Teaching Matters/Danny O'Hare: Anecdotal evidence suggests that much of the opposition to the recent organisational reforms in the universities has come from academics in the humanities.
Some of this, but not all, is opposition to the notion of change itself. It is the essence of human nature to resist change, especially when it threatens a status quo from which you yourself benefit. The history of human progress is littered with the remains of people, products and institutions that failed to face the inevitability of change and became extinct as a result.
But the reality is that the humanities are indeed coming under threat. As the universities' main paymaster, the Government increasingly insists that they follow national economic priorities - which focus mainly on science and technology. The Government also expects universities to raise a serious proportion of their resources by selling their knowledge in the open market - a marketplace that again favours scientific and technological disciplines.
Despite a recent recovery in student numbers, the humanities have been feeling the centre of power slip away from them. They do not know how to claim the "relevance" that scientific disciplines do, to raise large sums from industry for research or to turn their knowledge into hard cash through campus industries. In the future, they see themselves always playing second fiddle to the better resourced faculties, and foresee the slow demise of marginal disciplines as the whole field of humanities contracts. They see the final eventuality as a university system focused on the "rich" scientific disciplines, with an ever dwindling role for the "poor" humanities.
If that did indeed happen, it would be nothing short of a cultural disaster. Without strong humanities, our universities would hardly justify being called universities at all. If we were to lose the humanities, we should soon feel their absence in ways that directly threatened our economic future.
But if it is not to happen, it will be only because the humanities themselves fight back - not against change itself (which is inevitable), but against an educational future which refuses to accord them a central role. The humanities must clearly define that future role, and then persuade the Government and the rest of the academic community to make room for it.
The energy that has gone into opposing the university reforms would be much better spent on making a case for the humanities and on organising all those involved in support of it. They cannot expect others to make their case for them.
Perhaps the most important thing the humanities must realise is that they cannot fight this battle with the sciences on equal terms. Just as the best-equipped army always wins, so the best-resourced faculties will always win out in a direct confrontation. What the humanities must do is to redefine our approach to education so that a humanities element is seen as an essential element in the formation of every student.
The argument to put before Government is this: the humanities are an invaluable part of education, but so long as our system makes them always compete with the sciences for resources, we guarantee their inevitable decline. The only way to preserve the humanities is to reorganise the entire system. Rather than offering them as an alternative to the sciences, we should require a humanities input to the formation of every scientist.
How to do this?
One way is to follow the American practice of postponing career-oriented learning until the post-graduate level, accessed only after an undergraduate course that focuses on general studies. A variation would be to make one introductory year of general studies mandatory for all.
Another approach, already being pioneered tentatively in UCD, would be to marry together subjects from the two cultures. Instead of degrees on purely technical subjects, one could offer a major in a scientific discipline alongside a minor in a humanities discipline - and vice versa - for those students who lean more towards the humanities. (Now the scientific culture has moved to centre stage in our lives, it is vital that full humanities students do not graduate as scientific "illiterates".)
In parallel, special action is needed to preserve minority subjects, which are first in the firing line as the emphasis on efficiency strengthens. To my mind, the only way to ensure survival for the smallest disciplines is through collaboration between the universities, to craft a new offering based on rationalisation and amalgamation. While not every university can maintain a department in every small discipline, the country as a whole could do so by sharing them around.
Needed, too, is a much more aggressive approach by the humanities to commercialising their research, which has the important advantage of being much cheaper to undertake than research in science and technology. Is it really the case that the humanities cannot relate to business needs? After all, "content" is really very important in the ICT-related sectors. Are the humanities working hard enough or probing deeply enough in this area?
Such changes would require a radical change in the mind-set of humanities academics. Not only must they change themselves, they must also become missionaries for a new approach to their colleagues in other faculties and to the Government. Are they up to this challenge? Only time will tell. But if the answer is no, the long-term outlook for the humanities is bleak indeed.
Danny O'Hare is a former president of Dublin City University
