The Humanities Center at Miami University

What Good Are the Humanities?


A full text transcript of the video is available below.

 

What Good Are the Humanities video


Text Transcript

(This video describes the humanities and the role they play in our society.)

The humanities have long been important at Miami. They play a crucial role in the college of Arts and Science and they provide the very grounding for our liberal education. We're delighted that Miami University has chosen to make a substantial investment in the new Humanities Center. We would like to reflect with you today on the contributions that the humanities can make to our community, campus, our state, our nation and we would like to reflect together on the ongoing initiatives that will come together under the umbrella of the Humanities Center in the years ahead.
- Dr.Allan Winkler (Director, Humanities Center)

What Are the Humanities?

[The following are responses to the question, "What are the humanities?" by people on the street.]

"I don't understand the question."

"Now if I remember right that's more like the charities and ..."

"What the humanities are? I'm not a hundred percent sure."

"Are you talking about the humanities of life or like in school?"

I have always thought of the humanities as dealing with the fundamental questions of human existence, of morality, of power, of how people relate to one another, of how we organize our society, of who is privileged and who is left out.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

In my view, the humanities are a group of disciplines that are dedicated to preserving and interpreting the human record.
- Dr. Laura Mandell (Professor of English)

And so the humanities are the disciplines like religion, history, philosophy, English, all of which look at the way that certain stories or arguments produce our notion of what is meaningful in the world, what the world is like, how we should act.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

We study actions, we study thoughts, we study ideas, which are the fundamentals of what humans are.
- Dr Charles Ganelin (Professor of Spanish)

I think the humanities are those areas of academic inquiry that deal with human culture.
- Dr. Peter Williams (Professor of Religion)

The Humanities and Engaging the Public: Media

The humanities provide the very framework for public discourse. Over the past year or so, two faculty members — Michael Carrafiello in History and Brian Domino in Philosophy — have teamed up together as the Humanities Guys to reflect on the eternal questions of life, love, liberty, and morality as they affect our daily existence.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

The Humanities Guys
These were really Brian's ideas. He originally had the notion that perhaps we could approach the radio station and do a program dealing with the humanities, connecting with the public and the thing took off and has had momentum. We've been doing it for two years. And we talk about the humanities: What are the humanities? Why are the humanities important? What are our representations, perspectives on the humanities, answering life's big questions through the humanities? But we are more famously or infamously known as the Humanities Guys.
- Dr. Michael Carrafiello (Professor of History)

Announcer: On today's show, we once again give you a chance to get your questions answered and discuss issues in light of the humanities. Our guests are the Humanities Guys, Dr. Brian Domino and Dr. Michael Carrafiello.

"Brian, Michael, how can the study of history and philosophy make a difference in the way we vote?"

Well I think, in politics as in all aspects of life, critical thinking is important and in fact essential.
- Dr. Michael Carrafiello

One of the things that philosophy helps you to do in particular ethics is to see beyond your own perspectives. I mean, philosophers have tried a variety of different strategies to get people to look at the bigger picture, to look beyond their own wants and needs.
- Dr. Brian Domino

"What education do you think our presidents ought to have and two, do you think that there's a level of which people should be educated or aware before they participate in the process?"

Well, I think that both Michael and I will say that a liberal education is very important. I think we should clarify now just to make sure our listeners know that a liberal education is not in distinction to a conservative education, but rather liberalness in the sense of liberty. It's helping you prepare to be a free person. We might say it's preparation to be Joe rather than preparation to be a plumber. And so I think we both agree that our presidents should have a liberal arts education.
- Dr. Brian Domino

When you are done, it's exhilarating because you've really talked out some significant topics and you've had people engaging with you on the airwaves, and to me that's what humanities is about.
- Dr. Michael Carrafiello

It has also been for me a trial by fire to stand by my thesis that philosophy is relevant to everyday life. I still remember one time Sherry asked us, "Paper or plastic?" and I had to figure what could philosophy say about that. And I think we are very lucky that we ran into each other and that this is coming about at this particular juncture in history because I think now is the time when it is possible to do a lot of things in the public sphere with humanities than I don't know ten years ago when we probably couldn't have. It would have been a lot more difficult.
- Dr. Brian Domino

The Humanities and Engaging the Public: New Media

The great thing about this particular moment is that digitization also makes things interactive, so we could have scholar venues where scholars are managing, working with and simultaneously tagging and interpreting information that's been available to the general public. The public can do the same. They can start sorting out things that are important to them and scholars can look at that. There can be a real communication between people who sort of understand or have been trained to understand more about history and about literature and those people who are seeing it with fresh eyes.
- Dr. Laura Mandell (Professor of English)

