Humanities could change the world – if only they could change themselves

In October 2011, the then president and executive director of the American Historical Association, Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman, published an article responding to the difficulties of securing an academic position by asking the humanities profession to raise its collective gaze for postdoctoral graduate employment beyond universities.

“Most important is that we make clear to all students that they will enjoy their advisors’ and their departments’ unequivocal support, whether they seek to teach at college or university level, join a non-profit agency or head off into business or government,” they wrote in the article, titled “No More Plan B”.

“We teach our students to question received ideas and to criticize inherited terminologies and obsolete assumptions,” they added. “It’s past time that we began applying these lessons ourselves.”

Campus resource: Classroom tips for debunking the arts and humanities employability myth

In a follow-up piece, “Time to Craft a Plan C”, the authors noted that their initial piece elicited many letters from people trained as historians who now worked outside academe. They quote, for instance, a historian employed by the military who was completing his first book for a university press: “The greatest problem I have seen is the need for those of us inside the academy to interact with those outside,” the historian told them. “[My] academic colleagues and friends tend to see my non-academic status as an interesting and entertaining quirk. I don’t think they would consider a similar career for their students.”

Moreover, not all the reactions came from appreciative historians who had flown the academic nest. A number came from historians who remained in the nest – and their hostility remains revealing. Some claimed that any move to break down the deep disconnections within and outside academia opposed the humanities “as they knew them”.

The most vocal, as noted by Claire Potter in her Tenured Radical blog at the end of 2011, emphasised that Grafton and Grossman’s proposals for reform “accepted the market forces, and the underinvestment in education, that have left thousands of PhDs in many fields un- or under-employed”. For example, she quotes my undergraduate US history professor in the late 1960s, Jesse Lemisch, branding Grafton and Grossman “accomodationist”. But aren’t all career professors “accomodationists”? For historical context, I note that Lemisch for years was denied permanent employment for political reasons.

Herein lies the tragic, self-defeating triumph of the isolated ivory tower of the arts and humanities (as well as, to an unappreciated degree, of much of the social sciences and natural sciences, too). Our own rejection of the surrounding world underlies – in many ways, prompts or even mandates – our society’s, culture’s and political economy’s rejection.

Surprisingly or not, in 2023, we still lack the requisite data to clearly trace both academic and non-academic employment trends for graduate students, with controls for those who transition before or after completing master’s or doctoral degrees and explanations of why they left when they did. We also lack data on efforts to adapt doctoral programmes to at least perceptions if not documented realities of changing “market conditions” and the relations between job possibilities (both tenure track and non-tenure) and potential candidates.

But the uninformed and innocent doom and gloom about the state of both employment in and public perceptions of the humanities paints the situation in blacks and blues. Moreover, in blaming corporatism, neoliberalism, statism, careerism, racism, sexism, narrow-mindedness and so on, the responsibilities of the humanities writ large and humanities professors individually escape attention.

While emphasising that none of these trends exists independently and none is new, I declare that it is time for humanities academics to admit significant responsibility for the struggles of our disciplines and to begin corrective steps by reconnecting within the humanities, across universities and beyond. There are few, if any, positions that require post-secondary education that would not benefit from a broad and complex humanities foundation when integrated with preparation for available jobs. These two aspects, contrary to decades of complaints to the contrary, are not mutually exclusive.

I am reminded frequently how unusual a professor I have been. Growing up in the 1960s, with the emergence of the first great wave of interdisciplinary social science and comparative and quantitative history, I was introduced to all the major fields in which I taught and published while a graduate student: literacy and education; children, youth, and families; urban history and studies; theory and methods across domains of knowledge.

With my PhD in history and history of education, I taught and published in a number of fields across the humanities, arts, social sciences and education. I also collaborated with scientists and professors of medicine, and I contributed to public history across media and institutions.

I stop short of presenting myself as a model, even for my doctoral students across disciplines. But I can clearly imagine – not fantasise – how many important jobs, at all levels and in all walks of life, could be reconstructed by combining the most compelling and relevant elements of the humanities with, for example, cross-, multi-, or interdisciplinary studies in science and technology, business, media and communications, policy and administration, and education defined broadly.

It is not too great a stretch to say that if we could change the humanities and the graduates they produce, we could change the world. But, first, last and always, can we change ourselves?

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and history at The Ohio State University and inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies. This essay is part of a book-length project, From Multi- or Mega-Versity to Uni-Versity: Remaking the American University for the 21st Century.