Leaders: Start with the Data, then Innovation Requires Imagination

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit,” that is worth considering for two reasons. 

While there are various ways to slice and dice the data, the commonly heard ‘conventional wisdom’ among university leadership these days is that the science and engineering programs are subsidizing what one of my engineering colleagues loves to call the fuzzy disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 

Actually looking at the data, however, tells a very different story, as the Chronicle article outlines.  The Humanities either pay for themselves or produce (sometimes large) surpluses, while science and engineering programs do neither.

The ‘convention wisdom’ here—contrary to the best available data—is simply assumed to be true by many university leaders who never miss an opportunity to demand that their subordinates make decisions based on the best available data.

That is the first reason to check out this Chronicle article:  it is not true that the sciences subsidize the humanities.  Not even close.

The second reason is that the author of the article reminds us that embedded within this discredited assumption is the more dangerous notion about fuzziness that also turns out to be false, because it suggests the humanities, arts and social sciences are secondary, optional or perhaps even best avoided, components of higher education.   Here is how the author put it:

“We produce a profit despite the irreducibly labor-intensive aspects of much of our work in the humanities, where there is seldom any single right answers toward which students might be directed, and where instruction must therefore engage actively and progressively with the particular subjective attributes of each developing voice and mind in the classroom discussion or in drafts of any essay.  Class size therefore cannot swell in many of our departments without destroying our essential pedagogical function, any more than the sciences could function without laboratories.”

Irreducibly labor-intensive teaching and learning…about questions where there is seldom one right answer (though no shortage of wrong answers, such as the 'conventional wisdom' noted  here)...traditionally a cornerstone of higher education.  And this cornerstone is under attack by a self-interested and skewed notion of what it means to analyze, think, and innovate...a notion that privileges one approach and dismisses what have traditionally, and rightly, been seen as essential  and complementary approaches to serious inquiry. 

“No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for themselves immediately and in dollars.  We shouldn’t have to make the a balance-sheet argument for the humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and cross-cultural respect, improved communication through language and other symbolic systems, and increased ability to tolerate and interpret complexity, contemplate morality, appreciate the many forms of artistic beauty, and generate creative, independent thought.”

Even using the narrow measures associated with a balance-sheet, the humanities value cannot be denied.  Expanding our notion of value, as we must in the above non-controversial ways, we would be as eager to support small class sizes in the humanities, arts and social sciences as we are to invest in the laboratories our colleagues in science and engineering require to make their critically important contributions toward graduating globally competent and competitive, innovative and thoughtful democratic citizens.

If educational leaders (and legislators who want to be educational leaders) would  themselves start with the data, as they insist others do, and then recognize that the data is merely step one in real world problem solving, where there is rarely any single right answer to the most important questions we face...this would be the kind of innovative and imaginative leadership we need.

Einstein once said that "not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted."  He was certainly not suggesting we stop counting, but that starting with the data, measuring as rigorously as we can, is merely a starting point for the diffcult task ahead: thinking. 

Pretending that there is one right answer means we waste resources spinning our wheels and alienating allies by dividing the faculty against each other and against an administration filled with people who want to do the right thing by are rightly perceived by faculty as not getting it when they behave as if everything that counts can be counted (and too often do not even hold themselves to this same, step one, standard of starting with the data, as we see here).  

Worse, insisting that there must be only one right answer, in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, advances the forces of anti-intellectualism and sets a poor example for our students...making it less likely, to the degree that they learn from our example, that they will become the innovative problem solvers we need today (and tomorrow) to help us productively address the conflicts we face together.