A good friend of mine has worked as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a year and a half now. I recently met a few of his coworkers, and in the ensuing small talk I was asked my major. Those of you in the humanities will immediately be able to envision the facial expressions on this group of engineers, racking their brains for a polite response. One finally volunteered that he "never much liked history in high school." The conversation then turned to computer modeling and radiation prevention, and I realized that once again I had found myself in a position of irrelevance.
We humanities majors the world around, particularly literature and history majors, often find ourselves defending the importance of our chosen majors. No, we did not choose to study dead people in an effort to avoid a "difficult" major in college. We firmly believe that in a fast-changing world of new technologies and scientific discoveries, the only constant is the human condition — you can't possibly understand where we are heading without understanding where we came from. But dealing in the sciences involves a currency of facts and figures, while the humanities' economic system handles ideas, and reconciling these two currencies is like mixing oil and water. (See? Sometimes humanities majors know science-y things too.)
Honestly, it's sometimes no wonder why people find the humanities dry and pretentious. In an Aug. 5 article in The New York Times about modern literature, the author, Terrence Rafferty, chose as his focal point the advent of zombie literature, writing that "the flesh-chompers advance, are repelled, advance again and are repelled again, more or less ad infinitum." I am not convinced the author himself did not fall victim to these flesh-chomping machines, given the liveliness of his prose. Even in a popularly read publication like the Times, discussions of literature, music or history are written like a peer-reviewed journal article. That, or they follow a form that many authors of popular history have perfected: writing humorous satires of sweeping eras of history or of renowned writers like Shakespeare. So writing history in any kind of popular forum comes down to a choice of dry and dusty prose or an absolute mockery of the great men and women of the past.
If this is the only way to get the public interested in the humanities, then we surely are doomed, because no one has any reason to take us seriously. And this is where, I believe, we in the humanities need to take a page from our peers in science and engineering. No scientist would dream of writing a humorous piece about mononucleotides, nor would she believe that the only way to share her findings was through scholarly academic journals with big words and obscure graphs. I was having this discussion with a friend of mine in microbiology, who told me that all good scientists believe it is their duty to share their findings in an accessible way, because what good is research if it is made so obscure that only a handful can appreciate the advances the research provides?
So, my fellow humanities majors, I would propose a paradigm shift in our approach to our research. If we are to prove ourselves relevant in today's educational systems and in society at large, we can no longer consent to be part of the exclusive clubs that many historians, philosophers and literary scholars have created for themselves. Nor can we reduce our findings to tidbits of humorous trivia accompanied by cartoons of a headless Marie Antoinette. We all believe in our appointed cause — to study how people think, why they did the things they did, how that has changed and where it's taking us. Few would disagree that in a world this uncertain, such a view is unfounded or unnecessary. Where scholars in the humanities have traditionally fallen short is in applying this view to their findings, and then publishing it in an accessible way. Writing one of a million pieces about "The Great Gatsby" is only of interest if it is clear that there is a new way of reading the book that gives new insight on the human condition.
I am not saying it is an easy task to translate literary criticism or historical perspective into layman's terms. It isn't. But it is becoming increasingly important to try. We need to swallow our pride and follow the scientists' example, or we risk becoming not only irrelevant but altogether nonexistent.
— Sarah Russell is a junior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.