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CUR Focus
John Churchill
Secretary, The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Posters on the Hill Address
“How Frugal is the Chariot That Bears the Human Soul”
Welcome to this luncheon briefing on Undergraduate
Research in the Humanities. I am John Churchill,
Secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and it is my privilege today to convene and to moderate this session. I am
joined by four colleagues, who are or were undergraduate
students from colleges and universities of varying types,
who have devoted themselves to research projects in
humanities disciplines.
Let me introduce them.
Sarah Fuller, of Bridgewater State College, who has
explored the women’s suffrage movement in revealing
microcosm;
Mary Caulfield of the College of the Holy Cross, from
whom we will hear about the ancient historian Josephus
in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic;
Sada Hotovy, of the University of Nebraska, Kearney,
who has examined a handwritten notebook of Carl
Sandburg’s; and
T’Sey-Haye M. Preaster, of Smith College, whose work on
black women and philanthropy has taken her into the
history of the National Association of Colored Women’s
Clubs.
It is their work we most want to hear about, and I will
yield to them swiftly. But let me give you context. Their
work represents research in the humanities. We are all
used to hearing about research in the sciences, and the
benefits of undergraduate research in the sciences are
widely known and well understood. But the humanities? What are the humanities anyway? Or is it what is
the humanities? Why are the humanities worthwhile?
What is the point of asking undergraduate students to do
research in the humanities? Why should we, as a nation,
be interested enough in this work to urge our congressional leaders to fund it from the public purse?
The humanities are getting a lot of attention at the
moment because a confluence of factors has placed
these essential studies in special jeopardy. The Council
of Independent Colleges just completed a Symposium
on the Future of the Humanities. Cornell President
David Skorton has taken a strong leadership role in
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humanities advocacy. The current issue of the AAC&U’s
Liberal Education contains a striking message from Carol
Schneider and a powerful essay on the humanities
by Martha Nell Smith of the University of Maryland,
College Park. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
is spearheading a new national commission on the
humanities, answering a bipartisan call from members
of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Phi Beta Kappa and the American Council of Academic
Deans will be convening a conference in a few months to
examine these issues. The rise in the level of conversation
is heartening.
But the budget issues before the country are dire. They
are dire even if they have in part been manufactured by
our reluctance to face reality as we think about our collective responsibility for those of us who are old or sick,
our lapses in regulating the financial industry, our failure
to create an equitable system of taxation, our inability
to restrain the influence of special corporate interests,
and our over-reaching on the world stage. The issues
are real and dire, but they also provide the occasion for
special targeting of disfavored programs by those who
mistrust the humanities. In this situation, which recurs
with sad predictability, we must affirm that the reasons
why some have misgivings about the humanities are the
very reasons why a vibrant democracy must have them,
and support them, even--perhaps especially--in times of
stringency.
The humanities are unsettling. They encourage questions. They encourage investigation. “What does that
mean? Why think that’s true? What were those people
trying to do and why? Tell me what you think and what
you’ve discovered and I’ll tell you what I think and then
we’ll sort through and see what we have.” Disciplines
that proceed like this don’t create societies of docile uniformity.
These disciplines engender discovery, deliberation, and
diversity. That is their value. They ask questions. They
dispute received answers. They teach argumentation.
As long ago as Plato you can see the worry expressed:
Won’t people who are trained like this just pull and tear
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that the unique contribution of the humanities may be
to help us to resist an over-reliance on quantifiable data.
She reminded us that it is neither weakness nor ignorance
that brings down the tragic hero, but strength itself,
and the search for understanding, itself. It takes wisdom
tempered with irony to wrap your mind around that.
“Our technical skills,” she said, “allow us to execute what
we lack the wisdom to evaluate.” If we are to find the
wisdom, only the critical, argumentative study of what
humans have done can help us: the humanities.
Congressman Mo Brooks listens to Jose Andres Roman, the University of
Alabama- Birmingham, explain his research on “Delayed Administration
of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Chemically-Functionalized with
Polyethylene Glycol Promote Tissue Repair in a Rat Model of Spinal
Cord Injury.”
at everything? The responding point, though, also contained in Plato, is that this process in addition teaches
the pursuit of what is good, and true, and lovely.
I owe to Martha Nell Smith a reminder that Emily
Dickinson, in one of her most famous stanzas, approaches this question using the metaphor of travel laden with
exploration and pursuit:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing PoetryThis Traverse may the poorest take
Without offense of Toll-How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
We’re going somewhere, not just messing about, and
where we are going is connected with what in us is best
and most worthy of cultivation. The trip is good in itself;
it makes us better versions of ourselves; it has side effects
that make us more professionally and vocationally successful in life; and it helps to make us better citizens of a
participatory democracy. Choose the argument you like
best: they all work. The metaphorical travel that is the
study of the humanities does these things.
In a recent symposium sponsored by the Council of
Independent Colleges, Georgia Nugent, classics scholar
and president of Kenyon College, honored, as we all
must, our commitment to the sciences, but suggested
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Should the government support this kind of study?
No less a free market icon than Adam Smith thought
that government had to support education. (It’s in the
Wealth of Nations: you can look it up.) The framers of the
American nation thought so: Adams, Jefferson, Franklin,
on it goes. The far-sighted legislators of 1964 who drafted
the language that created the National Endowments for
the Arts and for the Humanities thought so. Their phrases
are stirring: I commend them to you on the NEH Web
site.
Listen to Emily Dickinson again: “How frugal is the
Chariot/That bears the Human Soul.” We are not, in
the Grand Scheme, talking about a lot of money here.
The NEH has been starved and skimped on for decades.
It operates now at 40% of its proven capacity--even less
if you adjust for population growth since that high tide
in--can you imagine--1979! We have let these critically
important, inexpensive studies languish in a crossfire of
suspicion, to the detriment of our national health. The
programs that have suffered most are the research programs, the very ones that sustain the activity at the core
of the humanities’ value.
Do you care that our public discourse is uncivil? That it
is fraught with misconceptions and bogus arguments?
That the culture of deliberation--reason-giving, examination of premises, searching for the grounds of one’s own
opinions--has so little impact in our political life? These
are lapses of national responsibility, one of whose primary symptoms is the lapse in support for the humanities.
Critical thinking, sympathetic imagination, contribution
to the survival of the experiment of popular democracy,
the exultation of the human spirit: that’s what’s at stake
in the humanities. That’s what you will see in the work
of these scholars, done as undergraduates. I will now let
them speak for themselves.
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