Stefan Collini, a professor of English literature and intellectual history at Cambridge University and author of “What Are Universities For?” held a talk Tuesday in the Minor Hall auditorium to discuss the fate of humanities programs in a culture that increasingly values hard sciences.
Collini began with a historical perspective of university development – starting with the rise in enrollment and funding for higher education following World War II.
Since the 1980s, however, he said universities have primarily been viewed as “engines of economic growth,” aligned with the needs of industry, finance and commerce.
To increase their funding, these universities are forced to compete with their peer institutions by demonstrating their programs’ and their students’ economic potential.
Humanities scholars should defend the value of their fields of study, Collini said, by highlighting their ability to deepen human understanding.
“The very open-endedness of [humanities scholars’] activities comes to legitimate forms of inquiry that may run counter to the aims of those who founded or supported it,” he said.
Rather than encouraging the adoption of central values of society, Collini said, universities should challenge and alter existing beliefs.
Although Collini suggested a broad humanities education can provide potential employers with a more creative workforce than that provided by a narrow technical education, he said a humanities education should not be evaluated solely based on its social benefits. Quantitative measures, he said, would fail to capture the true value of a liberal arts degree.
“I believe that he made utterly compelling statements about the arguments we should make to people outside the University about what we do and why it should be valued by society,” English Prof. Jessica Feldman said. “What I expected was a very finely-grained, very humanistic argument that I had not heard before, and that’s what I got.”
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