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> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. That's true to some extent. I think math has built up e

> I don't want to defend humanities academia too much, but you could ask the same about pure math too. That's true to some extent. I think math has built up enough credibility though because such a huge amount of mathematical investigation has turned out to have relevance in science which eventually trickles down to applied science. Even if the specific content of esoteric math isn't of practical use, the "machinery" developed for navigating the concepts often becomes an essential tool for other things that are more practical. It's interesting to think, though, if the prestige of math could decline as the stuff left to discover becomes more and more remote from practicality. > Now the steelman is that they make a complex literary work better understood by unfolding its layers, relating it to the context, analyzing its impact and influence etc. so the work becomes better and deeper understood. Yes, and I think that steelman is true. The important thing, though (like I said in another comment) is that it means what is important is not the specific content of the opinion but that process of unfolding, relating, analyzing and so on. So it can be useful to write about that, and to read what others wrote about it, even though in the end no one is really going to "find the right answer". > But simply writing about that is the equivalent of a reaction YouTuber. I'd say at the low end it can be like that. At the high end it can be more like one of those videos that breaks down "how movie X creates its suspense", or reading a good travelogue. Reading a book about someone's travels in Tibet isn't going to be the same as going to Tibet, and it would be foolish to read it hoping to replace such an experience. But if the book is good, you can still gain something from it, and it can potentially include things you wouldn't have gained by going there yourself, because the author can articulate insights you might not have been able to formulate yourself.

bonoboTP 1y ago
What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature, without any real world experience. I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way. It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines. So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system. Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto. Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge. In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist, but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this is the reality already, we just don't admit it. The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc. Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.

bonoboTP 1y ago

What I think is mostly missing the mark is treating this as an expertise that you learn in college, i.e. straight out of high school you go to college and then do a PhD and you interact in a bubble of people who are the same way. And you try to comment on the greats of literature, without any real world experience. I value it much higher to read critiques by different authors and artists, in a kind of Viennese coffeehouse gossip culture way. It's the equivalent of wanting to become an expert on the philosophy of ethics without ever having to resolve a real ethical conundrum in real life, like pulling the plug on someone's medical support or advising about authorizing an artillery strike or whatever other thing may arise with difficult tradeoffs outside neat thought experiments. It's being clever from the sidelines. So, I don't think it's a field of expertise, I think it's a teaching job. And teaching about art and literature and helping the new generation process the message therein is good. But it doesn't make it a research field. Indeed, the idea that a humanities teacher at university should have regular novel thoughts and innovations is a very new idea, from the 19th century, originating in the Humboldtian reform of German universities. Before that, teachers would read the classics to students and comment on them, but they mainly passed down the same type of commentary that they received in their education, of course with some of their own flavor, but it wasn't really seen as producing new knowledge, just making it easier to digest the existing high-prestige work of literature.

BrenBarn 1y ago
I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system. Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto. Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge. In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Yes, simple lecturing jobs are fine, and they do exist, but as you said they are paid less. Because in truth this is the reality already, we just don't admit it. The intention behind it is understandable though. Someone who has produced new knowledge tends to have a more flexible mind, they have felt that the walls of knowledge are soft and malleable and not some concrete slab. They work with the math even outside class, and have a real grasp on why things are defined in certain ways, having also defined new concepts and written new theorems and proofs and having faced dilemmas of how to construct it to be most elegant and compact and logical etc. Now, of course today the research and the teaching are often on quite distant topics. Like teaching some basic computer science stuff like basic data structures and algorithms while you actually research computer graphics or speech recognition.