The Humanities: What Future?

Abstract

Higher education in Australia is in a period of crisis and transition. While COVID-related events and their impacts have made it difficult for all areas of university academic endeavour, among the hardest hit have been humanities. Drawing on live interviews with professors in a range of humanities disciplines, the paper elucidates various elements of the crisis, which includes a summary of the impacts of the last three decades’ rise in neoliberalist imperatives within the university sector. The paper then argues that a robust defence of the humanities needs to be made and uses literary studies as its focus. Today, we are more in need of the humanities than ever. But this is a complex undertaking as research in higher education and live interviews reveal; the dictates of measurement, accountability, and questions of value within the humanities remain vexed; and while the aims and requirements of humanities studies may be at odds with neoliberalist demands and corporatisation, the humanities themselves may also be contributing to their own demise. Therefore, I offer future directions: I argue for the urgent need for the humanities to reinvigorate their ethical and critical functions, the need to demonstrate the connections between the humanities and wellbeing, the imperative to slow down and to eradicate the over-casualisation of academia, and the necessity for the humanities to articulate more clearly their connections with employment outcomes for a dynamic and evolving future.

1. Introduction

With the emergence of what some academics argue is a ‘university-as-spreadsheet’ model of administration, including a structure of bureaucracy and new administrative procedures and positions (Brooks and Melik 2020; Ginsberg 2011), the virtual overnight disappearance of face-to-face education on account of global lockdowns, and the removal of academic staff members due to redundancies (Littleton and Stanford 2021), it is safe to say that many universities are in crisis. Adding to this crisis is a reduction in subjects, courses, programs, and departments—along with the amalgamation of departments, schools, and faculties. Furthermore, the pandemic itself seems to have provided an opportune moment for institutions and governments to initiate strategies and public policy interventions to further rationalise, consolidate, and restructure universities in the name of efficiency. Higher education institutions in democratic countries worldwide have been subject to neoliberalist rationalisation measures for at least three decades, trends which have accelerated both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The question, now, is whether such efficiency is detrimental to the long-term impact of a university education and results in reduced public benefit.

There is a crisis in higher education—that much is clear. However, analysing its multifaceted nature, factors, and causes, and how we might move out of it, is not so clear. And, while recent COVID-19-related events and their impacts have made it difficult for all areas of university academic endeavour, among the hardest hit have been the humanities. Despite what appears to be an exceptionally grim situation, I refuse to subscribe to an attitude of institutional fatalism. While the regional focus of this paper is largely Australian, it draws on experiences in the UK and the US. I consider the ideas and previous projections of leading scholars and practitioners in the humanities and the arts, including literature, philosophy, and musicology disciplines. In this paper, I also discuss psychoanalysis, which is a therapeutic practice and vocation, but it is also an intellectual framework that is taught within literature, philosophy, and critical theory more broadly.

Here, I quote liberally from unpublished live interviews that were conducted in 2014 and 2015 with professors in a range of humanities disciplines. These professors include Steven Connor and Marina Warner (English), Maria Nikolajeva (children’s literature and education), Raimond Gaita (philosophy), and June Boyce-Tillman (music), as well as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. I contextualise some of their responses in relation to the scholarship on the current state of the humanities. Now, several years on, many of the issues presented are still astonishingly pressing and salient. I start this paper by defining the humanities and elucidating on the various elements of the present crisis, which includes a summary of the impacts of the last three decades’ rise in neoliberalist imperatives within the university sector. Identifying the nature of this crisis is a complex venture: the dictates of measurement, accountability, and questions of value within the humanities remain vexed, and while the aims and requirements of humanities studies may be at odds with neoliberalist demands and corporatisation, the humanities themselves may also be contributing to their own demise. This demise may in part be the result of the increasingly dominant role played by certain kinds of identity politics within universities, specifically the humanities departments. I argue that a robust defence of the humanities needs to be made—yes, again. Today, in the age of ‘post-truth’ and political polarisation, we are more in need than ever of what the humanities can offer us. In this paper, I present future directions: arguing for the urgent need for the humanities to reinvigorate their ethical and critical functions, the need to demonstrate the connections between the humanities and wellbeing, the imperative to slow down and to eradicate the over-casualisation of academia, and the necessity for the humanities to articulate more clearly their connections with employment outcomes for a dynamic and evolving future. Such ways forward emphasise a move away from a neoliberalist philosophy of efficiency and competition, towards more collective and collaborative approaches.

While this paper paints a picture of both the challenges and future paths for humanities; it probes further into bigger questions such as the following: Are the humanities in need of defending—or is their time up? Who is responsible for the state and fate of the humanities: is it the academy itself, university managers, or, indeed, governments? While entertaining different points of view and a variety of responses to these questions, I hope to offer a way forward into the twenty-first century classroom. While I aim to refer to the humanities in broad terms, as this paper is being written by a literary studies scholar, the examples I give are invariably from the literary studies context.

2. Just What Are the Humanities, Anyway?

In this paper, I use the term ‘humanities’—commonly understood to be the study of human expression and culture—though I acknowledge that this term is not without its problems. Helen Small (2013, p. 4) defines the humanities as the ‘study of the meaning-making practices of human culture [past and present], focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation’, and individual response ‘with an indispensable element of subjectivity’. She is quick to acknowledge the slipperiness of her definition but is emphatic that it is the element of judgement, rather than scientific-positivistic thought, that is at the heart of humanistic study. Small (2013, p. 4) describes the humanities as a ‘mostly American’ term that developed in the 1940s and 1950s in response to a scientific push for knowledge.

Humanities is a word that is ambiguous and contentious; it is one which overlaps with ‘the arts’ and ‘the liberal arts’. In Australia, the humanities are grouped together with the ‘social sciences.’ For Simon During (2014), the humanities are fast becoming a ‘meta-discipline’, as its component parts are difficult to group together such that they cannot ’be defended by reference to a single practice or even a set of practices, a single value, or set of values’. He states that the humanities are

a loosely-linked conglomeration of practices, interests, comportments, personae, offices, moods, purposes, and values and … the very settings in which these practices are interests and so on inhabit … Humanities are distinct from other worlds, from the worlds of science, sports, business … even if they … overlap with these worlds.

(During 2020)

The latter notion that the humanities cannot be evaluated like the sciences, sports, or business link back to the classical distinction between Ars and Scientia (art and science).1

Steven Connor is the Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and the Humanities at Cambridge University and Professor of English at Cambridge University. He is the author of many books and articles on literary criticism, culture, and phenomenology. In my interview with him, Connor (2014) confesses that:

I actually sort of don’t believe “the humanities” exists. There’s undoubtedly a whole lot of practices—ways of thinking, ways of writing, ways of teaching, ways of talking—that get called “the humanities” and I’m not saying that none of them exist. I just don’t think that there really is anything that binds those practices together.

So, while in agreement with During on the disparate nature of the humanities, Connor takes the position further by casting doubt on the existence of a single rubric that can encompass what is often held together within the definition of ‘the humanities’, going so far as to say that there is an ‘arrogance, really, contained in the name’. He explains that, in Britain, the word has not been used in a ‘very long time’ and that the term ‘‘arts’ was used’, which itself was a ‘very silly name’ as ‘it’s not at all clear in what sense … you can really call philosophy an art, or history an art, or it’s only in a very sort of classical kind of sense’. Connor also notes that the term ‘the humanities’ is American in origin and that it is linked with the need to name funding bodies and research centres. Connor concludes that the ‘claim in the humanities somehow that the humanities are the repository and the safeguard of the human … [is] absurd’. For Connor, the category of the humanities is a political one, with Collini (2017, p. 225) concurring that it is ‘chiefly an organizational or classifying term … and that we do better to speak of individual disciplines rather than use the category’.

Despite the conflicted and imperfect nature of the term humanities, its widespread use, particularly in Australia, makes it a useful one to describe the constellation of disciplines that are referenced by universities, Commonwealth grant programs, and the advocacy body the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Further, the term humanities is more of a heuristic device to hold the disparate group of disciplines together for the purposes of exploring the impact to these disciplines in the current context.

3. Crisis

3.1. Marketisation

The topic of the humanities being in crisis is not new. For example in Culture and Anarchy (Arnold [1889] 1994), Matthew Arnold argued for the authoritative power of ‘culture’,2 which would transcend political, religious, or social divisions, as a solution to the political confusion, crises, and riots of his time (see Rothblatt 1997; Birch 2008). Gerald Gaff believed that Arnold ‘established the categories and the grammar through which we think about cultural crises’(Gaff qtd. in Donoghue 2008, p. 20).

Today, scholars such as Stefan Collini (2017) argue that the ‘issue’ with the humanities, in part, concerns the university itself—that, within the last two decades, and with the rise in neoliberal models and priorities, we have lost a sense of what universities are. In his Speaking of Universities, Collini observes the surge in the number of universities in the UK which have an emphasis on business models; he also notes the impact of globalisation. Collini argues that, with the expanding and internationalising student populations, universities have lost their sense of purpose and increasingly feel the need to articulate their value. Universities are being run in a corporate model, with systems of accountability and high levels of managerialism. In a previous book, What Are Universities For?, Collini (2012, p. 87) points out that

Whatever the reality of the experience of actually attending one of today’s semi-marketized, employment-oriented institutions, there remains a strong and popular desire that they should, at their best, incarnate a set of “aspirations and ideals” that go beyond any form of economic return.

