President’s Page
The Future of the Humanities
By Joel Seligman
Throughout its history, the University has articulated a great ideal in higher
education. All students, regardless of major or graduate specialty, will be
better prepared in the context of a broad liberal arts education, rather than
by focusing exclusively on mastery of a specific area. This Rochester ideal
has been more than just a theory but has informed the development of our academic
programs for close to a century.
As long ago as the presidency of Rush Rhees, our Eastman School of Music was
initiated not as a conservatory, but as part of a university. Shortly later
our School of Medicine and Dentistry inaugurated the biopsychosocial model of
medical education to place medical training in a humanistic context. More recently,
the distinctive Take Five Program allows students an additional tuition-free
year if they qualify to study a different field from their major. Through its
distinctive approach represented by Clusters, our Rochester Curriculum eliminates
core subject requirements but allows students to concentrate in at least two
of the three great divisions of learning in the arts and sciences (humanities,
social sciences, and natural sciences).
But as we have grown throughout our 156-year history from a college that focused
on the humanities to a complex university that also addresses the natural sciences,
the social sciences, engineering, business, education, nursing, among many other
fields, concern is sometimes expressed about the state of the humanities.
What is their place in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering? What
role will have the humanities play in the University of the future?
We can not be a great university unless our teaching and scholarship
in the humanities
are great.
I believe we can not be a great university unless our teaching and scholarship
in the humanities are great. This is not because I believe that we will necessarily
graduate an increasing number of students who major or build careers around
the humanities, but because I believe that the Rochester ideal remains vital
to what makes education at our University distinctive. Our students will be
better prepared for careers in any field and more thoughtful as citizens, if
they, for example, have had the chance to address the most vital questions that
philosophy can pose, to better understand the origin of the world’s great
religions, to see the intricacy of human experience as only the arts and literature
can illuminate, or to appreciate other cultures in their own language. In 2004,
the Association of American Universities issued a 158-page report urging America’s
great research universities to give more emphasis to the humanities in their
curricula and research agendas.
The University appreciates the many accomplishments of our own humanities programs
over the last two decades. The classics discipline combined with religion to
form a department virtually unlike any other in academia. The internationally
regarded Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, the first such program
offered at a university in the United States, has been a model for similar programs
across the country in drawing on the social, cultural, and historical perspectives
of a wide range of humanities disciplines, students, and scholars. The Department
of English is home to faculty who earn Guggenheims and other national fellowships
as well as national honors such as the MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize,
and the Lannan Literary Award.
We live in the age of interdisciplinarity. For our professors this has led
to a growing number of efforts to bridge fields to perform more sophisticated
research. For our students, particularly our undergraduates, interdisciplinarity
has other and broader meanings. For some the University is the place where they
establish their identities as human beings. For these students exposure to the
humanities can play a pivotal role in self-discovery. For other students, there
is a self-conscious resistance to being too narrow.
I have never been associated with a university where there were more double
and triple majors than at Rochester. Almost every double major I have met has
chosen noncognate fields such as brain and cognitive sciences and Spanish. I
have been struck by still other students who pursue the classical liberal arts
ideal of studying knowledge for its own sake.
My commitment to the humanities at the University is based on other considerations
as well. Outstanding universities, such as Caltech or Lehigh, that historically
have focused more narrowly on science and technology in recent years have made
determined efforts to embrace the performing arts and humanities because of
the strong preferences of their students for broader exposure to the range of
educational experience. I believe this craving is near a universal one at great
universities such as Rochester. At our University, for example, when we eliminated
earlier requirements such as that in languages, it was striking that enrollment
in languages grew as students came to appreciate the importance of languages
on their own.
But the humanities do have one conspicuous disadvantage in the modern marketplace
of ideas. Unlike fields such as medicine, the sciences, and engineering, there
is relatively little federal or state government support provided to the humanities.
For universities that believe the humanities have a vital role, that places
a greater burden to work to support them. At Rochester in the past year, a few
new steps have been taken, including beginning work with Cornell and Syracuse
on an effort to create a Humanities Corridor and the announcement in July of
a new Humanities Fund to support a forum that will regularly bring humanities
and other faculty together. The fund also will bring to campus distinguished
scholars who represent areas of interest to several departments and who can
highlight emerging fields or current intellectual debates.
The evolving role of the humanities at the University will be a key topic addressed
by the College’s strategic plan. This plan will be drafted in the 2006–07
academic year. As we strengthen the College, I anticipate that strengthening
the humanities will also receive emphasis. No cluster of academic fields has
been a part of serious study as long as the humanities. I am confident that
the humanities will be a priority at the University of Rochester as long as
there is a University of Rochester.
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