Some thoughts on increasing fees for #Humanities programs in Australia from the perspective of a 19th-c. Humanities scholar. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… A thread… 1/14
2. NB: teaching humanities is pretty cheap. My faculty’s budget has been about the same as its tuition revenues for nearly a decade now, & tuition revenues are approx. matched by gov’t funding in my univ’s budget. Our students don’t see gov’t funding in their classrooms.
3. Increasing the price of Humanities education (regardless of its low *cost*) will limit access. What’s that line from “Withnail and I”? “Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t.”
4. In the 19th century, books were very expensive. University was unthinkable for most, and primarily devoted to the Humanities. Humanities education was a foundation for jobs in the civil service, the church, even the army (elite ranks anyway).
5. Humanities education was extremely narrow. The racism & misogyny we associate with “back then” wasn’t a function of morals or minds but of curricula: of what got taught. People could still (do still) read outside of the classroom, think for themselves, and ask other questions.
6. But institutions put a narrow subset of materials into the classroom, and so people were left to themselves—to their communities, their curiosity, their public libraries, and what spare time they had—to learn more than they were taught.
7. Gramsci’s idea of “cultural hegemony” is key here. What institutions count as “culture” helps keep the powerful in place. thoughtco.com/cultural-hegem…
8. There was a #cdnpse dept not so long ago that asked job candidates to pick the wine at the post-interview dinner. Know the right wines, know the right kind of culture, & get in the door. Mention opera, quote Cicero from memory--at least Shakespeare--& you’re in.
9. Humanities education started to shift for various reasons in the 1960s. Univs became more accessible (low bar!) & the curriculum began to be less exclusionary too—more flexible, more curiosity-driven, & open to more writers & kinds of creative production. We need more of this.
10. We confronted the logic of exclusion by which we had failed to learn--about the complexity of culture, the messiness of history & the multitude of connections between peoples, ideas, & forms. A narrow path through culture is an impoverished path. (Lots more to do on this too)
11. But I'm driving at this: Humanities education continues to be important in government circles. Being able to read, digest, and analyze large volumes of text is still a useful skill. Humanities grads also go into law, NGOs, not-for-profits, research councils, etc.
12. If the Humanities once again become the preserve of the elite—effectively “free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t”—then we're being dragged back to Humanities education as a tool of elitist cronyism, a way for insiders to identify other insiders.
13. Many Humanities grads become lawyers (& even PMs). Who will be Australia’s lawyers 20 years from now? If the Humanities once again become the preserve of the elite, then what will that mean for the range of experiences and perspectives in government 10 years from now?
14. tl;dr version... This isn’t just about an unfounded claim about #humanities grads being less employable. This is about changing the system to exercise more control over *who* gets *which* jobs.
