Steve Fuller delineates a comprehensive crisis, which is a general problem for academia. Photo: COURTESY OF STEVE FULLER

Global higher education appears to be undergoing a broad “retreat from the liberal arts,” a trend that has drawn widespread concern and debate. Are the humanities and social sciences wellsprings of insight that enrich the human spirit, or have they become irrelevant in the age of digital technologies pragmatism? In a recent interview with CSST, Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick in the UK, offered a fresh perspective. He argues that the crisis extends beyond the liberal arts—it is, in fact, a systemic crisis across all academic disciplines.

Crisis not limited to liberal arts majors 

CSST: What are some of the most visible signs of the “crisis” facing the humanities and social sciences globally? 

Fuller: Before dealing specifically with the humanities and social sciences, it is worth observing that a sense of “crisis” currently afflicts all academic disciplines, at least in Western countries. Nearly all the subjects taught in the university—including the natural sciences—remain in the control of academics, whose style of teaching and researching does not straightforwardly contribute to society’s needs for knowledge. For the past 200 years this mismatch wasn’t considered a problem because society—and especially the state—trusted that academics understood their subjects in a “deeper” sense, which implied that the knowledge they produced would outlast any short-term political and economic changes. However, this trust has been greatly eroded for a variety of reasons, including fraud, corruption, and bias within academia itself, which have led to public calls for greater accountability. As a result, there has been a general devaluation of academic work, which manifests itself in specific ways in the humanities and social sciences. 

At my own university, which is one of the “top ten” in the UK, we are told to mark student essays by criteria focused more on the technical side of writing (e.g., grammar, argument structure, etc.) than the course content. The policy assumes that good writing is a “transferable skill,” whereas course content is not. In other words, what our students know is less important than their ability to communicate what they know. It reminds me of the disputes that Socrates had with the Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues, in which the Sophists claimed that knowledge is simply the rhetorical skill of winning arguments. 

CSST: Do you believe the root cause of the crisis lies in endogenous disciplinary decay or external environmental pressures? 

Fuller: Both. The so-called “external environmental pressures” are largely ones that universities have brought upon themselves. Historically, universities have been “elite” institutions in the sense that relatively few people attended them. Nevertheless, the state supported universities because those few students would have an out-sized impact as leaders of various parts of society. All this changed with the “knowledge economy” policy that would have everyone attend university. This has involved enormous investment by the state to increase the size and number of universities. Not surprisingly perhaps, universities embraced this policy. But the state—at least in Western countries—has increasingly recognized that the returns on this investment are inadequate. Many “highly educated” graduates are unemployed or underemployed, while rates of economic productivity and overall social progress remain relatively unchanged. Already universities are restructuring and downsizing, and my guess is that in the future there will be fewer universities and fewer people attending them. 

As for “endogenous disciplinary decay,” the main problem here—and this applies across all the natural and social sciences—is what economists call “path dependency.” What makes a form of inquiry “academic” is its principled fixation on one (or a few) of many possible ways of studying a topic. It gives academic inquiry its distinctive “epistemologically rigorous” character. However, simply studying something one way for a long time invariably delivers diminishing returns on effort. Certain problems remain unsolved, which ultimately makes it difficult for what American historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, called a “scientific paradigm” to carry on its research. It leads to what Kuhn called a “crisis,” which opens the scientific community to alternative ways of solving its problems, resulting in a “scientific revolution,” whereby one of those alternatives becomes the new dominant paradigm—and the cycle starts over again. 

Unfortunately, Kuhn’s main example is Newtonian mechanics, the paradigm that dominated physics for 200 years. While that’s an impressive achievement, one might wonder why it took so long for the revolutions in relativity and quantum theory to replace Newton. Part of the answer, which is relevant to our times, is the “peer review” process of academic journals. From the 17th century onwards, people who recognize each other as “scientists” have judged each other’s work both in terms of its truth value and its relevance to their collective project of seeking the truth. However, as science became more specialized and institutionalized in the 19th century, “relevance” has come to imply the sort of path-dependency I mentioned, which leads to stagnation. 

Humanities and social sciences still relevant today 

CSST: Why are universities suspending humanities majors? Some argue that the sole purpose of attending university is to secure employment, and that the humanities and social sciences are therefore essentially “useless.” 

Fuller: I recognize this characterization. It reflects a vision of the university in society that both governments and university administrators have increasingly embraced—one into which the humanities do not easily fit. They are thinking of universities as primarily factories for manufacturing skills that can be straightforwardly applied in the jobs that students will supposedly get after graduation. This is not a new way of looking at universities. It has been around in the West for at least a half century. It is closely associated with the “knowledge economy” mentality, which holds that in the future, a prosperous society will require everyone to get a university degree for the highly technical jobs that will power what American sociologist Daniel Bell had already called in the early 1970s “post-industrial society.” “Humanistic” knowledge does not easily fit into this vision because it is more about thinking about the world in general than doing something specific in the world. The humanities aim to educate the entire person for life, not simply train the prospective employee for the period in which they hold a job. 

CSST: What is the significance of going to college and choosing the social sciences and humanities nowadays? 

Fuller: I think that the classic modern reason for choosing social sciences and humanities subjects remains very much alive in the West. It is about acquiring an education for living, regardless of the job one holds. Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the modern university in the early 19th century, understood this as part of the process of personal maturation, “Bildung” in German. In this context, philosophy was required by every university student before studying more specialized subjects. Hegel may be the most famous professor who taught this way, whereby philosophy presents the frontiers and horizons of knowledge as the kinematics and dynamics of thought more generally. The effects of this educational orientation can be seen in the careers of two of its earliest students, Karl Marx and Otto von Bismarck. Students nowadays are looking for updated versions of this orientation. Unfortunately, relatively few universities provide it—or even advertise it as part of their mission. Instead, universities try to attract students by the promise of credentials that will enable them to secure specific jobs. The promise itself is rarely fulfilled, and the humanities and social sciences are not well suited to fulfilling it. 

CSST: What’s the value of humanities in societies obsessed with GDP and employment metrics? In an era of algorithmic polarization and existential anxiety, can humanities help people to combat societal nihilism? 

Fuller: In terms of your first question, as I have been suggesting, in the current economic climate, it is just generally difficult for people with university degrees to get long-lasting and personally fulfilling jobs. Humanities are not unique in this regard. This is why it is better to see the “crisis” to which you refer as one afflicting the entire university sector and requiring an overhaul of the role of academic knowledge in society. 

Nevertheless, the answer to your second question is “Yes!” At least two features of a humanistic education remain as relevant now as ever. The first, to which I have already alluded, is that it enables students to acquire a deep and vivid understanding of the various aspects of life, which can result in people living better lives. Such an education is especially needed now, given not only capitalism’s intrinsic volatility but also the volatility of the current geopolitical climate, which affects everyone, regardless of one’s line of work. The second feature of a humanistic education is that it trains people to be more sophisticated in their evaluations of the world. Especially since the rise of social media, people are exposed to more different points of view than ever, but they receive relatively little guidance on how to judge them. In this context, the radical diversity of perspectives that one finds in art, history, literature, and philosophy provides alternative models for making such judgements. 

CSST: How can we deal with the crisis in the humanities? 

Fuller: As I have tried to indicate in this interview, I think the crisis in the humanities is symptomatic of the more general crisis of the role of the university in contemporary society. I believe that the way to deal with this more general crisis is to reinvent—for the 21st century—a conception of the university as providing education for life, in which the humanities provide the core form of academic instruction that is common to all students, regardless of whatever specialized studies they then go on to pursue. 

Edited by LIU YUWEI