Op-ed articles in newspapers, blogs, commentaries on public radio, other ways of using media that a larger public has access to as a way of communicating that we have something to contribute to the conversation, that we have perspectives, we have skills, we have knowledge that can be applied to the way people actually live their lives and make those lives richer and more critically and ultimately more enjoyably lived by using those skills and knowledge.
- Dr. Peter Williams (Professor of Religion)

Fashion among the Ruins

Various faculty members have embarked on projects on humanities that are intriguing to audiences beyond the university. Mila Ganeva, in the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages has been studying fashion and its role in our daily lives.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

I study what I consider the most exciting topic — fashion and how it works in our everyday life and how it figures in our imagination. We are attracted to fashion because it helps us distinguish ourselves personally yet at the same time make ourselves part of a group. In Berlin after '33, the industry was destroyed. The Jewish owners were forced into exile or were killed, the businesses were expropriated, the whole area or part of the city where it was located disappeared in the bombing, and after the war in virtually the first weeks after the bombing stopped, the industry experienced an amazing and very quick rebound. I'm looking at the fashion magazines of that time, archives and photographic material as well as films to reconstruct this picture of the function of fashion in the everyday life of Berlin women right after the war. Fashion is also very visceral, very essential experience of certain material qualities of everyday life. It's something that you wear on your body, you display, it's being seen, it's easy to use it to open up discussions about other relevant issues such as the issue of freedom versus conformity, private versus public.
- Dr. Mila Ganeva (Assistant Professor of German)

Crisis of the Humanities

One of the things we are seeing is just a general shift in the dominance of science as a paradigm. The other thing I think you probably are hearing from some people in the humanities like me is that people don't really understand what it is that we do.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

In an institutional sense, there's a crisis in humanities. Some of this is the struggle that higher education is facing and some of it I think is that we are in a moment in American culture in which there is a very high value put on anything that is of monetary value.
- Dr. Helen Sheumaker (Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies and Curator of Education)

People sometimes tell us, "Well, if my son or daughter majors in business, I know that there will be a job at the end of that process; if they major in English then what are they going to do?" Now in fact I think that's a misconception since a lot of the elite universities in the world don't offer business training and liberal arts students go on to all kinds of corporate jobs.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

The humanities should not be seen as an add-on. That, oh, yes, this is next to hair because we need our accreditation or because the students have to read X, Y, and Z before they go off to do something really important in the world.
- Dr. Charles Ganelin (Professor of Spanish)

Presentism in all fields of knowledge, but especially now I think with the current, what is perceived as a crisis in higher ed, where I think only certain very presentist projects are getting the highest priority, technology, natural sciences, research that's rated towards present-day technologies and immediate employment opportunities in fields that prioritize the contemporary mode. Well, you see what I do when teaching dead languages and the texts and stories of dead people is very much about understanding the present and in order to understand the present, you have to know some of the facts of the past, you have to know the ways that people of the past encountered their world and interpreted it and dealt with questions of value.
- Dr. Elizabeth Wilson (Chair, Comparative Religion)

The Humanities and Public Engagement: The Global

Humanities activities have an important bearing on the kinds of things that faculty members do in the classroom. Last year, my colleague Cheryl Johnson in the English department and I taught a course together on the United States and South Africa that included a ten-day trip to South Africa in which we explored the fundamental questions of liberty and democracy.
- Dr. Allan Winkler (Distinguished Professor of History)

Capstone: The United States and South Africa
But as I thought about trying to go to Africa, it struck me that South Africa given apartheid, given Nelson Mandela, given the role of South Africa in the continent as a whole might be a better topic for a course to really deal with. So then I embarked on the process of arranging to team teach that course with Cheryl Johnson and it just underscored for me the importance of trying to integrate what you do in the classroom with what you see outside of the classroom.
- Dr. Allan Winkler (Distinguished Professor of History)

This beautiful yet troubled place and to feel what happens when a man is imprisoned for 27 years and he comes out and says, "I love this country, and we are going to work all of us, colored, Afrikaners, black South Africans, we would work to make this country great and there's a lot we need to do but we would work." And I wanted the students to see that. I wanted them to see how they can participate in constructing this new South Africa. We had such a broad range of students — social work, black liberal studies, English and so what they managed to do was to bring all of that in.
- Dr. Cheryl Johnson (Professor of Women's Studies and English)

We wanted to make sure that they had a good background of the intellectual elements, the history, the literature, what the apartheid system was like and to that end, we had readings that ranged from Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, to a host of novels, to a memoir by the American Ambassador during the time of transition.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

Of course, being an English professor, I wanted them to read a lot of the literature, because I think that the literature communicates politics, culture, history, desire, you know all those kinds of things as well as being works of art.
- Dr. Cheryl Johnson (Professor of Women's Studies and English)

Classroom: Pre-Trip
Dr. Cheryl Johnson: What are ways of living that you see in this novel?

