The Humanities in Crisis-A Time for Action
The Humanities in Crisis-A Time for Action
复制标题
DOI：
10.1080/10714413.2013.752696
复制
发表时间：
2013-01-01
影响因子：
0.5
通讯作者：
Olson, Gary
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Olson, Gary
在过去的十年里，在国家财政危机的背景下，特别是在高等教育中，关于人文研究价值的辩论激烈。许多评论家认为，与非人文学科不同，英语研究和其他人文学科等领域对大学的贡献很少。研究机构的生产科学家可以每年将其大部分或全部年薪用于外部资金。同样，生产力社会科学家通常可以支付他们工资的很大一部分。即使是医学、工程、商业、教育等专业领域的教师，也要通过外部资助的研究来增加工资。然而，我们这些人文学科的人几乎没有外部资金来源可以利用，联邦政府根本没有为国家人文基金会--人文研究的主要联邦资助机构--提供与国家科学基金会或国家卫生研究院相当的资金。1这种资助的不公平性本身就说明了我们社会的价值体系与人文学科之间的关系。那些质疑人文学科价值的人坚持认为，尽管将纳税人的钱投资于可能开发出治疗疾病的方法或加固桥梁的新方法，甚至是教育四年级学生的革命性新方法的研究是合适的，它不适合资助诸如“仲夏夜之梦中的好客环境”或“旅行理论和保罗·德曼的白鲸翻译”或“写作教学中的可用性方法”（实际标题来自2012年现代语言协会大会）等调查。他们认为一组研究项目可能对社会有实质性的贡献，而另一组则没有。这场辩论与另一场全国性的辩论--一场关于教师生产力的辩论--密不可分。州长们（如佛罗里达和德克萨斯）质疑公立大学的教师是否在欺骗纳税人，因为他们把太多的时间花在了《双城之战》的神秘研究上，而在教育学生上花的时间太少;作为补救措施，他们主张加大力度来衡量教师
Over the last decade, and in the context of the fiscal crisis in the nation in general and in higher education in particular, a debate has raged over the value of humanities research. Various commentators have argued that unlike nonhumanities disciplines, fields such as English studies and other humanistic disciplines bring very little into their universities. Productive scientists in research institutions can bring in most or all of their annual salaries in external funding on a yearly basis. Similarly, productive social scientists can often cover a substantial portion of their salaries. Even faculty in professional disciplines—medicine, engineering, business, education—are expected to contribute to their salaries through externally funded research. Those of us in humanistic disciplines, however, have few sources of external funding to draw on. The federal government simply does not fund the National Endowment for the Humanities—the major federal funding agency for humanities research—at a level comparable to that of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes for Health. 1 This funding inequity in and of itself is an illustration of our society’s value system vis-a-vis the humanities.Those who have been questioning the value of the humanities insist that, although it is appropriate to invest taxpayers’ dollars in research that can potentially develop a cure for a disease or a new way to strengthen bridges or even a revolutionary new way to teach fourth graders, it is not appropriate to fund investigations such as ‘‘Environments of Hospitality in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’’or ‘‘Traveling Theory and Paul de Man’s Translation of Moby-Dick,’’or ‘‘Usability Methods in Composition Pedagogy’’(actual titles from the 2012 Modern Language Association convention). They see one set of research projects as potentially contributing to society in material ways and the other as not. This debate has dovetailed with another national debate—one about faculty productivity. State governors (such as in Florida and Texas) are questioning whether faculty in their public universities are shortchanging taxpayers by spending too much time on arcane research and too little on teaching students; as a remedy, they have advocated increased efforts to measure faculty