The humanities are facing a credibility crisis
Washington Post | Aaron Hanlon
Hanlon, an assistant professor of English at Colby College, explains that scholars can earn back public trust in the humanities, but first must choose whether the humanities is a “kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values” governing institutions, or is “foremost…knowledge work…requiring institutional and civic credibility.”
“The public doesn’t seem to trust that we are engaging in real, methodical scholarly inquiry — or, at least, that such inquiries amount to much more than informed or pretentious opinion-making… [second, there’s] the idea that humanities scholars are activists first and only then scholars leaves much of the public skeptical of the work we do…”
Where next? Hanlon says, “It’s clear there’s a fork in the road….Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work and therefore requiring institutional and civic credibility to function and thrive…Down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility…”
“The latter path is the one many humanities scholars appear to be moving toward. If it’s the one they choose, then we should be clear-eyed about its implications: The credibility crisis will only worsen — and the role of the humanities within the university will grow still more tenuous.”
