Is It Time to Dezone Knowledge? | Opinion - Inside Higher Ed

To halt the crisis in the humanities, we must rethink our classification system, argues Clifford Siskin, Berg Professor of English at New York University and William Warner, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Photo: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/RYCCIO

It’s time to bring the crisis of the humanities to a close. Efforts to track student numbers in the humanities, especially in America, now read like a long-running soap opera with high (and even modest) hopes dashed by more bad news. 

As far back as 2013, one observer in The Atlantic claimed the crisis was largely over. What had been a steep drop in numbers was now only a “gentle slope.” She was wrong. By 2015, The Washington Post reported that “the number of English majors at the University of Maryland, a public flagship, drop[ped] 39 percent over five years.” Maryland wasn’t alone, and other numbers have been telling the same story -- including declines not only in undergraduate majors but also in applications for doctoral study. 

The primary responses have been to blame or to tinker. The people who play the blame game have turned on others, dwelling on what presidents, deans, career-minded students and neoliberalism have been doing to “us.” The tinkerers have tried modest forms of self-improvement. In the United States, they include research departments in literary study that are adding creative writing tracks to their majors to bolster numbers... 

Reaching Its Shelf Life
Let’s start by agreeing on a historical fact: knowledge projects begin, and they can get stuck. The “intellectual sciences … stand like statues,” Francis Bacon wrote of the Aristotelian schemes of Scholasticism in 1620. Bacon called for what we need now: a comprehensive reorganization of knowledge. Our renewal could begin like his by clearing out intellectual clutter. He pushed aside systems and methods that had “stalled,” blocking access to “things as they are.” His purpose was to make room for doing new things with those things -- progress made possible by what he called the “good fortune” of “new resources”: printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass.

As we enter our own moment of new resources -- including the digital technologies of the information revolution -- our 19th-century zoned communities are now our clutter...

In addition to the turn to the history quoted above, Deutsch decided to publish a philosophical paper first,” not a mathematical one. And at the core of the philosophy of Constructor Theory is significant literary component: one of the theory’s primary strategies is linguistic -- the development of a new precise language for integrating the concepts of information and knowledge into our explanations of the real. Informed by a theory constructed in this way, physics emerges into compatibility as something that looks like it woke up in the wrong neighborhood -- appearing almost entirely as, in Deutsch’s words, “the theory of the effects that knowledge can have on the physical world, via people.” 
Read more...

Source: Inside Higher Ed