The humanities are getting smaller, and they’re thinking smaller, too.
It is no well-kept secret that the humanities are in crisis. Enrollment numbers make this evident: the proportion of humanities degrees halved nationwide from 1966 to 2010. At Harvard, the number of arts and humanities concentrators fell by almost eight percentage points between 2011 and 2020 alone.
External perceptions are often presented as the main suspects for this concerning drift. Some view a humanities degree as incompatible with promising career prospects, despite statistical evidence suggesting otherwise. To others, the humanities attract elitist or pretentious students.
Both of these explanations frame the humanities as a victim of outside forces. But these accounts are incomplete.
When it comes to the crisis of the humanities, the call is coming from inside the house. Internal issues are also driving individuals away from the humanities, and none are more poisonous — nor more crucial to address — than hyperspecialization.
Hyperspecialization has dominated the academy over the past decades. More and more, professors and outside observers note that academics silo research into increasingly minute areas. The consequences of this practice are deleterious.
For one, hyperspecialized studies contribute to universities’ ivory tower status by rendering much academic output inaccessible to major portions of the public, either because of a lack of insider knowledge or a lack of interest in the subject being studied. It logically follows, after all, that the more specific a subject is, the fewer people will know about it, and the fewer who will want to know.
Hyperspecialization also denies students the comprehensive, interdisciplinary education a liberal arts program should aim for. Questions of a certain scale will inevitably engage across branches of knowledge — one can hardly investigate consciousness, for instance, without encountering biological and psychological theories and methods. Overly narrow questions obviate this cross-disciplinary enrichment by confining one’s research scope.
As injurious as it is, hyperspecialization does have some merits. In the case of the humanities, it can concretize inquiries that would otherwise turn hand-wavy. When big questions like “Why are we here?” or “What is man?” seem so nebulous and far-reaching that they defy a demonstrable, straightforward answer, restricting the scope of humanistic inquiry can render its answers more tangible and, in that way, meaningful.
Nevertheless, hyperspecialization flattens the aim of a project, producing just that: flatness. That is, in prioritizing particularity for the sake of particularity, the hyperspecialized humanist produces scholarship with no real sense of stake. His outcomes are more alienating than those of the humanist addressing big questions: While the latter’s work may be less grounded, the former’s scholarship is too niche to be accessible or elicit interest.
As such, there’s something foundationally lazy about hyperspecialization, too. Smaller claims are conveniently insulating because their lack of stakes deters any interest in them, much less in challenging them. What’s more, for those projects that do receive criticism, smaller claims are (on balance) naturally easier to defend when compared to wide-reaching ones.
Thankfully, the humanities know specialization is an issue, and both Harvard and its students have made efforts to address it. Heretofore, such initiatives have largely focused on reviving interdisciplinary study. They include the “Third Enlightenment Salon,” a discussion group that aimed to bridge the divide between the humanities and sciences; the metaLAB, a “do tank” that marries the arts and technology; and the Intergenerational Humanities Project, which brought students together, regardless of concentration, to study environmental humanities.
But while these enterprises are valuable and worth continuing, they are not enough.
What we need is simultaneous cultural change: We need to abandon hyperspecialization (especially for its own sake) and embrace big-question ambition in research and in everyday life — a recognition at the university and individual level that such questions are worth reasoning through and discussing. We need radical arguments that, even if based in the particular, always and ambitiously declare something grand.
Take Plato’s “Republic.” It’s one of history’s most significant works, and one that makes universal claims on society and justice that are interdisciplinary (Book VII extols geometry, for instance). It begins, however, with a descent to the democratic port of Piraeus, to observe a religious festival celebrating a foreign deity. The scene is an unorthodox genesis for a political work of the time, but it demonstrates a critical truth: Universal claims cannot be divorced from the commons, ought to be everyday, and, only then, are valuable, are beautiful.
Jackson H. Barr ’29, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Canaday Hall.
