You often hear talk about how Canadian institutions need to do more research. Better research. “World-class” research, even. Research that will prove how smart our professors are, how efficient they are with public resources, and, hence, justify a claim to an even greater share of those resources.
In medicine, the biological sciences, and engineering, this call is easy to understand. Developments in these areas can – with the right environment for commercialization – lead to new products, which, in turn, have direct economic benefits to Canadians. In the social sciences, too, it makes sense. Most social sciences have (or should have) some relevance to public policy; thus, having world-class research in the social sciences can (or should) mean an improvement in that country’s governance, and its ability to promote a strong, healthy, and equitable society.
But what about in the humanities? Is there a national public interest in promoting world-class research in the humanities?
My answer is no. For two reasons.
The first is kind of technical. When it comes to research, “world-class” status tends to get defined by bibliometrics. In the sciences, scholarly conversations are, by their nature, global, and so a single standard of measurement makes sense. But in the humanities, an awful lot of the conversations are, quite properly, local. And so while bibliometric comparisons in the humanities, within a single country (say, between institutions), might say something important about relative scholarly productivity, comparisons between countries are, to a large degree, only measuring the relative importance of different national polities. A strategy favouring world-class bibliometric scores in History, for instance, would de-emphasize Canadian History and Aboriginal studies, and instead focus on the Roman and British Empires, and the United States. And that, obviously, would be nuts.
But there’s a bigger issue here: namely, why do we assume that the worth of humanities has to be judged via research, in the same manner we judge scientific disciplines? Arguments in defence of the humanities – from people like Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Fish, etc. – stress that the discipline’s value is in encouraging students to think critically, to appreciate differences, and to create meaning. And it’s not immediately obvious how research contributes to that. Even if you completely buy the argument that, “scholarly engagement is necessary to teaching”, can you really claim that an increased research load improves teaching? Have students started thinking more critically since 3/3 teaching loads were cut to 2/2 in order to accommodate more research?
The real national public interest is in having a humanities faculty that can develop critical thinkers, promote understanding, and foster creativity. Figuring out how to better support and celebrate those things is a lot more important than finding yet more ways for the humanities to ape the sciences.
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Also see Wayne Simpson and Herb Emery’s research on this – ungated here http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/q326722166424uh2/fulltext.pdf . They make the related point that “world class” in economics means “published in international journals”, and international journals aren’t typically interested in publishing studies on Canadian policy issues. They have hard evidence how the concentration on international prestige pushes Canadian economists away from researching Canadian policy issues.
For now, I want to focus just on two remarks here, Alex. First, you noted that “the discipline’s [ie, the Humanities’] value is in encouraging students to think critically, to appreciate differences, and to create meaning,” and second you wrote that “it’s not immediately obvious how research contributes to that.” I should note up front that I’m a teaching professor (rather than a research-focused professor) in an English department, so you can control for self-interest should you reply.
Your first point amounts to a declaration that humanities research doesn’t have value in itself, only in equipping students to go off and do something outside the humanities. I’m hoping you mean something more complex than that, but I don’t see it in your post. If I set my own discipline aside, my colleagues in history, linguistics, and assorted language departments all do substantive research in subjects of material consequence: students’ “critical thinking” is a by-product of their learning, which really does amount to an engagement with the subject of the professor’s research.
If you want to see some exemplary humanities research, I’d encourage you, on Twitter, to follow the #ASEH2013 hashtag, for talks this week in Toronto at the American Society for Environmental History. These scholars’ research work is embedded in their teaching (for those who are active teachers, of course), often growing into it, and they’re building in their research and in their teaching the understanding needed for Canadians to live justly and sustainably and responsibly.
I don’t want to think you see their work otherwise, but like I said, your post today doesn’t give me a reason to think otherwise.
On your second point, let me speak more personally. Like all teaching faculty at my school, I teach eight courses per year. Most colleagues in my position teach 3/3/2, because it’s excruciating to teach 4/4, and yet I’ve chosen 4/4 in each of the last three years. I’m basically useless for the entire month of May, but I put myself through it in order to build something of a research term into my year.
I learned that if I’m not doing active research, then I’m so buried in my 3/3/2 teaching (which I did for several years) that I become increasingly ill-equipped to teach upper-level classes or to work productively with graduate students. Even if my only goal is to present upper-level students with the challenges necessary to promote your stated ideal outcomes of critical thinking and so on, there’s simply no way to meet these students at their level unless I’m doing some active research. Of course, it’s NOT my only goal to help students develop critical thinking skills, because I want them to engage with the substance of the discipline rather than merely its tools and byproducts, but even your skills-focused model requires me to do disciplinary research.