This notion that there is a ‘non-economic’ return-on-investment for education can be traced back to Victorian ideals about the university, the origins of which informed the English education system and the modern university. This history is well explored in Sheldon Rothblatt’s work, as well as the study of Victorian education in Dinah Birch’s (2008) Our Victorian Education. Collini (2012) notes that universities are ‘a problem for governments, in market democracies … where there is an overreliance on ‘individualistic and economic pressures’’. In the end, ‘[t]he tension between the two imperatives (the market) and (disinterested scholarship) is unresolved’. It appears that the humanities, too, sit within this tension—perhaps even more so as their market value is more difficult to define in real terms and their inheritance of Victorian ideals surrounding the non-utilitarian nature of a liberal arts education still persists. Moreover, in the humanities at least, university research and learning encourages the study and exploration into many modes and ways of being; this knowledge can often challenge outright market logic.

Universities in the US and the UK have also been subject to strong neoliberalist trends. In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Donoghue 2008), US academic Frank Donoghue adds his own searing critique of the corporatisation of universities, their reduction in faculty, and the decline in tenure. He argues that universities have become consumed with the superficial notions of prestige, and it is the humanities that suffer the most in this scenario. James Côté and Anton Allahah similarly identify the loss of many universities’ missions and thus focus on reaffirming liberal ideals in their book, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (Allahar and Côté 2011). In The Marketplace of Ideas, Louis Menand (2010) recognises that, behind the rhetoric of anti-instrumentalism, there is a response to large structural and political changes in the university and in its relationship with the wider public culture.

It is clear from these studies that government mindsets and economic values have become increasingly at odds with the philosophical underpinnings of the university and with what universities are meant for or expected to do: on the one hand, to offer experiences which go beyond ‘economic return’ in a climate where financial support for universities providing non-economic returns on students’ education is dwindling.

In The Idea of An Australian University, Glyn Davis (2017), former Vice Chancellor of Melbourne University, argues that due to the withdrawal of public funding, universities need to focus on developing markets, diversity, and attracting international students. In her book, Academic Life and Labour in the New Universities: Hope and Other Choices, Ruth Barcan (2016) offers another Australian perspective: while considerably more ‘hopeful’ in tone than previous analyses, Barcan is attuned to the paradox of the institutional massification and marketisation of education; while perceiving advantages to opening up universities to wider cohorts, she portends that academics must respond to changing technologies and adapt to the times.

3.2. Politicisation

In a global context, different universities are subject to varying and specific political pressures. According to Henry Giroux, crises in universities in America have political roots. Giroux’s book University in Chains: Confronting the Military–Industrial Academic Complex, (2016) examines the attacks on higher education through what he believes to be the chilling militarisation and corporatisation of US universities since 9/11. Giroux (2016) sees the university sphere in America as dominated by right-wing military influences, which undermine criticality, democratic ideals, and possibility for public debate. An outcome of a disinvestment in universities, argues Giroux, is the chipping away of civil society as well as freedoms and democratic rights.3

In her book Not for Profit, Martha Nussbaum (2010) offers a scathing assessment of the ‘silent crisis’ of the stripping away of funding from the humanities education, which is eroding the soul of the humanities as well as democratic culture. She calls the reduction in funding for the humanities ‘a cancer’ which is ‘damaging to the future of democratic self-government’ and ‘a world crisis in education’ (Nussbaum 2010, pp. 1–2). Nussbaum (2010) emphasises the importance of skills like argumentation that a liberal education prepares students for, along with cultivating the imagination to dream up more ethical futures, while Collini (2012, p. 98) finds Nussbaum’s critique problematic, describing it as coming ‘perilously close’ to suggesting that respect and tolerance for others comes from studying the ‘great books”; furthermore, in stating that ‘disciplined free play of the mind over a given topic that is at the heart of scholarly and scientific enquiry is principally a cognitive achievement, not a moral one,’ Small argues that Nussbaum’s is ‘the most polemical form of the ‘democracy needs us’ argument’ and, while noting the important evidence made for access—equity in education—she also remains somewhat sceptical as to this argument’s proponents’ ability to mount a credible defence for the humanities (Collini 2012, p. 98; Small 2013, pp. 127–32). It is my belief that any move, political or otherwise, to reduce discussion, debate, and dissent within universities is clearly an anti-democratic one; thus, the links between humanistic inquiry and a healthy democracy are not as tenuous as some critics of Nussbaum like to claim.

3.3. Bureaucratisation

Many of the most powerful critiques on the structural and bureaucratic changes in universities and the humanities departments over the past 30 years have come from American academics. As early as 1996, in his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings laments the way in which universities had lost a sense of their role and function in the era of globalisation. Though they previously played a role within the nation-state, Readings argues that universities have now collapsed into for-profit, corporatised institutions that are obsessed with ‘excellence’ and ‘outputs’ and, in so doing, have lost a sense of their intrinsic value. In his book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, Benjamin Ginsberg (2011, p. 2) bemoans the rise of ‘deans, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants—who more and more direct the operations of every school.’ Academic staff are beset with bureaucracy and ‘administrative blight’ (Ginsberg 2011, p. ix). Ginsberg (2011) criticises what he perceives to be the bulldozing effect of administrators and administrative procedures entering university structures, wherein input, management, and vision of the faculty are not part of the plan. This phenomenon is clearly visible in Australian universities today, even more so during and after the pandemic.

4. Defending the Humanities

It is my belief that the humanities need to be defended and they require a clear articulation of their aims, importance, and impact, especially today. There are several works which focus specifically on the fate and future of the humanities within the university and, in so doing, offer a robust defence for the humanities by focusing on values or a return to either liberalism or pragmatic solutions. Scholars Simon During and Ronan McDonald are more circumspect about the future of the humanities with During (2014) urging us to stop defending them, and McDonald (2015) arguing that perhaps their time is up. When it comes to the question of whether or not the humanities need defending, however, the matter may be viewed as more nuanced than a simple condemnation of or bold defence, as there are many elements which come in to play.

Geoffery Harpham (2011) argues that practitioners of various disciplines within the humanities need to work together to make a case for themselves. It is my view also, in keeping with Harpham, that a collective, rather than atomised approach, is the best way forward. Harpham’s Humanities and the Dream of America is a series of essays in which the author argues for the ways in which the humanities make a significant contribution to not only American education but the way in which American ideals secure state and national character.

Harpham (2011, p. 22) dissects the multivarious nature of the crisis in the humanities and concludes that it is what he calls a ‘crisis of rationale’ (emphasis added). Like other advocates (including myself), Harpham believes that a powerful defence for the humanities must be made. For Collini (2012, p. 61), however, making a case is not so straightforward: the issue for the humanities, unlike other disciplines in the sciences of technology, lies in the difficulty of characterising ‘the nature of teaching and research’ as well as justifying it. While a case for universities must be made, an ‘aura of defensiveness hangs about’ any attempt to do so and he cautions against this (Collini 2012, p. 87). A case must nonetheless be made for the humanities, defensive or not.

Since these publications, multiple attempts have been made to defend the humanities. Helen Small (2013) focuses on values. In The Value of the Humanities, she evaluates common defences such as ‘the democracy argument’, subjective value, use value, democratic value, and intrinsic value. There are others which focus on returning to liberal ideals, such as Menand (2010) and Dharamsi and Zimmer (2019); the latter two thinkers, as editors of Liberal Education and the Idea of a University, make a powerful case for liberal learning as essential to the defence of a democratic order, using intrinsic value as well as utilitarian defences.

Other scholars turn to pragmatic methods in order to articulate the ways in which the humanities are necessary. Examples of this include Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education, wherein Moner et al. (2020) present a forward-thinking approach in a collection of essays that highlight the ways in which critical thinking, collaboration, building cross-cultural competencies, resilience, and empathy can assist students in the modern world. In Seven Radical Ideas for the Future of Higher Education: An Australian Perspective, Clare Macken et al. (2021, p. v) offer pragmatic ways ahead: ‘With disorder, comes the opportunity to create order’, they write in their preface. In their book, these authors present the context in which students now live, including their heavy debt for education; Macken, Hare, and Souter focus on developing policy, blending learning technologies, upskilling and micro-credentialling students for multiple careers, developing links with industry, and internationalisation.

Academics have also turned towards the humanities themselves, and rather than defending them, they reveal a range of exciting ways in which they might evolve and become an intrinsic and essential part of knowledge for the future. For example, distinguished scholars such as J. Hillis Miller (2009), N. Katherine Hayles (2021), and Mark B. N. Hansen (2000, 2012) show the continued relevance and adaptability of a subject such as literary study to the realms of technology, philosophy, and science, demonstrating that literature is still a vital form of inquiry. Bruno Latour (1993, 2005) does the same for Anthropology and Michel Serres (1995, 2000) for history and philosophy.

It is apparent that voices aiming to defend the humanities range from those defiantly decrying the situation and making urgent calls for a return to liberal ideals to those who believe the humanities must adapt—that is, keep its core principles but hybridise in the view of technology, the market, and globalisation. However, despite the evidence of both optimistic and practical ways forward for the humanities, serious problems for their future remain—these problems are due in part to the fact that the very aims and elements that traditionally make the humanities valuable stand in opposition to a culture of quantification—which also makes questions of accountability absolutely critical but also keenly problematic for the humanities. At the same time, there is a recent move to use data sets and algorithms to discuss issues in the humanities (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020; So 2020; Chun 2021).

5. ‘Measuring’ the Humanities

One of the many issues facing the humanities is that of universities privileging measurement as the criterion for determining the effectiveness of research methodologies, assumptions, models, and variables, and these have a direct impact when it comes to public policy decisions, particularly around funding and accountability.

