  Letters Archive
Erudition and
Specialization
Centers such as ours serve to
bring together scholars in
the humanities and other
fields to share knowledge across
what are sometimes artificial
boundaries of academic departments. As Director of
the Warren
Center during the last three years,
I have been fortunate to be involved in encouraging
discussions
of problems such as the different
approaches (literary, anthropological, historical)
to the nature of
culture and the interaction of science and society.
These are questions that are both historical and
contemporary and that have included members of many
different disciplines. One
of the most common ad verse images of faculty,
perhaps especially of those in the humanities, is
that of excessive specialization, of concentrating on
such narrowly-defined research topics as to ignore or
forget the broad based liberal education that was
supposed to be their metier. Edmund Wilson wrote a
famous scathing review of a new edition of the works
of William Dean Howells, castigating the author for
devoting page after page of the introduction to the
use of commas. Barbara Tuchman, the best-selling
freelance historian, criticized her academic
colleagues for their pettifogging concerns that meant
nothing to a public eager to learn about great
historical issues and enterprises. Recent decades
have certainly expanded the horizons of such
disciplines as English and history so that the Image
of overspecialization does not fit the present
reality. No
one can accuse humanities faculty of failing to
address current political questlons—If any thing,
they are now attacked by such widely-read authorities
as The Wall Street Journal for excessive (and
leftist) attention to social issues. An emphasis on
multiculturalism, popular culture, theory, and
discourse out side the canonical, high-artistic texts
has increased the scope and range of programs in
literature and brought them closer to addressing
change and dissonance. .
History, literature, and philosophy may seem, to
those of us in universities, to have taken on new
life and multiple new interests, but to the educated
public, the humanities disciplines remain suspect for
their supposed preference for research over teaching,
their devotion to a recondite theoretical jargon, and
a reluctance to support a traditional, broad
understanding of their subjects. Much is made of the
esoteric nature of Ph.D. theses and their distance
from what universities and an educated society
actually need. Recently Louis Menand in The New
York Times linked the twin evils of
overspecialized dissertations and the terrible job
market and proposed a less rigorous set of hurdles
for doctorates in the humanities to bring graduate
education back in touch with what is really important
and in demand. Graduate education, according to this
view, might again serve a liberal educational ideal,
attracting many whose career plans lie outside
university teaching. . Lost
sight of in such proposals is that far from a
universal over specialization, there has been a
decline in many subfields, especially those that are
fundamental underpinnings to humanities disciplines.
Subjects that formerly were reasonably
well-represented in American universities are now
endangered from a mistrust of what seem to be
esoteric topics. . To
speak only of the field I know best, medieval
studies, there are basic areas for which al most no
one is now hired such as paleography (the study of
reading manuscripts) or codicology (the study of how
manuscript books were put together), subjects of
fundamental significance for understanding medieval
texts, identifying forgeries (a major medieval
pastime), dating records, or determining where they
were written and how they circulated. It is virtually
impossible for anyone with training in these areas to
be hired in departments of English or history.
There are also whole cultures that are now
marginalized, so that there are few younger scholars
employed to study them. Byzan tine history, a subject
embracing a thousand years and a society that
influenced modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and the
Balkans, has a handful of practitioners in this
country, and what were for merely active programs in
major universities are now closed. Even more
surprisingly, there are fewer than five specialists
in Anglo Saxon England employed by history
departments in the United States. Again, this is not
a tiny field of endeavor but a major culture that
lasted seven centuries. The study of canon law, a
system important not only in the history of the
Catholic Church, but also in the development of
modern law, is almost moribund after a promising era
in the 1960s and 1970s. The
overall field of medieval studies has done reasonably
well. There is a surprising degree of student
interest in this distant period and there has been no
decline in the number of positions in relevant
departments in the last twenty years. On the one hand
there has been a commend able orientation towards
under graduate teaching but this has also meant the
marginalizatlon of those specializations regarded as
incompatible with departments' priorities.
This is not to lament some crucial collapse of
Western Civilization. Even someone with my interests
would find it difficult to predicate the ruin of
American society on the decline of paleography. What
this does point to is a series of underlying crises
in the humanities disciplines apart from the
well-publicized culture wars and canon controversies,
or the severely constricted job prospects for recent
recipients of doctorates. It is an aspect of the only
partially-recognized volatility in humanities
disciplines. . Whole
subjects in the humanities are in precipitous decline.
While overall foreign language enrollments have
stabilized or increased, most of the growth has been
In one language: Spanish. Judged by enrollments and
numbers of majors, all other European languages
(except Italian) have experienced profound and m
creasing uninterest. I he case of Russian is more
recent as the collapse of the Soviet Union, far from
encouraging a new interest in a more open Russian
culture, has resulted in the halving of enrollments
despite a business job market wide open for college
graduates with Russian language skills. . With
respect to interdisciplinary research, varieties of
approaches, and a certain inner vitality, these are
good, if not the best of times for the humanities.
Joined, however, to the damage done by the culture
wars and the disastrous decline of public funding for
state universities and the National Endowment for the
Humanities is a hidden crisis that will weaken the
standards of evidence and expertise on which our
fields are based. The commitment of university
resources and the generosity of donors has made
possible the Warren Center and similar
interdisciplinary humanities centers in other
universities. Such programs not only
overcome the compartmentalization of disciplines to
encourage exploration of new topics, but also serve
to preserve in what is sometimes a discouraging
climate, a sense of the past, of culture, and of the
tradition of human thought.
For more information, contact the Center's executive director, Mona C. Frederick. [ RPW Center for the Humanities | About the Center | Visiting Fellowship Information | Howard Lecture Series | Seminars and Programs | Programs since 1987 ] [ Vanderbilt University | Site Index | Search Vanderbilt | Help ]
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