toward a new deal « Bethany Nowviskie

"This is the cleaned-up and slightly expanded text of a talk I gave last week, at a University of Illinois symposium on the future of the humanities at state-funded, US-based research universities. My paper was called "Graduate Training for a Public and Digital Humanities." The organizers of the symposium, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, framed its goals in a New Republic essay and positioned the event deliberately between two significant anniversaries: of the Morrill Act, establishing land-grant universities in the US, and the GI Bill, extending higher education to the American under-classes ... The engagement of the next generation of scholar-practitioners is crucial not just because of the positive opportunities for interpretive scholarship that come with digital inquiry at scale, or with the knowledge-producing revelation of the unfamiliar that researchers invariably experience when confronted with a single artifact at its moment of digital conversion or re-formation, deformation. And it’s crucial not only because it allows us to build new publics for the humanities, and ensure our citizenry has access to its treasure-houses, now and into the future. No. The reason we musteducate scholars and specialists in the application of digital methods to humanities questions, and must equip them to craft digital tools and platforms of their own is this: the conversion and culling of artistic and cultural content, and the wholesale re-structuring of the terms under which humanities scholarship can be conducted will happen, with or without them ... We do stand at the edge of a gulf. It’s one that most of us will not enter or cross. But our challenge (and one from which, on the whole, humanities faculty have shamefully turned away) is to replace ourselves as men and women of letters with the cohorts called to construct brilliant architectures within that space – called to construct a new habitat for the liberal arts, to develop its new habitus – to build and to fight, or be lost.  If we are to face that challenge, we must ask painful questions. We must ask ourselves what messages about the future we overtly send to devoted students of the humanities in the year 2013? And what systemic or perhaps even unintended guidance do we offer a generation that looks to us for mentorship and models? Graduate programs, taken as an aggregate, urge hordes of students down a single, well-trodden, and vanishingly narrow employment path. Do we honestlybelieve they’ll continue on that track? Do we believe that all of them should? Of the ones who attempt to go where we are sending them, how many will arrive? When? And in what condition, at what cost? In what relation to the unlucky majority – in a system in which the odds become more akin to luck than merit? Are we content with those odds – with our returns on investment – when we regard our protégés both as individuals and as a collective? Why are we, on the whole, so hapless in our engagement with this problem? Why so willing – as evinced through our daily actions in graduate teaching and counseling – to squander public resources, institutional energies, and private lives? Put more kindly: what factors inhibit us, as leaders in State-supported higher education, from pointing out the varied spaces, beyond and within the academy, where the public so clearly needs its scholar-practitioners to labor and explore? Why do we herd humanities doctoral students down a single road at all? And, finally – because unproblematic solutions would have been implemented long ago – what challenges or even dangers will we face if we do resolve to reconfigure our training practices to outfit the humanities more appropriately for journeys and projects ahead? ..."