The Humanities and Common Sense. By Roger Berkowtiz. Via Meadia, August 10, 2012. Archived here and here. Also at Hannah Arendt Center.
Survival Strategy for Humanists: Engage, Engage. By Jacques Berlinerblau. The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2012. Berlinerblau blog entries at The Huffington Post.
The “Popular Religion” Paradigm in Old Testament Research: A Sociological Critique. By Jacques Berlinerblau. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, December 1993.
Berkowitz:
What is
amazing is that not only do our students not want what we offer, but neither do
our colleagues. It is an amazing and staggering truth that much of what
academics write and publish is
rarely, if ever, read. And if you want to really experience the problem, attend
an academic conference some day, where you will see panels of scholars
presenting their work, sometimes to one or two audience members. According to
Berlinerblau, the average audience at academic conference panels is 14 persons.
The
standard response to such realizations is that scholarship is timeless. Its
value may not be discovered for decades or even centuries until someone,
somewhere, pulls down a dusty volume and reads something that changes the
world. There is truth in such claims. When one goes digging in archives, there
are pearls of wisdom to be found. What is more, the scholarly process consists
of the accumulation of information and insight over generations. In other
words, academic research is like basic scientific research, useless but useful
in itself.
The
problem with this argument is that such really original scholarship is rare and
getting ever more rare. While there are exceptions, little original research is
left to do in most fields of the humanities. Few important books are published
each year. The vast majority are as derivative as they are unnecessary. We
would all do well to read and think about the few important books (obviously
there will be some disagreement and divergent schools) than to spend our time
trying to establish our expertise by commenting on some small part of those
books.
The
result of the academic imperative of publish or perish is the increasing
specialization that leads to the knowing more and more about less and less.
This is the source of the irrelevance of much of humanities scholarship today.
. . . . . . . . . .
The
focus on pedagogy is a mistake and comes from the basic flawed assumption that
the problem with the humanities is that the professors aren’t good
communicators. It may be true that professors communicate poorly, but the real
problem is deeper. If generations of secondary school teachers trained in
pedagogy have taught us anything, it is that pedagogical teaching is not
useful. Authority in the classroom comes from knowledge and insight, not from
pedagogical techniques or theories.
The
pressing issue is less pedagogy than the fact that what most professors know is
so specialized as to be irrelevant. What is needed is not better pedagogical
training, but a more broad and erudite training, one that focuses less on
original research and academic publishing and instead demands reading widely
and writing for an educated yet popular audience. What we need, in other words,
are academics who read widely with excitement and inspiration and speak to the
interested public.
More
professors should be blogging and writing in public-interest journals. They
should be reviewing literature rather than each other’s books and, shockingly,
they should be writing fewer academic monographs.