• Funding

Adam Phillips is one of the world’s foremost psychoanalysts and the general editor of Penguin Modern Classics’ translations of Sigmund Freud. Phillips is also the author of books on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He contends that the arts and humanities are in crisis because of the way in which they are measured by institutional structures:

I think it may always or often have been the case that people in the so-called arts have felt they’re being judged by alien criteria and therefore that what they’re doing is made incommensurable with the culture that they so much want to contribute to.

(Phillips 2014)

Raimond Gaita is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School and Faculty of Arts. He has been the Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London and the Australian Catholic University. Gaita is the author of many books. He offers similar observations:

the difficulties in which the humanities find themselves in are because a scientific model of research is being imposed on them. But that’s commonplace; I mean, everybody knows that. What’s interesting though is to ask, since everybody knows it, how come it’s being done?

(Gaita 2015)

Why is this model of research being imposed upon the humanities? Is it the case that funding bodies and organisations, including universities, require certain criteria to be met in order for researchers to be awarded grants and funds so that they can continue their activities? Cambridge University Professor of Education with a focus on Children’s Literature, Maria Nikolajeva (2014), believes that this ‘is just something that’s always been the case’:

that humanities are valued less than natural sciences, also because in natural sciences you can actually measure the results or make major discoveries, while in humanities it’s all about thinking, understanding, and so on. So I don’t think it’s in crisis in the sense that the area in itself is deteriorating. It’s just that societal and political support for it is going down … but it has always been the case, and humanities have always depended on sponsors, because … you’re not producing any material value, so you need to … And you cannot just guarantee it.

(Nikolajeva 2014)

The devaluing of the humanities over the natural sciences is even more marked in a culture increasingly obsessed with material values, so it is no surprise that ‘societal and political support’ has decreased and that these sorts of problems arise: there is a clash of values.

Marina Warner is a prominent critic, historian, and writer. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and the President of the Royal Society of Literature. Warner sees the need to find grants as an unjust and at times oppressive element to modern academic work. She states, ‘[h]igher education now is under the … imperative to fund itself from the pockets of students or from funding bodies’ (Warner 2014). Warner identifies clear ethical issues with this: while one might be familiar with scientific groups funding university research in order to meet their own agendas, the same can be applied to the humanities, which may be subject to having to meet the aims and missions of certain organisations, such as religious foundations, whose judgement on what constitutes valuable research will be biased in a particular way.

Raimond Gaita observes that this pressure to obtain grants exerts an unreasonable burden on a discipline such as philosophy. He says, ‘it becomes not at all what it proclaims itself to be, a self-critical discipline, but something driven in all sorts of ways by fashionable ways of being quick on your feet or quick to publish somewhat’ (Gaita 2015). Gaita (2015) argues that while, historically, philosophy may have been subject to various trends, ‘it doesn’t help when there’s so much pressure to get grants—so much pressure to publish more than, for the most part, people can do reasonably reflectively’. This pressure, again, will potentially compromise the quality of research and contribute to the notion of disinterested scholarship.

There are problems when assigning economic values to the work of the humanities, with Marina Warner arguing that it is almost impossible for a poet to demonstrate the economic value of their poetry. The arts and humanities offer economic benefits that are enormous—but which cannot be measured in the short term. So, they have been put into ‘ludicrous’ positions to account for their economic impact when applying for grants, when it is not possible to measure the future possibilities of that output. Warner (2014) states:

[In the 1940s or 1950s] … when Tolkien first dreamt up The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it would have been impossible for him to put in a grant application to support Anglo-Saxon Studies at Oxford on the grounds that Middle-earth would become the GNP of England in the twenty-first century. Now, but it’s a very good example. I mean, Anglo-Saxon was supported, and Norse was supported at Oxford, in the teeth of great unpopularity. Very few people wanted to study it; it’s quite difficult. Because this eccentric figure loved it, and it—by a quirk—Anglo-Saxon was made part of the English Tripos. In fact, they’re not really—I mean, they’re not demonstrably—connected.

Raimond Gaita (2015) agrees, lamenting that academics must obtain ‘25% of their salary in grants.’ He adds, ‘that would be very difficult for academics in the humanities to do’ (Gaita 2015). Gaita acknowledges this catch-22: academics must obtain grants to keep their positions, but the system is skewed in favour of more scientific outcomes, which poses a fundamental challenge to academic life and the very existence of their disciplines. Thus, there is still a need for support for the humanities: funding that is not external to universities or governments, as cost–benefit ratios hold little meaning if the benefit side of the equation does not adequately account for the many positive externalities and wide societal benefits that a liberal arts education provides.

Marina Warner describes a phenomenon that is occurring in the UK but which could apply also to the situation in Australia with the way grants are awarded by the Australian Research Council; she states, ‘The big funding bodies, which are related to the state here … give out huge grants. It’s much easier for them to give out four grants of £1 million each, than to give what would be infinitely more useful to the society, of, you know, 400 grants of £10,000 each’ (Warner 2014). A little bit of money goes a long way for humanities researchers who would be able to buy out some teaching and spend time devoted to their work. Warner (2014) calls it

a lopsided, absolutely entropic system, whereby whole slews of young groups of young academics work for a year to write a proposal for a £2 million grant … They put their year’s work into it, and then they don’t get it, because, of course, in another university, another 20 young scholars have also done the same thing.

The inefficiencies of a competitive grants scheme designed in such a way are hard to fathom; this system is a misuse of valuable time and pits applicants against one another in a way that does not appear logical or particularly fair. Warner (2014) complains about ‘the absolute mortifying boredom of writing these grant proposals—I mean, it’s enough to destroy someone’s brain.’ The bureaucratic nature of bids for funding, she suggests, are barbaric, and lead to diabolical ends:

Sometimes people sort of ask: How did the Roman Empire come to an end? How did the Byzantine Empire come to an end? How did the Ottoman Empire come to an end? It came to an end because there was too much of this. That’s how civilisation ended. It ends in a kind of mass of bureaucracy, that’s how it ends, and that’s when the military powers come in. It doesn’t just … It isn’t defeated because the military power destroys it; it allows the military power to take it. I mean, the Ottoman Empire … It allows … the military power takes over because everybody has been completely leached … For the humanities, the grants system is clearly inherently flawed—not only in the criteria used to assess them, but in the imbricate bureaucratic excesses which effectively disable equitable grant funding to the many humanities scholars. Perhaps, more sinisterly, such a system has been designed to starve the humanities altogether.

(Warner 2014)

Adam Phillips (2014) suggests changing the criteria for awarding funding for the arts and humanities. He gives the example of rethinking timescale in relation to outcomes: ‘‘other criteria’ might involve, for example, a different timescale’, so

the effect of this conversation on you and I might be known in 30 years’ time or ten minutes time. We really don’t know how we’re going to digest experience, so there’d be a temporal dimension that would say we don’t know when we’re going to gain or not gain what we’re going to gain or not gain.

(Phillips 2014)

Benefits such as these above need to be articulated in a way that is both comprehensible and flexible.

b.

Accountability

Both Phillips and Gaita have pointed out the trouble with accountability in terms of how humanities academics and researchers might account for what they do, including their research. On the one hand, there are external measures of accountability including funding obtained, outputs, tangible impact, ‘reach’, or various teaching measures; on the other hand, the value of much humanities work is difficult to account for and remains a contentious issue. Phillips (2014) states, ‘one values different things at different stages of one’s life, and that also has to be included in accountability’. What a young student might find valuable in his or her studies may change over time. Something learned in philosophy may not seem immediately useful upon graduating but may become a useful life skill as a manager or parent later in life. Adam Phillips (2014) contends:

I also think that people might not be able to articulate why they value an experience, but still value it highly. And I think that’s very important too, but of course it’s very difficult to make shareable … I might absolutely love a piece of music, really feel enlivened and inspired by it, and not be able to say why or what about it. And I would want to live in a culture that would accept that as sufficient.

To counter Phillips’ ‘dystopic’ vision would mean an educational institution and a culture which would value lifelong learning.

Gaita is sceptical of the external accounting measures placed on academic staff within universities, an attitude which is not at all uncommon:

I think the trouble with accountability is that we can’t find … a means of holding academics to account which doesn’t at the same time degrade the activity. That’s been the trouble so we’ve had to publish the perilous thing which everybody knew was bad. Now we’ve got the grant system, which has become lunatic.

(Gaita 2015)

Despite a ‘lunatic’ system and the difficulties of ‘accounting’ for one’s humanities research or accounting for the humanities more generally, humanities departments must nonetheless be held to account. The fact of the matter is that the arts and humanities do receive government funding that is not insubstantial; the arts and culture sector nationally in Australia receives approximately AUD 7 billion of public funding per year (A New Approach 2021). It must be acknowledged, however, that Australia’s spending on arts and culture is less than the OECD average and has gone down since 2018, despite a population increase. According to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the humanities in universities receive funding in the form of subsidies, block grants, scholarships, Commonwealth-supported places at universities, Australian Research Council funding, and general research and development expenditure.

6. The Value of the Humanities

The provision of higher education, whether private or public, is known as a public good. Public goods contribute to the economic, cultural, and political functioning of society. They benefit all of us but cannot be paid for solely by individuals. Governments debate on what those goods should be and how much they should tax individuals for them. On the question of the public good, Nussbaum (2010, 2011) is illuminating; she contends that public goods should support the wellbeing of all citizens, especially the vulnerable, marginalised, or disadvantaged. Justice means going beyond the minimum provision of public goods. In the case of education, Nussbaum argues for a capabilities approach; this means enabling people to develop skills to live a good and dignified life.

