PROVO, Utah (March 21, 2014)—Innovation is relevant to the humanities. That was the focus of a Humanities Center symposium at Brigham Young University. Prominent scholars Robert Bullough and Christopher Newfield spoke in relation to how humanities and education are becoming more important in modern times.
Bullough, from the BYU McKay School of Education and the first external fellow of the Humanities Center, highlighted the shifts in the university education with the current social changes.
Bullough stated, “We have witnessed aggressive, rapid shifts in wealth and a weakening of all things public.” Along with these changes, there is a push towards individualism which puts people in competition and causes the social community to degrade.
Similarly, “high education responds,” Bullough said. He mentioned that year after year, tuition increases, and now total student loan debt nears one trillion dollars.
With university education, there is a growing gap in a return on investment, Bullough said.
Overall, it seems that the university system is weakening. Bullough spoke specifically about how many colleges are moving online to save money, but doing so “undermines the forms of relationships that sustain identity.” Furthermore, “student attention spans are fleeting, and students are expecting to be entertained by teachers who feel they are in a losing battle,” Bullough said.
In these current times, “fast thinking is preferred to slow, reflexive thinking,” Bullough said. But, “the faster we go, the less likely desired changes will occur in institutional life. Simply going faster is not a means to going better.”
Even with these shifts, Bullough said that “the traditional scholar still remains an ideal, especially in humanities and social sciences.” In these fields, scholarship and teaching have been able to avoid shifts to fast thinking.
While there is much wrong with today’s social and educational institutions, Bullough commented, “there’s much right. BYU is doing many things right.”
He cited specifically the aims of a BYU education, the university devotionals and forums, prayers in classes, on-campus student employment, the museums, and the honor code. “The best remedy for the unpredictability of the future is to be able to make and keep promises,” Bullough said. And the humanities have an important role: “To criticize neoliberalism”—to criticize the reduction of moral and educational ideals to economic precepts.
After Bullough’s remarks, Chris Newfield, professor of literature and American studies at UC Santa Barbara, continued the discussion of the changes within education, speaking to the problematic but important role that innovation plays in the humanities in the 21st century.
Newfield spoke on the problems of how the humanities are perceived today. He said, “The millennial generation is interested in the creative industry, but students are having a hard time imagining how they are going to support themselves.”
He asked, “Why do arts and humanities struggle? Some people believe that the humanities are intellectual things that don’t seem to pay in a deep way.”
Newfield explained that the struggle in the humanities comes because markets decide the value of everything. “These things are cultural biases that allow the humanities and arts to struggle.” He said that many of these biases are policy driven. “The culture of the economy is that science is for winners and the humanities are for those that can’t do science, that science makes money and the arts and humanities lose it.”
But Newfield refuses to accept those assumptions. He said, now, other areas of studies, such as science, have the same problems. “They struggle now on the national level.”So, Newfield said, “there’s a deeper issue we have to think about.”
“In years past, the higher the productivity, the higher the wage,” Newfield said. “That stopped. Although we continue to go to school, invest, increase productivity and creativity, we do not continue to increase our wages.”
Newfield explained his method for fixing the problem. We have to “redefine the deep needs of society beyond tech innovation.”
“The stereotype that humanities don’t make money is bogus and should be put aside. The humanities actually give money to the STEM organizations,” Newfield said. For example, the tuition gained from humanities students often helps support the expensive labs and costs required by the sciences. Furthermore, humanities students help funnel creativity and new ideas into technology, science, and business fields within industry.
“So how do you get entrepreneurs, artists and scientists to be creative? You need to pass through the university,” Newfield said.
“The goal really is linking the university with the unfolding of the destiny of mankind.”
On innovation and the humanities, Humanities Center director Matthew Wickman said that through this symposium, “we want to make the point that innovation has relevance to the humanities.”
For more information on lectures, colloquium and research within the Humanities, visit the BYU Humanities Center website.
—Stephanie Bahr Bentley BA’ English ’14