Defending the humanities: the idealist vs. the materialist argument

Inspired by the cuts to humanities funding in Britain, Australia seems to be having a vigorous debate about their role in public life. In an earlier post I shared the views of John Armstrong, who believes that the public could benefit much more from the humanities, if scholars would only direct more of their work to a general audience. Now a new piece from The Australian contrasts the "idealist" view of Armstrong with the "materialist" view of Stuart Cunningham, who prefers to focus on the contributions humanities graduates make to government and industry:

In an essay in the Griffith Review earlier this year, Armstrong wrote that the humanities had become inward looking, were anti-business and were characterised by a left-wing monoculture, all of which contributed to a disconnect with wider society.

"There is a very good fit between the potential for the humanities and the needs of society. But we have set things up in such a way that the services that the humanities offer to our society are actually not that good a version of what they could offer," Armstrong told the HES.

The question is whether or not the humanities can reform itself without having the type of crisis that has hit it in Britain.

"The great hope is that you can learn in times of safety the lessons that other people have had to learn by failure and in times of terrible trouble," he says.

But Stuart Cunningham, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, regards such comments as an "idealist argument" rather than reflecting the actual importance of the humanities, arts and social sciences in producing large numbers of graduates who work productively for the economy and government. He argues HASS teaches about two-thirds of students. It is this "materialist argument", as he calls it, that needs to be advanced to the base funding review and which, he says, is so self-evident that it sometimes gets lost.

I can see the practical appeal of the materialist argument. It's something that can seem comforting in a funding environment that sees universities as drivers of economic growth. Its weakness lies in its almost complete disconnection from the content of humanities instruction. People earn humanities degrees and then attain leadership positions; if we don't draw explicit connections between the former and the latter events, who's to say they would not do even better with engineering or science degrees?

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