Do the humanities within the university provide that public good? Small notes that people who make decisions about public expenditure need to know of the ‘multiple distinct ways’ that the humanities have value (Small 2013, p. 2). We know they do not just have economic value: the humanities offer public goods that are more than just economic; the humanities contribute to a more pluralistic society. They inspire passions, ignite emotions, get us to think and write critically. The skills taught in obtaining a degree in the humanities foster the ability to theorise, envisage possibilities, consider data, identify patterns, and develop the imagination. Hugo Meynell (2000, pp. 327–28) points out that a humanities education should make students ‘more attentive, intelligent, and reasonable’ so that they ‘get to know what is really true and really good and not just what is true for or good for ourselves or our interest groups’. Menand (2010), on the other hand, is less hopeful, arguing that humanities academics all tend to think alike and create identikit left-wing graduates. A controversial view, no doubt, considering the conservative thinkers which emerge from universities entering government, business, and legal spheres. And, despite the debates on the matter, most academics within humanities disciplines would argue that their work is worthwhile. Making connections between scholarship and wider public good, on the other hand, is more difficult.

One recurrent view that emerged in my study is that the humanities are in crisis because they deserve it. For Stefan Collini, this is because practitioners in the humanities have failed to provide a story for themselves. He argues that ‘as scholars we do perhaps need to make a greater effort to try to provide politicians, officials, journalists, administrators and other public figures with a usable set of descriptions about what we do’ as a justification for public expenditure (Collini 2017, p. 226). Steven Connor (2014), on the other hand, confesses to being ‘not terribly interested’ in defending the humanities:

if [academics] … depend on quite significant amounts of public resources, they kind of need to make a case for themselves. On the other hand, you’ve always got to be sceptical of any case that people make for themselves, especially when the payoff is large amounts of public money. It’s not that I’m opposed to public money—I think that the state has to continue to have a vastly enhanced role in so many different areas of human life—it’s just that when huge amounts of public money are being chased and divided up on the basis of self-certification then a civilised democratic society has got to have a lot of scepticism about those kinds of arguments.

(Connor 2014)

Steve Connor (2014) observes that all the ‘to-do’ about the crisis in the humanities, including anxieties around accountability, has less to do with the humanities and more to do with jobs: ‘I really don’t think that people feel worried about the existence of the humanities, because they feel that there are certain things that are a threat; they feel that their jobs are under threat’. Ronan McDonald (2015) has argued that the imperative ‘is not to defend the humanities but to subject them to cold, honest scrutiny. How correct is the image of the humanities as a publicly subsidized space of learning, a civic alternative to the brutish vagaries of capital?’ This is, indeed, a question worth answering, using intelligible and convincing evidence to weigh up the issues.

Some authors argue that the humanities are in trouble because it is their own fault. That is, they do not deliver public value for money. Part of the problem, argues Gaita (2015), firstly, is that universities do not know what they are, and humanities disciplines are doing nothing to help the situation. Sitting in his office in Melbourne University’s Arts Faculty building, he says that ‘caring for truth’ would be an appropriate aim. He advises:

Give up on thinking that what you could argue for in an institution like this is seriously going to be informed by the concept of a university and then we just have to think of other ways of trying to capture what was deepest in it. But we won’t capture what was deepest in it unless we find a serious way of talking about a care for truths, a love of truths and, at any rate, certainly get beyond the banalities of thinking of higher pleasure and certainly get beyond the self-deceiving idea that we’re producing critical citizens. We’re producing citizens who think they’re critical and this is what is true of the right-wing cultural blaming, they’re complacent …

(Gaita 2015)

For Gaita, while truth is a key element in humanities study, it is fast being abandoned for fashionable ways of thinking that do not cultivate the critical faculties sufficiently. Gaita (2015) goes so far as to say that ‘the kind of thinking that’s necessary to do moral philosophy … is a kind of thinking that can’t be taught in a liberal university’. The humanities, in other words, have failed. Gaita points to different kinds of self-serving agendas as being at the heart of the humanities’ dilemma, and Gaita (2015) laments that

far from producing a critical body of citizens, which the humanities often claim that they do and for which they often justify themselves to politicians and others, the forces on the cultural divide have in fact claimed what it produces—for the most part left-leaning uncritical people who are causally and morally complacent.

Gaita does not like culture wars—‘I think they poison everything they touch’, he says (Gaita 2015)—but he perceives a phenomenon occurring whereby humanities graduates have not developed the tools for proper, diverse thought. Gaita contends that the quality of ideas and discussion is not only poor in mass tertiary education but also in other forms of public discourse such as politics and newspapers, even writers’ festivals. The discussions have ‘become worse and since one of the claims for the humanities always has been that the more people educated in the humanities, the better the level of discussion in a democracy about all sorts of things’, then the humanities have been unsuccessful in achieving their aims (Gaita 2015). Believing them to have been ‘supported sufficiently’, Gaita (2015) alleges that they have failed ‘to generate a critical politic, a critical civic space’. Notions such as ‘value for money’ may fit all too neatly into neoliberalist agenda; however, a robust critical public and a civic space need not be subsumed into neoliberalist philosophy.

Conservative governments have targeted the humanities and social sciences over the years for their preoccupation with what they perceive to be political agendas: not only around familiar issues such as class, race, gender, and sexuality but also around those such as climate change and globalisation—thereby excluding other viewpoints or critical positions from that of orthodox ones. The concern seems to be related to a view that the more recent history of humanities departments reveals a suite of disciplines that promulgate a particular kind of ideology that deepens political polarisation rather than fostering a critical facility to analyse contemporary society and produce engaged citizens. The question is whether the focus on particular frameworks (postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, etc.) for exploring ideas (power, race, gender, identity, etc.) has politicised the humanities to such an extent that, rather than producing critical citizens, it produces only political activists. One view is that universities are producing humanities graduates who are more concerned with identity politics than the kinds of solidarity that can bring people together in a democratic sense by using the power of collective engaged citizens to effect positive change. In concluding his work on identity politics in America (that could also be reflective of the Australian context), Mark Lilla (2017, p. 137), Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, states:

Of all the developments I have discussed in this book [The Once and Future Liberal], the most self-defeating from a liberal standpoint is identity-based education. Conservatives are right: our educational institutions, from bottom to top, are mainly run by liberals, and teaching has a liberal tilt. But they are wrong to infer that students are therefore being politicized. The liberal pedagogy of our time, focused as it is on identity, is actually a depoliticizing force. It has made our children more tolerant of others than certainly my generation was, which is a very good thing. But by undermining the universal democratic we on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled, and action inspired, it is unmaking rather than making citizens. In the end this approach just strengthens all the atomizing forces that dominate our age.

It is worth asking whether conservative views around the humanities are misguided—if the kind of exploration of society that has been labelled ‘identity politics’ is the only viewpoint tolerated within the humanities—or whether the humanities provide a critical capacity to critique society and question orthodoxies, whether right- or left-leaning. Is there justification in equating the humanities with a particular ideological position, a reification of particular assumptions that underlie various approaches to produce a new ‘orthodoxy’ more akin to belief and political activism than critical enquiry?

Identity politics is and has been crucial for social redress; and while identity politics taught within the academy is no doubt a vitally important dimension of humanities study, identity itself is a manifold and complex concept. Framing learning and research predominately through the lens of identity politics could pose some risks. Scholars have suggested that identity politics in its most militant form paradoxically gives rise to certain kinds of political apathy, individualism, and general social and civic disengagement. Lilla, for example, contends that ‘identity politics reinforces individualism, turning people inward, rather than outward working towards a common good’ (Lilla 2017, pp. 9–10). He observes a move away from a democratic ‘we’ to an ‘I’ or ‘those with whom I identify’. Indeed, social media is well suited for identity politics; it is an easy way for identity-based ‘silos’ to be re-affirmed. Using the work of Scott A. Sandage (2005), economist Mary Wrenn argues that neoliberalism begets identity politics. By engendering and exalting ‘neoliberal identities’ (pp. 506–7), those excluded from wealth and privilege in such a culture (typically, although not always, minority groups) seek social groups through which to claim an identity; as neoliberalism intensifies, so too does identity politics. She writes:

the extra-economic, potentially extra-social identity could connect the alienated individual to the external world or serve as a proxy for or as rebellion against the institutionally assigned liberal identity.

(Wrenn 2014, p. 503)

Sociologist Juha Siltala even goes so far as to argue that ‘Identity politics supports the coherence of right-wing populist parties but divides leftish/liberal groups due to intersectional competition for victimhood’ (Siltala 2020, p. 1). The ugly realities of discrimination and inequality persist and are in urgent need of our attention, and yet, could it be the case that identity politics is being taken too far? Neoliberalism has no concern with identity, and if neoliberalist economic systems and policies are to be challenged, then groups need to be able to engage in productive conversations in order to work together as part of a shared humanity. This is closer to Nussbaum’s conception of an educational public good than a system which frames knowledge exclusively through differences and divisions.

7. Ways Forward for the Humanities

Ahead of this discussion on the ways forward for the humanities, it is important to ask where the responsibility lies: is it the government’s responsibility, for example, to properly fund the humanities and will that ‘fix’ the problem? Is it humanities departments’ responsibility to better articulate their value? It is my view that it is on the onus of both parties but that it begins with the humanities themselves. We must continue to evolve and adapt but also understand our core values and purpose, as well as the value we bring to civic life and the importance of articulating these within a language that frames our work in such a way that is understood by the government. We must also advocate for the importance of what we do and why we do it, resisting reductionist approaches to our work that misrepresent and misunderstand the importance of preserving time to engage in deep research and ‘slow’ work—thereby showing this benefit to universities, students, academics, and society at large. In the areas below, I introduce potential ways forward; though they need considerably more research and elaboration, they are presented here as indicative areas to further develop and articulate in the future.

