities, and the measure by which we should judge our allegiance to
them, lies, I think, in pleasure. Not cheap, plastic, sitcom pleasure but the genuine and sustained bliss
that comes, eventually, when hard thinking meets real feeling. I think of poet Audre Lorde's essay on the
erotic, which she understands not as the pornographic, or even necessarily the sexual, but as the deep
resource within each of us, the capacity for joy, found, she writes, "in the way my body stretches to
music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also
opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem,
or examining an idea" (1984, 56-57). And this is not a private or passive pleasure but a creative and
subversive one, because it makes us demand such satisfaction in all areas of life. She writes:
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms
of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional
components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its
erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a
travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we
love. (55)
Having pursued the arts and humanities here, I hope you students find, will transform your work—
whatever it is or becomes—from a travesty of necessities to something integral to your deepest desires,
keeping you whole and affording you critical distance on that profit-driven system. Will your degrees
get you all jobs in the fields you have studied? Probably not directly or immediately. Are they therefore
not practical or useful? Hardly.
And if this deep pleasure makes you want to safeguard the place of these disciplines in the academy—
the courses that make you read whole books and watch whole plays and figure out your own place in
3
relation to centuries of arguments about what is true and good and beautiful—then I really hope you
are in it for the long haul. Because you will have to deal with politicians who say that those who want to
study non-careerist subjects should all just go to private schools (Kiley 2013). And federal proposals that
call for the elimination of all support for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Endowment for the Arts (Stratford 2014). And cities that invest millions of public dollars in sports arenas
while symphonies and museums close up shop (Easterbrook 2013). To take deep pleasure in the arts
and humanities is not then a luxury but an act of resistance in a society that would reduce us to
compliant producers, consumers, and branded products. It should not be surprising, therefore, that so
many of tonight’s presentations pay attention to and seek to understand more complex and less visible
identities: those of sexual minorities, those who live in two cultures, those who are disabled, those who
rebelled.
We have evidence tonight in these presentations that the arts and humanities are alive and well here,
that our college will continue to find its usefulness in this work of attention and complication. Therefore
do not lament. Rather enjoy, deeply, the subversive pleasure of this work.
4
References
Academic Plan Committee, California State University, Chico. 2014. “Possibility Conversation Reports.”
http://www.csuchico.edu/futurepossibilities/documents/compilation_of_61_possibility_conversatio
n_reports.pdf.
Easterbrook, Gregg. 2013. The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Grafton, Anthony T. and James Grossman. 2013. “The Humanities in Dubious Battle: What the Harvard
Report Doesn’t Tell Us.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 12).
(https://chronicle.com/article/TheHumanities-in-Dubious/140047/.
Harvard University Arts and Humanities Division. 2013. “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at
Harvard College: Mapping the Future.”
http://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/files/humanities/files/mapping_the_future_31_may_201
3.pdf
Kiley, Kevin. 2013. "Another Liberal Arts Critic." Inside Higher Ed (January 30).
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/30/north-carolina-governor-joins-chorusrepublicans-critical-liberal-arts#sthash.0fyvIU13.dpbs.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches,
53-59. New York: Random House.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Stratford, Michael. 2014. “Higher Ed Cuts in GOP Budget.” Inside Higher Ed (April 2).
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/02/ryan-budget-calls-cuts-pell-grant-eliminationneh#sthash.WbhTFWw8.dpbs.
Tworek, Heidi. 2013. “The Real Reason the Humanities Are ‘In Crisis.’” The Atlantic (December 18).
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-real-reason-the-humanities-are-incrisis/282441/.
5