This conversation about @UTAustin athletics raises interesting points. Buckle up, it’s time to talk about the value of the humanities and ask how we got in a situation where it seems logical to argue sports and STEM matter more than history.
First, this argument hinges on the idea that that the monetary worth of a thing is its primary form of value, and that in a free-market, democratic society, monetary investments “naturally” reflect the desires of the people.
That system of value has a name: neoliberalism, an economic and political model that has its own distinctive history – first theorized by economists at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was then embraced by politicians in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the U.S. and U.K.
I bring this up only to point out that free-market economic values are *themselves* a social construct with a history – they’re not inherently virtuous or more valuable than other types of systems of value, and they are not “natural” or inevitable. They’re just a set of ideas.
In fact, it was a group of “elites” – academics at top universities and wealthy business elites who stood to benefit from deregulation – who put neoliberal economic policies in place and worked over several decades for their adoption by politicians.
And it was non-elites who lost out as over the past 40 years, the middle class hollowed out and inequality ballooned to levels not known since the 1920s. That has impacted state universities, too, who have suffered from massive defunding. pbs.org/newshour/educa…
In other words, though marketization as the primary form of value today seems “natural” and inevitable, there was a concerted effort to adopt market-centered systems of value. Historians can attest that market values have not necessarily always been at the center of human values.
That’s not to say that markets and economic issues didn’t matter – of course they did. But the idea that a thing should be supported and valued by society *only* if it is financially profitable? That’s quite new, and it’s a special legacy of neoliberalism.
The second leg of this argument is that a university should also be subject to market values. I am going to respond to each issue separately, because I think it’s an important conversation. I’m grateful to @einsteinIamnot for raising these issues. We don’t talk about them enough.
So let’s look at the first argument. Are the humanities valued monetarily? There are different ways to index their monetary value. One way would be book sales. prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Book sales in the social sciences and humanities – including literature, philosophy, and history – are strong and in fact that market sector is growing. So if we’re to take the market value of humanities as reflecting public interest, it would seem the public interest is there.
We might also ask what contribution to the economy arts and culture comprises. There, too, the evidence is overwhelming: arts and culture contribute 800bn to the U.S. economy. That’s more than the transportation, construction, and agriculture. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
You might also ask about the financial value of a humanities degree. Here as well the evidence is clear: STEM majors may make more money initially, but humanities soon catch up. By midcareer, humanities majors often make more money. nytimes.com/2019/09/20/bus…
So we can safely say that contrary to popular perception, there is significant economic value in fields related to humanities, arts, and culture, and that even in monetary terms, people value the arts and humanities. So why do people think the arts/humanities are not profitable?
The idea that STEM fields are the most profitable and that they therefore “deserve” more education funding was also sold to us over several decades. You can read about that history and its lack of success in this critique (in a conservative journal): americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/08/rotten…
But I want to come back to the founding assumption, which is that core tenet of neoliberalism: that a thing only has value if it can be measured monetarily and that thus, we should only invest in things that are immediately profitable. What would that look like?
I think the answer is obvious – we know that as human beings we have a need for experiences and knowledge that are not based solely on their monetary value. Arts and humanities are public goods that help us learn to be reflective enough to build better societies.
And traditionally, successful human societies have understood this and have valued the humanistic, artistic, and practical/scientific disciplines equally. We need science and technology, but we also need the humanities and arts to help us understand and use these innovations.
Scientists can give us a vaccine for Covid-19. But they can’t tell us how local religious traditions, the history of political oppression, or peoples’ susceptibility to nonscientific conspiracy theories might impact whether that vaccine gets into people’s arms. Historians can.
Scientists can tell us climate change is real and how long we have to do something about it. But they can’t craft the ad campaign that will carry the emotional punch that will make climate change legislation politically viable. Filmmakers can.
Engineers can tell us how to build the AI that will transform our world in the 21st c. But they are not specialists in the unpredictable way that human beings might interact with that AI or the moral or ethical crises that may arise. Philosophers are.
More and more, people in STEM fields know this. There’s a reason that parents in Silicon Valley send their kids to arts and humanities-based Montessori and Waldorf schools. thetimes.co.uk/article/silico…
Would we really want a world in which science and technological innovation were uninformed by the humanistic reflection engendered by history, philosophy, or the arts? Increasingly, many scientists are saying no. insidehighered.com/views/2020/02/…
So back to the university. Should university departments be valued primarily for (perceived) profitability? In the 19th c., the United States built the largest public university system in the world. That system provided residents with state-funded education at free or low cost.
Why would states do this? Because they believed paying for an educated citizenry would both drive economic growth and also create a thoughtful, reflective, educated citizenry capable of governing themselves with wisdom. theamericanscholar.org/the-virtue-of-…
Public education was viewed as a public good: much like roads, railroads, and electricity brought betterment, state investment in a broad education that includes the sciences, arts, and humanities creates educated citizens capable of building functioning, democratic societies.
That’s the value. The value of investment in education, particularly in creative, reflective fields like arts and humanities, is in the kind of society you create, not in the immediate economic return. We get to live in a society of reflective, ethical, knowledgeable citizens.
But in past 40 years, universities, too, have been subjected to the logic of profit over all. Despite the clear economic value of the humanities, we’ve come to believe otherwise, and now ask why state universities should support departments that (supposedly) don’t “make money”.
And that inequality is painfully evident at universities like @UTAustin, where the humanities are deeply underfunded compared to the sciences, business, or technology fields, and where humanities graduate students are paid so poorly they struggle to feed themselves.
And unfortunately, despite the fact that everyone benefits from living among educated citizens, there is an ongoing, systematic effort to further defund state universities. starvingthebeast.net/trailer/
It’s up to us to decide whether public universities and the economic, social, and democratic benefits they provide are valuable. It costs money to run a university. We just have to decide if it’s worth it. And we have to stop opposing sports, STEM & humanities. We need them all.