• An Ethical Future

In a ‘post-truth’ age, questions about ethics and morality are more pressing now than ever. For Nussbaum (2011), achieving a democracy means cultivating emotional intelligence from an early age. In particular, what she terms as ‘moral’ emotions such as empathy, compassion, and concern for justice need to be activated in educational settings for democratic values to prevail. ‘Anti-moral’ emotions, on the other hand, such as anger, fear, and shame, need to be managed carefully, as they hinder democratic action. Such emotions are manipulated by leaders to undermine democratic processes and suppress dissent. I am in agreement with Nussbaum that an education that encourages ‘moral’ emotions and reflects on ethical questions is crucial for the future. I am not suggesting any easy straightforward or simplistic understanding of morality or ‘moral benefit’ or that the humanities ‘teach’ morality. Humanistic study should entail discussing the moral and ethical dimensions of any kind of disciplinary inquiry. Determining the moral value of a work of art or literature, for example, requires time. As Marina Warner (2014) states,

That fundamental principle, the limits of our language and the limits of our world. I mean, literature is a constant enlargement of experience and understanding, and so are the other arts, and it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pleasant. I mean, one of the things that literature does, of course, is deepen one’s sense of the, you know, anguish and complications … a text, any kind of text, an art object … engages you with the world, and one of my tasks as a critical commentator is to try and understand how that novel or poem or painting does engage with the world.

It is arguable that there is a moral purpose of aesthetic experience which includes an appreciation for its sensuous dimensions, certain kinds of artistic truths: an Aristotelian ‘higher reality’ which may offer a more heightened experience of philosophical truths. Roche (2004, p. 22) puts it succinctly:

Frequently our experience of the ethical dimensions of an artwork does not so much expand our knowledge of ethics as deepen our understanding of the implications of our ethical positions. Great works of art and literature draw our attention to still unresolved problems without elevating the dissonance of nonresolution as an end in itself. Through imagination and sensuous embodiment art reveals truths that would otherwise not be accessible to us, or at least not yet accessible.

Roche’s delineation of the moral in art is more complex than a simple ‘art makes us moral’ argument—which is of course too simplistic and refutable. His position entails a deepening of perspectives and positions on behalf of the one who encounters it, making moral enquiry ever more complex and thus closer to the ‘truth’. Bringing to the fore the ethical and moral dimensions of humanistic inquiry is thus perhaps radical, but it is nonetheless important for a more just and bold future. This effort also allows the current debate around ‘cancel culture’ to sit within an ethical context, not in the sense of removing artworks or works of literature, or deplatforming academics, but in the exploration of the ethical dimensions of aesthetics and representations and their connection to truth—itself a contested area that can be better teased out within a humanities context of criticality.

b.

Criticality

Those who have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them … do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

John Stuart Mill ([1859] 2004, p. 38)

If humanities disciplines are meant to encourage critical thought, what is this criticality—exactly—and how should it be both taught and practised? Developing a critical reflex is essential, although not exclusive, to humanistic study. Critical reflection involves a probing below the surface or face value of objects, situations, and phenomena. This involves examining the meaning of culture through certain lenses, angles, and frames, whether via politics, form, history, ethics, and so on.

But criticism itself is also important for the flourishing of art and for the evolution of new ideas and forms. Oscar Wilde ([1891] 2018, p. 772) famously asserted that ‘it is the critical faculty that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that springs up … The mere creative instinct does not innovate, but reproduces’. Could it be that, by emphasising the relationship of criticism to the development of new forms of ideas, the critical reflex one develops at university can become a key element in defending the humanities?

What is the difference, then, between criticism and ‘critique’? Criticism—critically evaluating a text or work of art—involves contextualising: bringing our knowledge to bear upon reading the work at hand. Criticism involves asking a range of questions about the piece—both formal and aesthetic as well as ideological; it would entail researching other readings and analyses, brainstorming possible interpretations, and coming up with an evidence-based case of what is our own interpretation of the text. But criticism is often eclipsed in the face of critique.

The humanities’ habit of critique may be one of its problems. Helen Small (2013) points out that those unsympathetic to the dire situations and dwindling funds of the humanities departments will often say ‘given their orientation towards critical reflection and critique, crisis is their ideal element.’ Small (2013, p. 39) observes that the humanities’ commitment to

critical scrutiny (of language and other expressive media, of history, of modes of reasoning) may not seem to afford them enough by way of a positive public function. Too much critical reflexivity may suggest ‘possibilities of paralysis through excess of self-consciousness and infinite regress’.

Small explores the new attitude of ‘the critique of critique’ by asking what other forms of engagement with culture this attitude is precluding or forgetting. Similarly, Rita Felski (2015, p. 5) claims that literary studies are undergoing a ‘legitimation crisis’. In her book The Limits of Critique, she questions ‘criticality’ as the sole measure of literary value. She writes, ‘we short-change the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to reconceptualise, reconfigure, or recharge perception’ (Felski 2015, p. 17). Felski (2015) cites and explores more affirmative modes of engagement with texts, such as those offered by Eve Sedgewick (‘reparative’ rather than ‘paranoid’ reading), Yves Catton’s Lire Intern (reinventing the self through an affective hermeneutics), as well as Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (whereby readers take a more active part in the reading and interpretation of the text). Felski (2015, p. 176) quotes Marielle Mace: ‘works [of literature] take their place in ordinary life leaving their marks and exerting a lasting power … Reading is not a separate activity, functioning in competition with life, but one of the daily means by which we give our existence form, flavor, even style’. Felski (2015, pp. 154–55) joins this ‘eudemonic turn in literary studies’, which focuses on ‘joy, hope, love, optimism, and inspiration’ rather than the ‘hermeneutics of scepticism’ and ‘critique’. I am in agreement with Felski that certain modes of critique can prevent students from becoming more genuinely critical. Indeed, her other suggestions offer attractive and empowering alternatives which herald not the end of critique but rather other kinds of it. Bruce Robbins (2019) rebuts what he terms to be Felski’s ‘aggressive manifesto for postcritique’, describing it as a part of a ‘new modesty’, a backward, depoliticising gesture in literary studies. He even claims that such ideas ‘sound … like neoliberalism’ when political intervention is what is required now more than ever. It must be noted, however, that while studies of power and the use of political frames of reference are crucial and productive in the humanities, they are not the only possible critical positions and are at risk of being reified. By the same token, activism is not the only legitimate end result of critique. Critical discourse must not always privilege the ideological; it needs to embrace and foreground more varied frameworks and ask a wide variety of questions—answers to which cannot or do not always need to be boiled down to political positions.

Ultimately, on either side of the debate lies the question of academic freedom. For philosopher Immanuel Kant (2012a, 2012b), such freedom is crucial for the pursuit of truth and knowledge. For sociologist Max Weber (2005a, 2005b), universities and academics must pursue the search for truth, without fear of censorship. Such a pursuit may indeed threaten the prevailing values of the status quo, whatever they may be; academics must be able to research and teach ethically, with legitimate academic freedom. We do not need politicisation to hamper continued critical enquiry and exploration with particular kinds of artistic and humanistic inquiry viewed as unimportant or detrimental by governments in face of other concerns more broadly.4

In the same vein that the humanities must engage in comprehensive and legitimate critical discourse, it is essential that universities prioritise greater access for a variety of students from all backgrounds to attend tertiary institutions. Universities—at least outwardly—are beginning to do this. Such measures will reduce inequalities and improve the diversity of representation in public life and in positions of power. Cultivating a philosophy of inclusion as part of university enrolment strategies and curriculum agendas is an essential part of this effort; the humanities have the opportunity to play a key role in this move. Whether or not this shift happens in practice—and indeed it should—the very nature of the humanities entails the exercise of entertaining points of view that are different from one’s own, and this is conducted by the student encountering diverse traditions, positions, and agendas through engagement with historical situations, cultures, systems, or texts. For example, Martha Nussbaum (2010, pp. 95–96) suggests that, by studying and reading literature, we gain a ‘narrative imagination’, that is, ‘the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions, wishes and desires that someone so placed might have’. Of course, there is no guarantee that students take anything at all from their reading experience. While Nussbaum’s desired effect may not materialise for everyone, there is an abundance of scientific research on how reading fiction improves certain kinds of intelligence which includes empathetic and emotional intelligence in some readers (Oatley 2016). Reading has a proleptic function; it also improves social cognition, as reading the thoughts of characters on the page develops a theory of mind (Tamir et al. 2016), or, indeed, reading may work at the level of affect and emotion rather than cognition (Felski 2015). There is no question that much can be learned through the study of literature; for example, readers can stretch and challenge sensibilities, sympathies, and their frames of reference by encountering other cultural positions and narratives. Roche (2004, p. 209) argues that literary study may lead to a certain ‘self transcendence’ by ‘immers[ing] oneself in another culture, to recognize thereby those aspects of one’s culture with only contingent validity, to encounter alternative models, and to free oneself of the narcissistic impulse to reflect constantly on one’s own private world’. It also ‘expands … preferences, tastes, and identity—not just in literature but in general’ (Roche 2004, p. 209). In this sense, a student’s engagement with other ages, artforms, and ideas will make them, at the very least, aware of the diversity of the world. There is, on the other hand, also the risk that reading experiences reinforce entrenched assumptions the reader has about the world. Meynell (2000, pp. 327–28) is more positive, contending that the study of the humanities is crucial for encouraging students to consider viewpoints other than their own, and that it leads to ‘the expansion and clarification of consciousness’ which is

valuable both intrinsically and instrumentally in itself and as a means to other ends … [For example] Thus, I may be the more able to perceive limitations in contemporary industrial culture. The expansion of consciousness may be indirectly useful even for these purposes in giving people the flexibility of mind to think of new ways in which they may be achieved. But it also might provoke the student into asking another kind of question, how much more of these things do we really need to enhance the quality of our human lives?

