Humanities DisciplinesIn many people’s eyes, the humanities disc

Humanities Disciplines
   Good morning, everyone. Today we are going to talk about humanities disciplines.
   Many people say that the humanities disciplines have collapsed, but for the most part they do not say this with a huge amount of anxiety. Students continue to enroll in humanities courses; they continue to go to graduate schools so that they can some day teach humanities courses themselves, and a great deal of scholarship is still published. It is comforting to assume that as long as these conditions obtain, the disciplinary situation will shake itself out. I have no idea whether or not the complacent attitude will prove to be the wise attitude, though it often does. I do think, however, that the humanities disciplines are facing a crisis of rationale, and sooner or. later crises of rationale can lead to crises of funding, and those, at least, are serious. The humanities occupy only a comer of the higher education marketplace, but it has historically been a very prestigious corner. Although no one is likely to take the trouble to cut the humanities disciplines off, there is some fear that the action, including the funding, is moving into areas of teaching and research that can demonstrate a more obvious market utility. The humanities disciplines don’ t seem to be dying out, but they do feel dislocated. They are institutionally insecure because they appear to have lost their philosophical roots. The question I attempt to address is exactly what those roots were in the first place.
   The history of higher education in the United States since the Second World War can be divided into two periods. The first period, from 1945 to 1975, was a period of expansion. The composition of the higher education system remained more or less the same--in certain respects, the system became more uniform--but the size of the system increased dramatically. This is the period known in the literature on American education as the Golden Age. The second period, from 1975 to the present, has not been honored with a special name. It is a period not of expansion, but of diversification. Since 1975, the size of the system has grown at a much more modest pace, but the composition—who is taught, who does the teaching, and what they teach—has changed dramatically. You cannot understand the second phase, the phase the university is in now, unless you understand the first.
   In the Golden Age, between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.
   Three external factors account for this expansion: the first was the baby boom; the second was the relatively high domestic economic growth rate after 1948; and the third was the Cold War. What is sometimes forgotten about the baby boom is that it was a period of record high birth rates that followed a period of record low birth rates--the Depression and the Second World War. When Americans began reproducing at the rate of four million births a year, beginning in 1946, it represented a sharp spike on the chart. The system had grown accustomed to abnormally small demographic cohorts.
   The role played by the Cold War in the expansion of higher education is well known. The American university had
been drawn into the business of government-related scientific research during the Second World War. At the time of the First World War, scientific research for military purposes had been carded out by military personnel, so-called "soldier- scientists". Then there was an idea to contract this work out to research universities, scientific institutes, and indepen- dent private laboratories instead. In 1945 was organized the publication of a report, Science--The Endless Frontier, which became the standard argument for government subvention of basic science in peacetime, and which launched the collaboration between American universities and the national government. Bush is the godfather of the system known as contract overhead-.-the practice of billing granting agencies of indirect costs, an idea m which many humanists owe their careers. Then, in 1957, came Sputnik. Though it had the size and lethal potential of a beach ball, Sputnik stirred up a panic in the United States. Among the responses (including, possibly, the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960) was the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The Act put the federal government, for the first time, into the business of subsidizing higher education directly, rather than through government contracts for specific research. Before 1958, public support had been administered at the state level.