I haven’t said anything here about “world class,” but for now let me just say that I’m worried you’re mistaking metrics for quality.
Hi Richard,
Some subtleties have clearly got lost due to my self-imposed 450-word maximum.
I’m not suggesting that humanities research has no value. I would agree with what I think is implicit the second half of your argument – that some research activities are necessary to keep a professor in some kind of touch with his or her discipline and maintain his or her value as a teacher. But it doesn’t have the kind of externalities that research in sciences and engineering do, so it’s not obvious to me what the rational is for humanities professors having kinds of course load, release-time arrangements and funding that scientists get, in the name of being “world-class” in the way other disciplines measure that term.
(obviously, the kinds of loads I’m talking about are considerably lower than yours…HEQCO had an interesting piece a little while ago suggesting that among FT professors in Ontario, the load in Arts was slightly less than 2/2. See: https://higheredstrategy.com/a-zinger-from-heqco/)
Also, there may be some disciplinary fuzziness around what each of us is including in the humanities…there are certainly bits of the history and linguistics professions which are a great deal more applied than others, and which – to me at any rate – seem like social sciences. But that’s probably a side issue.
There’s that tricky word “applied,” though: your argument (compressed into 450 words, which as you suggest is nearly guaranteed to unhelpfully minimize some subtleties) seems to depend on the idea that non-applied humanities research doesn’t deserve much support. The term “externalities” muddies some of the nuance, but to me it seems that you’re suggesting it’s a poor idea to support research without near-immediate material application. Is that accurate?
I’d argue that where Humanities faculty members are focused on Canadian issues (and not all of them are!), their research falls into the broad category of cultural studies: understanding the nation and its culture. This seems meaningful to me, though clearly it’s not going to score well in international metrics analyses.
But I may be misunderstanding you on one additional point. Would you argue against supporting “world-class” humanities research generally, or would you restrict your argument to a lower-population country like Canada? I’m wondering, for example, if you’d make the same argument about USA-focused humanities scholars in the USA, even though their nation-specific research qualifies as “world class” simply because it ticks more metrics boxes than Canadians’ does.
Incidentally, departments in Humanities here run at either 2/2 or 3/2 loads. It’s only folks in my category who teach 4/4 (currently referred to as “Senior Instructors,” with a ratification vote ongoing on, among many other things, the term “Assistant Teaching Professor”).
I think that American scholars are more likely to put up “world-class” stats without trying, put it that way. It doesn’t necessary mean their work would necessarily be seen higher quality if you used some non-bibliometric standard. As Frances implied out earlier in this thread, you could do great work in Canadian economics and no one would notice because it wasn’t published in the right journals.
I’m not suggesting it’s a poor idea to support research without near-term material application; I am suggesting that a lot of what passes for research in the humanities doesn’t have a lot of long-term application, either. And I think most people in the humanities know that; it’s why when they’re making the case for support of the humanities, it’s always in terms of “ah. but we help people think critically”. I personally don’t think the evidence for that is quite as strong as some people claim, but let’s take it as read for the moment. If that’s why we support humanities, what’s the justification for having so many tenured humanities profs essentially turning their back on actual teaching? Because big-league research does mean, in a sense, abandoning teaching to a large degree.
I don’t have actual stats to back this up – just my knowledge of how various national systems of education work – but I’m fairly sure there are no other major HE systems where so large a percentage of humanities professors work 2/2. We did it because we wanted tenure-track folks to be more research-intensive. We almost certainly got more publications, but it’s not clear we got more quality in those publications (let alone any other wider quantifiable benefits to society). But we did it all at a cost of larger class sizes and a more casualized workforce – and if you believe that humanities’ main contribution to the economy is proividing society with more critical and creative thinkers, you have to wonder if the costs of this policy haven’t outweighed the benefits.
Hi Alex,
No time yesterday to respond, but better late than never.
Separating the questions “Is there meaning in the assertion of ‘world-class’ for humanities research” and “is there a public interest for Canada in supporting such humanities research”. The slam about humanities aping sciences is a subsidiary of the first question.
On Q. 1, of course there is. We all work in peer-reviewed global socially-constructed knowledge clusters we call disciplines. Some scholarship changes the way we understand a field or discipline or aspect of the world. It becomes must-read work for anyone in that field or discipline, and often beyond also. Northrop Frye’s work would be a Canadian example. A rule of thumb would be the stuff that ends up on PhD reading lists. Peer review is the validating mechanism, and it does not quantify well in humanities or some social sciences, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist (and peer-review is what gives credibility to bibliometrics where that is meaningful, also). Any Canadian academic can name you fifty must-read works that have shaped scholars’ understanding of his/her field. And writing research-based academic books takes major time. Also, there is no aping of the sciences here — humanities scholarship with international reach and influence in the West goes back practically to Gutenberg, long before our current institutional configurations.