The humanities offer useful training for interpreting the ‘cultural texts’ of institutions, politics, and the popular media. The critical skills developed in humanities training offer an important capacity to both read and read through culture and, thus, not take things at face value. In a world that has become increasingly polarised in terms of political and other ideological positions and trends, wherein the abundance of ‘fake news’ means it is difficult to discern the truth or gain an accurate picture of a situation or event (and where voters have no sense of a political reality as their own prejudices and preferences are reaffirmed within the electronic echo chambers of phenomenally powerful social media algorithms), it is more urgent now than ever for students to develop critical skills. The crucial critical skills are those which also assist them in appreciating their cultural locatedness, which is gained by studying subjects that, by their very nature and design, offer alternative models for thinking through particular topics, knowledges, disciplines, methods, arguments, and questions. Arguably, such subjects allow students to reflect on history or—at the very least—to see how they form part of, and are products of, certain kinds of histories and forces: economic, political, cultural, ideological, and social. As Oscar Wilde ([1891] 2018, p. 773) wrote with his keen wit, rallying against the popular beliefs of his meritocratic Victorian age, one which valued tireless action and productivity:

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it … Anybody can make history. Only a great man [sic] can write it … [A]ction … is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious … The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.

Wilde does not mean that someone who has not studied the humanities cannot make change or ‘rewrite’ history; however, the tools of a humanities education can certainly help someone make a start—at the very lowest level—to raise consciousness and awareness from which the seeds of change may take place.

For example, Netflix’s College Behind Bars is a series about an initiative led by New York’s Bard College to run tertiary education programs within prisons. This series includes a clip from 2014 of the former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo declaring that recidivism, usually at almost 50%, was reduced to only 4% for those who had studied some college courses within prison. In the clip, Cuomo states that ‘every dollar spent on higher education in prison saves taxpayers five dollars.’ Despite this success, the scheme was famously publicly defunded. The whole Netflix series is testament to the restorative, corrective, and rehabilitating effects of higher education, including training in history, literature, classics, and political science—for those whose lives have denied them any such opportunity for learning. In the first episode of College Behind Bars, one prisoner recounts that although he had only been doing the program for three months, he could already see that ‘you’re putting words to systems that you’ve recognised your whole life but you never had the word for it … [like] ‘hegemony’, ‘alienation’. It’s rewarding, but it’s hard’ (Novick 2019). Such study no doubt empowers prisoners and offers them hope for a better future.

In a similar fashion, Harpham (2011, p. 112) recounts Nina Auerhach’s experience of teaching Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations to college students in a ‘sprawling, car-choked school between two freeways on the fringe of the barrio’. Her students, who were ‘blue-collar workers, blacks, Chicanos, foreigners, and housewives’, and for many of whom college was a strange and estranging experience, responded powerfully to Pip’s predicament (Harpham 2011, p. 112). Auerbach had reported that her Princeton students, on the other hand, had simply condemned Pip and his behaviour. A canonical work was able to straddle class divides; indeed, it could speak right into those class divides with effectiveness—not so much for the elite, but for the disenfranchised. These two examples point to the important work that the humanities do to speak to a wide range of students in different educational scenarios. Maria Nikolajeva is passionate about creating accessible education in the humanities. ‘This is something absolutely essential for the future generations, but also for everybody. You’re also asking about social justice. Access to good books, arts, music is absolutely essential for citizenship, and it’s a matter of social justice’ (Nikolajeva 2014). The liberatory potential of humanities study is clearly evidenced in these two examples. It is easy to understand, then, why conservative forces might oppose them as such study can plant the seeds for change, including changes which are not desired by those in power.

It is important for their careers that university students are able to entertain multiple positions and conflicting ideas—which humanistic study is certainly meant to induce within them—whether or not Gaita is correct in his declaration that the humanities at Australian universities have failed to produce critical citizens. It is an idealistic aim of the humanities, no doubt—and it is clear that students may be threatened by difference, ‘otherness’, or even intimidated by cultural practices and methods that are taught within the university. But this does not mean that the ideal of the humanities should be abandoned. Gerald Graff (2008, p. viii) writes: ‘Educators have always assumed that achieving coherence in the curriculum requires substantial agreement. I argue that sharply focused disagreement can serve as well or even better’. Educating through ‘sharply focused disagreement’ and debate is also useful for both political and cultural literacy and can go some way to avoid unsophisticated thinking and unchallenged prejudices that can lead to political binarism, polarisation, and—I daresay—even war. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humanities can be part of a peace-keeping mission. While different from ‘studying the humanities’, Boyce-Tillman is unreserved on the topic and is passionate about the possibilities for the practice of the arts on a broader cultural level, including accommodating differences. June Boyce-Tillman is a Professor of Applied Music at the University of Winchester, where she is also the Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing. Boyce-Tillman is a composer and specialist in women’s music and spirituality. She states:

When you ask about the philosophers that have coloured me, it’s been a lot of the Levinas and Derrida … and what they say is that … when we meet somebody who’s other, to make a relationship what we do is try to make them the same as us but the real way forward is to leave somebody to be other and to make a relationship with them and leave them as they are.

(Boyce-Tillman 2014)

Boyce-Tillman emphasises the importance of living with dignity and difference or else ‘we’ll blow one another apart’. She is inspired by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s The Dignity of Difference and his call for living in such a way that lets people be different while trying not to make them the ‘same’. Music is a way to allow one another to be different while, at the same time, to bring them together:

There’s power in the space of the interface between difference and I think that’s the only way forward … it’s what we have to do in education. It’s not done by a knowledge-based curriculum. It’s done by encountering the differences in the classroom and enabling … [students] to understand difference and to relate to it.

(Boyce-Tillman 2014)

Exposing students to different world views and scenarios, developing critical tools, and highlighting dignity and difference might also change the planet—according to Boyce-Tillman. However, such an assertion cannot be guaranteed. The risk is that it makes little or no difference. But it is a risk worth taking as there is enormous potential for the practice of art to be a tool for reconciliation; culture becomes a way not to divide but, as a common language, an intermediary zone, a way to unify:

We’re all in the cosmos together and our wellbeing depends on our relationships with one another, within ourselves, with the natural world, across cultures and there are examples … [M]usic is one of the main features of reconciliation between cultures … and so it can operate at a level of the natural world. It can operate at the level of restoring relationships between people and the areas say of mental health, it restores imbalance between different parts of the self …

(Boyce-Tillman 2014)

Marina Warner (2014) notes that ‘[b]ecause humanities are about crossing borders, and thinking about relationships between people as individuals, and peoples in groups,’ they are a way to bridge the divide.

Now that the situation of the humanities has been outlined, the difficulties inherent in the category revealed, and the nature of the crisis and questions around accountability delineated, we can consider ways forward for the humanities, to ensure they thrive and contribute to the common good as well as employability.

8. The Humanities and Happiness, Wellbeing and Pleasure

One needs to tread carefully when making the claim that humanistic study brings a sense of wellbeing and pleasure to an individual or that the pursuit of the humanities automatically leads to a happier society overall. But there is still room to make the case for a connection between the study of the humanities—certainly the practice of the arts—and for the wellbeing that is essential for a functioning and productive society, which leads to greater economic and professional outcomes. Maria Nikolajeva (2014) agrees: ‘Wellbeing, if we by wellbeing mean a possibility, a potential for every individual to develop intellectually, socially, emotionally, and so on, access to arts is absolutely essential. And this is why arts have survived’.

While wellbeing and happiness are different concepts, an experience of wellbeing can lead to happiness and contentment, or—as Aristotle would say—‘Eudaimonia’ or human flourishing. There is evidence that, in Western cultures, those with higher incomes experience a higher happiness index and that university education directly contributes to this, but we are in agreement with Helen Small who writes, ‘[t]he core assertion here is not that ‘the humanities will make you happy’; rather, that they can help us to understand better what happiness is, how we may better put ourselves in the way of it, and how education may improve the kind and quality of some of our pleasures.’ (Small 2013, p. 5; also Killingsworth 2021). The humanities permit us to enter into questions of meaning and purpose: questions which may not always make us feel better—indeed, increased self-consciousness can be a burden, but a sense of meaning is fundamental to mental health.

There are great reasons for defending humanistic study on the grounds that it contributes to wellbeing. Barry Weller describes the important kinds of pleasures that are fundamental to engaging with literature where students encounter ‘something swoonier’ in their studies, ‘some possible apprehension of sublimity or self-erasure in the presence of what is not ourselves’ (Harpham 2011, p. 112). Reading ‘takes us out of ourselves, relieves us of the burdens of selfhood and sets us free in an alternate universe of possibility’ (Harpham 2011, p. 112). Some might argue that Marvel movies do the same. However, the pleasures involved in grappling with texts within a university context provide an atmosphere for certain kinds of self-exploration which may be critically shared and interpreted—something important for intellectual growth, meaning, and thus to wellbeing.