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More from @stephenniem

11 Oct 20
Congratulations @wendymk for winning Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Book Award at #MESA2020! This is only the second time an Islamic art historian has won the prize, and it couldn't go to a more paradigm-shifting book. Read it.
"Professor Shaw’s book is a bold and successful attempt to reconceptualize the historiography of Islamic art outside the current Euro-centric and colonial paradigm."
mesana.org/awards/awardee…
"To do so Shaw takes “Islam” seriously as a category of analysis, arguing that it drives the production of Islamic art, rather than being incidental to it. In the process she places in generative tension the Islamic and Western paradigms for understanding agency and subjectivity"
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11 Oct 20
There are so many things wrong with this analysis that I'm not sure where to begin. First, Dune is so patently *not* inspired by the fall of Roman Empire - Herbert calls it The Galactic Padishah Empire for a reason. It's not subtle. Not everything in history is Rome, Tom.
The idea that early Muslims would have understood the "fall of Rome" is equally anachronistic. The early Arabs experienced the Roman empire as a continuous & living entity: what we call (equally anachronistically) Byzantium, they called Rome, al-Rūm. hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
And not only did they view the Eastern Roman Empire as a living entity, it was a vibrant source of inspiration: influencing art, scholarship, and knowledge production in the early Islamic period. halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-0081740…
Read 5 tweets
11 Oct 20
'Herbert’s future is one where “Islam” is...a part of the future universe at every level. The world of Dune cannot be separated from its language...Even jihad, a complex, foundational principle of Herbert’s universe, is flattened – and Christianised – to crusade.'
'And, of course, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, the jihad of Frank Herbert’s imagination was not the same as ours [but] exhibits...influence of Sufism and its reading of jihad, where, unlike in a crusade, a leader’s spiritual transformation determined the legitimacy of his war.'
'When a director...casts people of colour out of the future, ...casts Islam out of the future, they reveal their own expectations and anxieties. They reveal an imagination at ease with genocide...with a whitewashed future that does not have any of the “mess” of the contemp world'
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22 Jul 20
Outside Cairo is the City of the Dead, a vast, sprawling necropolis ornamented with thousands of exquisite funerary structures dedicated to Sultans, scholars, and venerable forbears of the Egyptian nation. Now a construction project dooms part of it to destruction. Please sign.
And though its domed mausolea are exquisite, the City of the Dead is very much alive. Since the medieval era, its villa-like structures have been inhabited by generations of Cairene residents. Today, over half a million people live in the cemetery. huffpost.com/entry/city-of-…
If this thread has made you curious about the Qarafa, its history, and its people, read Gaila El Kadi's wonderful Architecture for the Dead from @AUCPress
aucpress.com/product/archit…
Read 7 tweets
29 Jun 20
If you or someone you know are among those who dismiss the threat of #COVID19 because there's a 99.75% recovery rate, listen up.

My mom is fairly sure she had COVID in March. She was never tested (because there was no testing at the time) but she had all the symptoms:
Profound exhaustion, a migraine-like headache, crushing chest pain, and a cough. She was sick for six weeks.

Since being sick, my famously unflappable mother, habitual climber of mountains and inveterate world traveler, has suffered with intense, crippling anxiety.
Then, about two weeks ago, she went to the dentist for a checkup and they took her blood pressure. It was sky high - 220/98. The dentist told her no way he was doing her cleaning and she should go straight to the emergency room. She did, and they ran some tests.
Read 11 tweets
28 Jun 20
Oops! Looks like someone hasn't read the UNESCO 1970 convention. Manuscripts are in fact explicitly protected, as are *cough* incunabula.

Let's have a thread about provenance, UNESCO, and the priciest Qur'an ever sold: 2 days ago at Christie's for $8M.

portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_…
OK enough shade ;-) In this thread I'm going to respond to the points raised by @incunabula one by one. I don't agree with their reading of the legal or ethical boundaries. But I do agree that having a public conversation about this is a good thing.
ICYMI @incunabula is responding to my thread about the incomplete provenance for this breathtaking 15th c. Timurid Qur'an on Ming colored and gold painted paper that just sold at Christie's for that unprecedented sum.
Read 33 tweets

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