The humanities are facing a credibility crisis

The humanities are facing a credibility crisis

 

Here’s how scholars can earn back public trust — and contribute to the conversation

 

 

By Aaron Hanlon

Aaron Hanlon is an assistant professor of English at Colby College.

 

The Washington Post, April 15, 2022

 

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Humanities scholars and advocates have long complained that the humanities are undervalued. Scholars of the humanities should, in theory, have a great deal to contribute to conversations about all sorts of critical topics, from the distribution of health care to the regulation of AI. Why does no one seem to care what they have to say?

 

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The answer, unfortunately, is that the humanities have a credibility problem. That problem takes two forms: first, the lack of public trust in humanities scholars’ processes of inquiry and expert conclusions. Simply put, the public doesn’t seem to trust that we are engaging in real, methodical scholarly inquiry — or, at least, that such inquiries amount to much more than informed or pretentious opinion-making. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences survey found that over half of Americans agree with the statement that “the humanities attract people who are somewhat pretentious and elitist,” a belief particularly strong among Black, younger or lower-income respondents.

 

Humanities scholars fare much better in the public view when opening up to the public beyond specialist research, by reinforcing the value of reading literature, watching TV shows with historical content or discussing “ethics.” Such activities can certainly benefit from expert knowledge gained through study. But enjoying literature or admiring art in a museum are activities people are generally happy to do without the intermediary of a professional scholar.

 

The second credibility problem facing the humanities is with respect to political advocacy. Where climate scientists and epidemiologists routinely advise on major policy decisions — including decisions with significant partisan import — humanities scholars typically do not. For all our political and policy views and all our expertise, the conflation of our scholarship and our political advocacy doesn’t improve our credibility; it undermines it. Indeed, people often assume that humanities scholars start with political commitments and backfill the evidence rather than starting with questions to answer through some relatively transparent process of inquiry. The idea that humanities scholars are activists first and only then scholars leaves much of the public skeptical of the work we do.

 

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Credibility problems aren’t exclusive to the humanities, of course. The sciences famously suffer credibility problems in the general form of science denial and in the more specific areas of anti-vaccine movements, anthropogenic climate change denial, HIV/AIDS denial, flat-eartherism and more. Indeed, to address credibility problems in the humanities, it’s helpful to look at what’s happening in the sciences.

 

For much of his career, the historian of science Steven Shapin has illuminated the essential role of credibility in scientific knowledge production and the growth of industrialized science. One of Shapin’s key insights is that even as we largely embrace — even celebrate — scientific rationality and scientific methods, we come to much of what we take for scientific fact through systems of trust. Most people don’t understand medicine at a technical level, though we put ourselves in the hands of physicians and medical science researchers on a regular basis. I haven’t run my own vaccine trials, but I trust the methods and institutions that brought me the coronavirus vaccine enough to have taken three doses of it.

 

Even as we place considerable trust in science in our everyday lives, however, many branches of science suffer credibility crises, regardless of the integrity of scientists and their methods. Shapin has argued that what we mistake for a crisis of truth is really a crisis of credibility. As the sciences become implicated in politics (via massive government support for scientific research) and in business (via private-sector research and funding), scientific credibility takes a hit. In Shapin’s words, “When science becomes so extensively bonded with power and profit, its conditions of credibility look more and more like those of the institutions in which it has been enfolded.”

 

As a result, cynical attacks on fields such as climate science or vaccination or epidemiology are more effective than they would be if any of these fields were plausibly disconnected from government and business and the ideological, motivational or partisan pitfalls that come with these. Despite the relevance of their expertise to the most pressing problems of today, it’s not uncommon now for climate scientists or epidemiologists to feel challenged on their expertise by influential politicians, generalist thought leaders and everyday people.

 

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There’s a mutual lesson here for the sciences and the humanities, and it’s twofold. First, even some of the most valued research is subject to credibility crises, despite and sometimes because of being highly valued. Second, credibility is a complex and sometimes counterintuitive social phenomenon, dependent on particular circumstances.

 

For the sciences to address their credibility problems, they would have to learn something from the history of the humanities, namely that some degree of skepticism toward political and profit motives can be good for epistemic credibility. Scientific institutions and their leaders would have to sacrifice some degree of funding and prestige to publicly oppose their embeddedness in systems of profit and power.

 

From their 19th-century origin as a branch of knowledge in the professionalized modern university, the humanities set themselves up in opposition to utilitarian value systems, industrial modernity and industrialized science. As intellectual historians Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue in their book “Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age,” the idea of the humanities was shaped from the beginning by an opposition to use value. They were imagined instead as outsider disciplines in tension with the utilitarian principles of the universities that sustain them.

 

In defining themselves in opposition to professionalized, utilitarian institutions, the humanities obviously aren’t cozying up to big business, so their credibility problem isn’t the same as that of the sciences in that regard. But when humanities scholars and advocates lead with activist political commitments, they run into a problem comparable to the one scientists face when their work is embedded in political institutions: People see it as less trustworthy because of the possibility that it’s rooted in cynical political objectives rather than scholarship.

 

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For everyone invested in the institutional future of the humanities, it’s clear there’s a fork in the road. Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work and therefore requiring institutional and civic credibility to function and thrive. That would mean letting go of the oppositional identity that, from the beginning, has both defined humanities scholarship and kept it on the institutional margins. But it might also open up new collaborative possibilities, allowing humanists to partner with the sciences, not simply as critics or ethical watchdogs but as problem-solvers with knowledge and skills often lacking in other fields. Credibility — a shared sense that such knowledge and skills are well founded and reliable — has been the missing ingredient in so many failed “interdisciplinary” projects.

 

Down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility. To truly embrace that attitude would be to give up on perennial pleas for institutional support in the form of research funding and tenured faculty positions. But it might also mean reimagining new institutional homes for humanities work, alongside different venues for publication beyond the paywalled academic journal, such as podcasts and literary magazines. Many humanities scholars and advocates believe the university is irreparably broken, but that doesn’t mean a homeless humanities, just a different, more nurturing home.

 

The former path won’t guarantee institutional support, but it would improve credibility by showing the kind of interest in public trust and accountability we demand of every other branch of knowledge. The latter path is the one many humanities scholars appear to be moving toward. If it’s the one they choose, then we should be clear-eyed about its implications: The credibility crisis will only worsen — and the role of the humanities within the university will grow still more tenuous.