I would also flip your assertion and say that publication in an international peer-reviewed journal is FAR too low a bar to justify the label of “world-class.” There is a place for excellent or respectable scholarship that contributes incrementally to building up knowledge in a specific area of inquiry, much of it in international journals, but I would separate that work from the field-shaping work, and would try to reserve gushing labels for the latter.
Is there a public interest in having such research in Canadian universities, and having systems in place (including teaching/research loads) that support it? Again, certainly. Not because of specific economic or technological spin-offs, but because having excellent recognized research in humanities builds the reputation of our universities, and having strong, internationally respected universities in Canada is in the public interest. I think you would agree with this — don’t you?
A side note on teaching: it is important to recognize how different the task is between humanities and sciences (or business or law or …). Teaching in humanities often entails extensive investment of time in prep and marking not commonly experienced by our colleagues in the sciences. And graduate supervision is usually very reading-intensive and _inversely_ proportional to our research output, rather than a multiplier to it as in a lab or research team configuration. Plus often taught above-load. Also even a 2/2 teaching load is higher than most or all of our non-Arts colleagues have, before one even considers qualitative differences in what teaching means to each.
In short, this one was a miss for me, but keep it up — your work is important to the sector!
Hi Ryan,
“having excellence recognized research in humanities builds the reputation of our universities and having strong internationally respected universities in Canada is in the public interest”.
I’m actually not convinced the first half of that is true, tbh. I mean, part of my point is that given the more localized nature of scholarly discussions in the humanities (not that they are all that way, but a much greater proportion of them are), is that its incredibly difficult to become internationally-recognized for humanities research. As for the second part, it depends what you mean. I certainly think we need a strong higher education system. There are, however, countries which manage to achieve that without concentrating achievement in a few big “world-class” universities the way we have done (Norway, Finland – arguably Israel).
Your point about prep time is interesting. It would be interesting to have some data to make some comparisons in this area (the Canadian data for the “Changing Academic Profession” isn’t public domain yet, unfortunately). But wouldn’t that be all the more reason not to encourage science-like research burdens?
Thanks for reading.
Hi Alex,
Busy week in AB! But returning with a brief comment. I guess my disconnect is with your idea that humanities scholarship tends to be more “local” than other types of scholarship. All the humanities scholarship I can think of is embedded in international academic discussion (often multilingual, also). Daoism, British women’s writing, symbolic logic, queer theory, Ukrainian folklore studies — you name it. At the grad level, people apply to study in particular schools very often because they have encountered the work of the academics there (or the profs advising them have). I suppose Drama might be the most relentlessly “local,” but international reputations are also generated in Drama, and more readily in the other fine arts. So I am not seeing the localism, but perhaps I am missing your point?
Ryan
“And it’s not immediately obvious how research contributes to that. Even if you completely buy the argument that, “scholarly engagement is necessary to teaching”, can you really claim that an increased research load improves teaching? Have students started thinking more critically since 3/3 teaching loads were cut to 2/2 in order to accommodate more research?”
You are kidding, right? This is somewhat astonishing: if you think that research done in the humanities does not contribute to better teaching, to participating in the big conversations about big things, to the ability to give your students much, much more, then you have are missing something. Or you’ve never done real research in the areas you teach.
I’m not sure you’re quite grasping the argument. I have no doubt that research in field X improves one’s ability to teach the substance of field X (I am not sure that reducing the teaching burden by a third provides a concomitant rise in teaching quality, or that this is the most efficacious way to raise teaching quality, but that’s another story). What I was saying (and what you’ve obscured by the way you’ve chopped my quote there) is that the key claim for the value of the humanities made by its supporters in the humanities is not that they provide students with knowledge and skills in a particular discipline, but that in so doing students acquire such things at “critical thinking”, “creativity”, etc and such things – what is unclear to me is how a heavier research load would improve teaching in those areas.
I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, though. Could you perhaps explain how this works?
One of the things that carrying out decent research does do IS tutor one in critical thinking and creativity–of that there is no doubt. You have to get good at it; you have to do it; and you know what it takes. When you do good research you (to use your words) “create meaning”–and you have to do is at a high level if you take it seriously and attempt to publish in serious places.
You wonder about the worth of knowledge in the Humanities. Where do you think this comes from, just looking at it? No, it comes from people writing about and thinking about it. In short, in comes from research. You might not get Kant, but when you read about work done on Kant, you might. That “work” will be research.
Without research in the Humanities, it all stands still, and it will all go away. The VERY best university teachers I personally ever had were first-class scholars.