On the Road Again: Globalizing Humanities
James Deaville asked us to speculate on the future of our respective disciplines 10 years from now. As someone who started out as a cultural historian at a place where history was considered by many a social science (Vienna), then worked in a Cultural Studies Department in the postcolonial context of Hong Kong, and is teaching now in an interdisciplinary Humanities department in Canada, I find it hard to define an area, let alone my area of study – as would Michael, I suspect. But many of the interdisciplinary projects and discussions that I have had the good fortune to share with Michael have turned to the past when it came to trying to explain what is happening now (or speculating about the future). So let me start this speculation by imagining what form a tribute to Michael would have taken in the past: maybe in that mythical golden age of academia when venerated professors wrote (a few) learned books at a leisurely pace (without committees of academic managers in business-suits demanding reports on performance indicators and outcomes each semester/month/week), pursued their own interests (without the necessity to acquire funding on terms dictated by policy-makers), occasionally pondered on those interests aloud in front of polite, motivated, and consistently well-educated students (and not a diverse rabble of troublemakers who demand knowledge that is relevant to their lives, and want a good multi-media show to boot), and apprenticed a few chosen ones to continue their work. In those days, the chosen few – having been inducted into a discipline by their professor and therefore sometimes referred to as the disciples, indicating that they were disciplined well and successfully –, would probably have put together a Festschrift stressing the venerated professor’s eminence within a sub-field of this clearly defined discipline, with the explicit purpose of erecting a lasting monument to both the person and the knowledge he created. And Michael’s contributions to Musicology doubtless deserve that.
This tribute here has taken a different form. It collects interlocutors, friends, colleagues – people who have worked with Michael in teams that span disciplines, languages, and continents. This speaks very clearly to changed structures of work – in terms of teaching and the production of knowledge – in the contemporary academy, particularly in the Humanities. The breakdown of a canon in the culture wars, the linguistic turn and the ensuing complexities of poststructuralist and deconstructionist theorizing, and the huge expansion, co-optation, and professionalization of the tertiary education system has challenged academic tradition, and their firm basis in discipline (in both meanings). At the same time, the wider movement of the globalization of tertiary education, which required new strategies of diversity management in immigrant societies, but has also turned the English-speaking academy into a profitable import-export business providing very basic educational functions (in English) is hard to reconcile with a highly specialized disciplinary orientation.
These changes have, of course, affected all disciplines; professional schools and the natural sciences, much less responsible for providing basic education functions, have been able to set standards of accountability in terms of output orientation, fundraising, and graduate placement, while the humanities have had to follow suit, professionalizing themselves along the lines of models invented for other schools of thought. These contradictions between Allgemeinbildung and professionalization in Humanities education cannot be easily reconciled, no matter what pompous mission statements in glossy brochures and on flashy websites promise. One clear outcome of a market rhetoric is a redistribution of resources across the system, away from the humanities. Peer review has always accompanied an academy that understood itself as professional, but managerial practices that are defined by market-speak have flattened differences between academic and economic productivity as well as between humanistic and scientific research. The loss of disciplinarity prefigured in both the continued demand for Bildung and the move to “high theory” has been translated into fundamental structural changes to the disadvantage of the Humanities disciplines.
Under these circumstances, complaining about the dire state of affairs (sometimes by conjuring up the good old days) is one coping mechanism we are very familiar with. We all do it, it produces a sense of bonding, and it can be very therapeutic. It is also most ineffective, born as it is by a sense of entitlement that it would behoove academics to shed. A more productive option is to look for a way forward and engage the challenges in ways that accommodate globalization, seek out the intellectual challenges of interdisciplinarity without relinquishing the quality standards of traditional disciplines, embrace the pedagogical and intellectual challenges of curriculum design, and make academic work relevant by building transdisciplinary, innovative and sustainable projects and research teams that understand themselves as producing relevant Humanities expertise for a knowledge-based society.
To many, this might seem an impossible task, but Michael Saffle’s work provides us with a map. He is not a Humboldtian professor who leads and is venerated in return; he is a true intellectual who works in teams, inspires, supports, and listens. With people like him around, one has reason to be optimistic about the role of Humanities in ten years from now.
Markus
Reisenleitner
Division of Humanities,
York University
Department of
Cultural Studies, Lingnan University