Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University (Page 2)
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
| Welcome to the English Department Knowledge Base at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
|---|
Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
The Status of the Humanities
Ryan Boyd: "I thought we could [move on to] talking about the status of the humanities in the twenty-first century. There's been a lot of discussion within the academy lately about the purpose and use of literary studies, and the humanities in general, in an increasingly digitized, global world. Could you speak to that?."
Porter Abbott: "Yes, I have two things to say, and they both have to do with the status of the humanities in a university environment, and particularly their status vis-à-vis the physical sciences and the increasingly scientized social sciences. One has grown steadily clearer from the time I served as Acting Dean [of the Humanities and Fine Arts, UCSB, 1992-93]: it is that we have a culturally built-in bias toward the sciences that is simply inescapable. This is because the work of scientists always has the potential of leading to useful things, and in our culture useful things have an enormous weight. Sometimes, when I talk with people in the physical sciences, especially those who don’t have much contact with people in the Humanities, I pick up the idea that our main purpose, lacking the potential for useful things, is to provide a cultural polish for their children. And when we disappoint them, we are caricatured as people who mainly write for themselves in a strange language."
RB: "You mean academics in the humanities?"
PA: "Yes, we write for academics, which of course is an essential part of our profession. But since our product is the dissemination of knowledge, with only books for our things, and these of doubtful use, we are judged on our performance as disseminators. This puts us in a more vulnerable spot than our scientific brothers and sisters.
“We are also vulnerable--and this is my second point—by virtue of the fact that much of what we deal with of interest is, necessarily, speculative. Often highly speculative. There is a good reason for this, and that is there is a considerably higher degree of complexity in our field than you can find, say, in the field of physics. This makes it extremely hard for us to practice the kind of reductionism that serves as a gold standard in the physical sciences.
“Because our work not only does not lead very often to the making of useful objects, and because it is necessarily speculative, and because it deals with emotional and ethical issues, which have a pronounced subjective dimension, it is harder to get the kind of cultural respect that produces, among other things, money for research. This may account for the tendency among some humanists—and even more among social scientists--to pull their field in the direction of the physical sciences."
RB: "How so?"
PA: "Whatever you can cast as an empirical form of research increases, I think, the possibility of getting the kind of financial support that is common in the sciences. I'm generalizing very broadly here, but the final point is that it's extremely important for us, on the one hand, to acknowledge the speculative character of our discipline, especially in our rhetoric, and, on the other hand, to emphasize that it loses nothing in value for being speculative. Human beings are, after all, ethical creatures, and they have to make decisions in this life, not the next. In many critical areas, we cannot wait for the results of empirical research – which, however, does not let us off the hook in exercising due diligence when we generalize."
Page 2
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