This ‘wellbeing’ line of defence, however, is not without its problems, as Raimond Gaita (2015) points out:

I think the first thing should be at least that … [defenders of the humanities] realise that if all they can really say about the intrinsic value of what they do is that it gives them very great pleasure, a higher pleasure as Mill would call it, they then have to understand that it’s understandable that the Minister of Education would say all of that and it’s really good that you have such pleasures but there are people who are in very serious trouble in our hospitals and we have priorities. I used to often say this to my students when I taught in London, I said the National Health Service here is in a woeful state and you better think about why you should be, why anybody should be, paying money to educate you in philosophy. If all you can say is that it’s really pleasurable and you find it really exciting thinking about these things, then you should also understand that people won’t be impressed.

Gaita (2015) is not satisfied with the idea that the humanities have managed to bring about wellbeing either, declaring that they have ‘failed radically because I think the quality of discussion there has declined markedly. They have failed to improve the wellbeing of the politic in my judgement.’

While psychoanalysis is a practice and a more popular area of study that is often under scrutiny and suspicion in general, it nevertheless offers revealing insights into these questions. Adam Phillips (2014) attests:

I think of it is of value to the people who find it valuable … I think it’s like poetry, it’s the people who get it, you know, the joke’s as good as its audience and I think for the people who pick it up and use it, it’s really interesting. But it’s whether you can use it or not, and it’s not, you know, lots of people can’t.

Phillips is not willing to make a case that the humanities will lead to wellbeing necessarily. It may, but it will not have that effect for everyone. Phillips expresses the need for other conceptions to gain importance; it is not that happiness is unimportant, he says, ‘and anyway psychoanalysis is partly about this … and so are the arts’, but there are other emotions which are crucial to humanistic study, such as frustration, that is ‘what people can do with frustration, what they can transform it into’ (Phillips 2014). Phillips (2014) relays that

frustration is an important experience because if you can bear it, and bear it with other people, you might have more of a sense of what it is you do want and need. So it seems to me frustration is an essential kind of political emotion … for clarifying and identifying what might matter to you most and the kind of world you might want to live in.

So, other emotions will lead us to what is important, what might make us happy, and what might get us to connect with one another. He explains, ‘if you live in a consumerist culture that fobs you off with pseudo-satisfactions, the risk is it anaesthetises people, they’re not actually able to have the conversations they need in which they can find out what they want’ (Phillips 2014). Therefore, frustration is just as important as emotions such as joy and peace—arguably more important. Phillips (2014) states that happiness and wellbeing are ‘poor aims but good side-effects … I think that people do bad things in the names of happiness and wellbeing, but wellbeing and happiness can be the consequences of doing good things.’ Happiness as a goal in and of itself may be a misplaced priority.

An important distinction must be made between studying the humanities and practising arts—such as music, writing, painting, and dance. While there is invariably crossover, they do differ. Artistic practice can take place both within and outside of university contexts. The university, however, can provide the educational opportunities to explore artistic practice in a particular way. Boyce-Tillman (2014) is passionate about the practice of the arts and how it allows you to ‘take control of your own wellbeing’. She adds, ‘and of course with the pharmaceutical industry some of it may produce wellbeing but there are also toxic side effects’ (Boyce-Tillman 2014). The practice of music, for example, has none of these toxic side effects; the study of music and its ability to improve quality of life and outcomes, however, has been subject to the same mismatched criteria in funding assessments as other humanities disciplines such as philosophy and literature.

• The Slow University

Oscar Wilde ([1891] 2018, p. 782) remarks that ‘the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming … is what the critical spirit can give us’. The kind of process and critical spirit of which Wilde speaks can be cultivated through the study of the humanities. In the true spirit of intellectual inquiry, legitimate research practices should also allow for failure, failed experiments, and the exploration of things that do not always lead to predicted outcomes. Slowing down—no doubt—becomes the path to more ethical practice within universities. In a climate where collegiality is dwindling and stress levels of academic staff are at an all-time high, the ‘fast’ university risks ethical impoverishment; if everyone is too busy, too stressed, then collegiality, mutuality, commenting on a colleague’s paper, supporting one another, writing references for students, and so on become impossible and the focus is only on one’s own career and ability to survive and withstand multiple pressures. Parkins and Craig (2006, p. 47) call it the ‘ethics of time’—taking time for oneself and the other.

A way forward for the humanities is to take the lead from Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber and slow things down. That is, humanities practitioners need to reform their discipline and then advocate for the value of a social and institutional context that allows critical thought, research, and institutional, staff, and student wellness to thrive. Berg and Seeber (2016, pp. 10–11) acknowledge that

the discourse of crisis has become part of the problem … it creates a sense of urgency—act quickly before it is too late—which makes us feel even more powerless in the face of overwhelming odds. The discourse of crisis also inadvertently encourages passivity—if it’s too late, why bother?

Inspired by the slow food movement, in The Slow Professor, Berg and Seeber (2016) advocate for slowing things down in academic life to resist the brutal pressures of the corporate university, and to enter more deeply and more effectively into teaching and research by cultivating collegiality and mutuality in the university. Such a philosophy is part of broader movements globally to live with care and attention in an attempt to live in ‘a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way’ (Parkins and Craig 2006, p. ix; emphasis in original). One of these authors’ key ideas takes from Oili-Helena Ylijoki and Hans Mäntylä’s notion of ‘timeless time’, arguing that it is crucial for meaningful work within the academy, as relentless time pressures lead to ‘feelings of powerlessness’ (Berg and Seeber 2016, p. 26). Berg and Seeber (2016) quote Bodil Jönsson as stating, ‘surely we know that intellectual work … cannot be measured in the same way as industrialization’ (Berg and Seeber 2016, p. 26). There is a major disconnect between the labour of humanistic study and the age of technology; the demands of the two are arguably fundamentally incompatible.

Berg and Seeber (2016) describe that students require happy teachers, not overworked ones, and students thrive if teachers themselves are not overburdened. But, in an increasingly pressurised academic context, this balance is a challenge to achieve unless an active stance against the culture of speed can take place. So, too, the ‘supermarket model of research’ is at odds with the ethical dimensions of time by not allowing for ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ (Berg and Seeber 2016, p. 58). ‘Slowing down is about asserting the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition and complexity’ in the development of knowledge (Berg and Seeber 2016, p. 57). Slowing down allows for things to ripen—for periods of rest. The idea of slowness is relevant to all research, ultimately, as Isabella Stengers (2018) has argued for slowness in science, too. Slowness is one of the foundational principles of the university: contemplation, reflection, trying out different styles of thought, and so on. The neoliberal order, which has drained the university of the possibility of ‘slowness,’ needs to be robustly challenged and slowness needs to be defended if universities are to serve one of their core functions.

Important work has been conducted in this area of ‘slow education’, including that of Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush, in their book, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching. With its anti-consumerist stance, work such as Barbeza and Bush’s (2014) signals a drastic need for change in the workplace cultures of universities, wherein students are often highly anxious and in need of slowing down and becoming mindful—as well as in teaching practices, which could offer students more contemplative pedagogies.

Gerald Graff is practical about the challenges facing the humanities in the context of a ‘fast’ world:

The ceaseless invitation to distraction issued by our increasingly compelling electronic gadgets, the grinding effects of the economics of education, and the atmosphere of nonstop hysteria generated by the media. An excellent bunch of reasons for the decline in [humanities subjects such as] literary studies. All of these factors work against a discipline that is predicated on the ability of people to absent themselves from the world and enter into extended periods of solitude, concentration, meditation.

(Harpham 2011, pp. 99–100)

Robert Louis Stevenson identifies extreme busyness as ‘a symptom of deficient vitality’ of ‘a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people …, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation’ (Odell 2019, p. 6). In the context of a university, the most pernicious element of busyness is that it leads to moral bankruptcy by enforcing a ‘survival mode’ that can only encourage the worst kinds of academic self-absorption. There is an ethics—therefore—to time. An unlikely criterion for promotion is to help a colleague or to offer students high-quality pastoral care. Are universities, in fact, rewarding self-absorption?

b.

Jobs for the Future

Newman’s and Arnold’s somewhat idyllic notions of university education comprise a vision of a sequestered space away from the vicissitudes of capitalistic society. Such ideas, attractive as they may seem, must also sit alongside the imperatives of the global job market. Universities must still prepare students for work. Therefore, a way forward for the humanities is to make greater connections between what is learned at the university and the development of competencies for the workplace—as well in making students lifelong learners. An example of this is a practice at Google called ‘20 percent time’ which the company founders introduced in 2004. In this practice, Google employees are encouraged to take a day a week to work on a ‘Google-related passion project of their own choosing or creation’ (Robinson 2018); this provides them a space from which many innovations arise. Whether or not this practice has continued at Google is somewhat under debate, but what ‘20 percent time’ does demonstrate is that innovation often rises outside of formal structured work practices. What employees need, in these contexts, is critical capacities and the ability to compare various ideas and ways of working, as well as various approaches and possibilities beyond what is immediately in front of them—to slow down and allow innovation to rise.

There is often a mismatch between the way things are run in humanities departments and the way in which the undergraduate student expects to learn: that is, they do not necessarily connect what they are learning in the humanities to their employment. This needs to be better articulated by the departments and academics with emphasis on real-world applications related to critical capacities.

Advocates for the humanities argue that a liberal arts education does prepare students for work beyond the university; at the very least it constitutes social capital and critical reasoning training. But there also seems to be a mismatch between the priorities of students and those of academics. Academics argue that students should enrol in these subjects because they make students socially aware critical thinkers—indeed, “overcoming narcissism” means becoming even morally aware (Nussbaum 2010). But how do they translate to careers? This appears inconclusive—or at least, poorly researched historically—and awaits the evidence base that is beginning to be gathered through monitoring that is currently in training to measure and demonstrate the public benefits of humanities research.

In their study on job outcomes of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) graduates, the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2017) found that these graduates comprised almost two-thirds of Australia’s workforce. Graduates have highly prized skills, including problem solving and transferrable skills, which are essential for a life where people are likely to change jobs several times. This finding is in keeping with the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 Report, whose authors emphasise the importance of critical, social, emotional, and creative skills, as well as a commitment to flexibility and lifelong learning (OECD 2021)—all attributes of an arts graduate. These data from the AAH are at odds with the Australian Job-Ready Graduates Package (Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment 2020), which is aimed at promoting graduate employment outcomes by assuming students will choose courses that are not as expensive for them, and it is founded on data that HASS graduates are not as employable, with only a 40% graduate employment uptake. Fees in Law and Arts, for example, have been increased by up to 113%, and fees for degrees such as science and health have been reduced by up to 20%. This policy, however, does not take into account the skills graduates gain from humanities degrees that are taken up across a plethora of industries. Moreover, it is simply discriminatory against those who cannot afford to study the humanities on account of this increase. As During (2014) puts it, ‘the humanities may form a world more than they provide a social good, but that does not mean that access to them should be determined by money’.

Steven Connor (2014), a self-professed utilitarian, says that ‘while oddly enough the best preparation for advanced thinking about difficult problems is probably to have studied one set of things in a very, very effective and quite remorseless kind of way’ and that to learn a discipline takes many, many years; he also believes that the current education models will change:

The model that people will be educated until, you know, 21, at which time they will be intellectually formed to do some kind of operation or another, that’s finished. I mean, it will carry on … partly because economies are so fast, technological change is so fast … human life is so much longer, so all of those things put together mean that we would be insane to imagine that, even if we just wanted to train people to do something useful—and there is a part of me that feels that in a way we should probably do that for about 16, 17 years, and then have graduate education throughout life … there will be a lot more of people paying for themselves and that will mean that education and entertainment will start to, as it is already happening, start coming together and it will be funded in much more diverse ways, and I think some of our worries that are turf worries, they are territory worries, and ultimately they are worries about what proportion of available public funding we will get to keep us doing this kind of thing.

(Connor 2014)

Likewise, During (2014) notes that ‘if the humanities were to disappear, new social and cultural configurations would then exist. Would this be a loss or gain?’ While devastating for devotees of the humanities, it could be the case that the humanities represent a world order that will soon be surpassed. In other words, the future of lifelong learning and formal tertiary education will see significant change. The question, though, is the following: how are the disciplines adapting and will government public policy enable these changes and optimal student learning for jobs of the future or will it dissuade students with burgeoning critical capacities from humanities degrees, losing critical innovative capacity and the very disciplines that fuel that criticality (as well as the many other benefits noted above)?

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the job prospects of humanities postgraduates. As Frank Donoghue (2008, p. 34) writes, ‘The job market in the humanities, then, is not a market at all,’ a situation which describes the US but which also could be applied to Australia. Small (2013, p. 65) adds to this dilemma: ‘The doctorate in English, or History, or Modern Languages, or Philosophy trains students to become university teachers of English, or History, or Modern Languages (etc.) at a time when there are fewer and fewer jobs in academia to be had’. McDonald goes further, offering a harsh criticism of a situation where humanities doctoral candidates are trained in a system which will then be unlikely to employ them. He writes:

we need to educate PhD students in such a way that they might be able to get a job. It is also one of the most glaring indictments of the humanities that we continue to direct our best and brightest students into years of lonely research followed by years of precarious temporary teaching, at the end of which most will fail to find an academic post.

(McDonald 2015)

Helen Small (2013, p. 65) describes the academic job market for the humanities as one of ‘bad faith’; McDonald (2015) ends by calling it ‘cruel’. However, it is not the sole responsibility of academic staff to create jobs for promising students; it is a structural issue much deeper than this.

While the humanities may offer ways of approaching a world that stands in conflict with demands economic labour and obsessions over monetary gain, this does not render them useless.

Academics and university bureaucrats alike need to understand the value of the humanities and emphasise the practical value of a humanities education—demonstrating how it will be of benefit to the world. A connection must be made between the knowledge and the intellectual training that graduates and postgraduates in the humanities are given and the practical activities of the market: media, businesses, journalism, the civil service, politics, publishing, and so on. The link between training given and how it is used is much less transparent than with vocational subjects such as law and medicine—or in the sciences where the content of the training continues to be used—but there is, demonstrably, a significant tangible benefit and job-readiness as a result of this training.

c.

Employment that Enables Jobs of the Future

A crucial way forward for the humanities is set at the feet of university bureaucrats and executives: reverse casualisation within academic staffing, work towards placing those staff on more secure contracts, and make casual academics fractional or permanent part-time members of staff. This effort may also assist in addressing the issue of employment for PhD graduates. The National Tertiary Education Union of Australia completed a cost–benefit analysis of what the financial implications would be for universities should this take place—i.e., granting fractional positions to casual academics—and the result was that it would only be marginally more expensive for universities to do this. The benefits, on the other hand, would be enormous: secure and happy staff who contribute to the curriculum regularly and who have time to research and contribute to university culture and to civic life. By establishing a reliable pool of colleagues for academic staff and management and allowing for research and ‘slow’ time as articulated in the previous section, universities attract staff and provide the capacity for the kinds of criticality-building skills—not only in their own degrees but also cross-degree. Furthermore, universities with a better reputation for treating their staff attract consciously minded students who care about the wellbeing of their educators and the employment values of the university management, as they recognise, implicitly or explicitly, how that translates to their own quality of education and job prospects. Universities are increasingly focusing on developing industry partnerships for student work experience and research collaborations.5

It is well known that conditions for adjunct, casual, or ‘sessional’ academic staff within universities are generally appalling. Frank Donoghue (2008) describes this as a phenomenon of a service proletariat in a post-Fordist production economy. At present in Australia, there have been claims made for wage theft against two major sandstone universities, including allegations that casual academic staff have not been paid for the hours they worked.6 Casual academics are often taken for granted because it is assumed that they do the work for the love of their subject or as apprentices. But many casual academics turn into roaming scholars, persons who work at multiple institutions at one time in order to make ends meet without receiving any income over the summer, sick leave, or other entitlements (Donoghue 2008). This precarious employment is also a significant ethical issue for HR departments at universities to consider. Universities profit from the education and skills of casual academics without investing in their academic or professional development. Casual staff are obliged to keep up to date in their field but do not receive the support to do so. Inadequate support for casual staff can quickly turn into a quality-assurance issue for universities. Thankfully, there has been a very recent turnaround within Australia. The University of Sydney has permitted casual staff five days of paid sick leave and has plans to increase the number of ongoing positions for academic staff, a trend which will be followed by the University of Technology, Sydney, the Australian Catholic University, and potentially Flinders University (Dodd 2023).

The predicament of casual academics is also exceptionally awkward for continuing or fixed-term academic staff, as most sessional or adjunct staff have the same training as those on contracted, continuing, or tenured positions, but they do not live with the same sense of stability and security. Continuing academic staff need to advocate on their behalf to ensure an improvement in their conditions. Another deeply uncomfortable element of this situation, as Donoghue (2008, p. 65) points out, is that students ‘have no way of distinguishing tenured professors from adjuncts and have no sense of the very different working conditions’. Students should be made aware of which staff are casual and which are continuing because it would give them a clearer picture of how universities run, and perhaps they might advocate for better conditions also.

9. Conclusions

The humanities may be in need of revival, but this is unlikely to emerge from a negative position. Maria Nikolajeva (2014) states:

Of course, we are complaining all the time, and we are complaining because we want the politicians to support more, not to take away things that are already there, not to close libraries, not to withdraw support, so we are complaining, and … But complaining will not take you anywhere. You just have to voice your beliefs.

Complaint: There seems to be nothing more satisfying than articulating the crisis we find ourselves in, but it only gets us so far if the ones we are complaining to are either (a) other complainants who reinforce the general sense of malaise, (b) those who could do something but believe there is no value in what we do, or, (c) even worse, those that believe that the humanities actively contribute to polarisation through approaches that actively shut down civic discourse and limit criticality.

The humanities need to widen and deepen their critical function and, in so doing, develop more nuanced ethical positions on the part of their practitioners. The reality is that we face urgent issues that include climate change, global poverty, corruption, radical inequality, war, and injustice. The humanities have an important role in responding to these challenges by training us how to think critically and creatively. The value, purpose, and role the humanities play in civic life must be defended. So, too, must we acknowledge their role in contributing to wellbeing and meaning making, which has effects that are far beyond simple equations of economic value—although they do not exclude them. Universities must not cave-in to a culture of speed, and they must slow down. Finally, academics must be supported while the over-emphasis on casualisation should cease. The humanities need to make their case for how relevant they are for the world of work and jobs—however indirectly—through the knowledge and skills training their departments provide.

It is not all doom and gloom for the humanities. Developments in the past two decades show that the humanities have evolved to encompass collaborations with the sciences, including in the realms of medical humanities, environmental humanities, anthropocene studies, posthumanism, and the posthumanities. It is evident that the humanities play an increasing role in transdisciplinary work and study. This ‘meta-discipline’s’ (to borrow During’s (2014) term for it) future is bright if it boldly goes forward and makes its case in a way that does not come from or lead to divisions but instead contributes to collective solutions for humanity.