"That you can die mentally, you can die physically, you can die emotionally and those are different ways of dying in that one person."
- Shaneqa Harper (Black World Studies Major)

"Ms. Hunter Gault's whole notion of new news out of South Africa, that these people really do have something to offer to the world, and they're not just the poor babies of the whole world."
- Antonio White (Black World Studies Major)

"I agree with what Denise said in our class. I think that South Africa has been horribly stigmatized."
- Aaron Ehrle (English Literature Major)

"The only thing I really knew about South Africa was Nelson Mandela and apartheid."
- Denise Mack (Sociology Major)

Back in the U.S.A.
Dr. Allan Winkler: What kinds of things moved you the most? What kinds of things surprised you?

"About you know, don't tell a story of pity, don't pity me, don't cry for me. Rather tell a message that is true. See my legitimacy. What I noticed from the people, like, you know, OK, yes we are in poverty but don't look at me like another statistic or another body that is stricken with poverty or disease that Ms. Hunter Gault talked about, but rather see the fact that I still have pride and I still want to live and that I'm living."
- Antonio White (Black World Studies Major)

"It's like another phase, I guess another page in poverty, because I've seen poverty in America, all over America and some poverty is if not worse, is just like Soweto."
- Shaneqa Harper (Black World Studies Major)

"It's like actually the first time that I have seen poverty up close and so it kind of made me take a look at everything in my life."
- Michael Talley (English Literature Major)

"It was right for us to go to the orphanage, Rosie's Home because I wanted them to see the impact of poverty and AIDS on these young children."
- Dr. Cheryl Johnson (Professor of Women's Studies and English)

"The poverty and illness that they face and just being torn apart from the inside, have the community ripped apart, just knowing that you have to acknowledge your past, acknowledge your history, the importance of validating yourself first."
- Denise Mack (Sociology Major)

I wanted my students to see that, yes, we can make a difference. I think they've been thinking either more about this election that's coming up right, their participation in that, that they can see themselves making history.
- Dr.Cheryl Johnson

It has been to my mind the humanities working as they should. Studying them, really making a difference in terms of asking questions about how we and other people live and react and exist on a day-to-day basis.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

What Do the Humanities Do and Do Well?

I think a lot of people who do humanities ravel in ambiguity. We like the fact that it's very difficult to pin definitions down or to put people or groups of people into categories. But because we'd like to do that, that puts someone at odds with contemporary American culture, which is very much into sound-bites kinds of descriptions of people and issues in advance.
- Dr. Andrew Cayton (Distinguished Professor of History)

In my mind, we tend to live more and more in the sound-bite era where people in America want very short and specific answers to complex questions. And this is what the humanities don't provide. We want people to engage in debate, to come up with different answers to different questions. It runs against popular culture today.
- Dr. Stephen Norris (Associate Professor of History)

We all decide what's right and wrong, how government resources should be allocated, what sorts of freedoms to allow and which ones are not really a good idea. And for us to make those decisions, we need the kinds of knowledge that are produced by the humanities. We need to know what's happened in the past, we need to know how to investigate things through a philosophical lens, we need to know how to make category distinctions and think through the rational implications of certain kinds of social strategies we might adopt. And we need to be able to see the world from other people's perspectives.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

History has always been that a society that does not also engage in the humanities is a society that has no sense of who it is or why it's doing these things. That you can become so obsessed with technology, so obsessed with the pragmatic parts of life, that you lose a sense of your connection with other people.
- Dr. Andrew Cayton (Distinguished Professor of History)

We have found that since 2001, people have actually been coming to us, knocking on our door, so to speak, going to our national organization, the American Academy of Religion, federal agents from the FBI are coming asking for help in understanding what's the difference between Shia and Suni and what's going on with all these sectarian conflicts in Iran and why are these Muslims fighting each other and how can it be that they are fighting each other in the name of religion when the religion says don't kill the Muslims and so you know we have a lot of sort of easy low-lying fruit when it comes to proving the relevance of what we do.
- Dr. Elizabeth Wilson (Chair, Comparative Religion)

So in studying the events of the past and the sources of the past and coming up with interpretations of these sources and events of the past, what we are providing the students with are a set of skills really that can be transferable into virtually anything. For instance, if we were to study, say, the origins of affirmative action in America, this is a historical phenomenon, and why did it come about? Who supported it? Who opposed it? When did it come about? What were the discussions at the time that the affirmative action was adopted in the states across the country? You are gaining perspective on a phenomenon, a very important one in American public life today. You are also gaining historical perspective in terms of how it was debated at the time. And if you then can come up with some sort of an argument, write about it, vocalize it well, you are not only contributing to a debate, you are helping yourself develop skills that can be used in almost anything.
- Dr. Stephen Norris (Associate Professor of History)

Training people in a kind of critical thinking that allows them to be better democratic citizens and that enables them to express themselves more clearly and think more clearly and look at social structures and analyze the ways in which we could re-imagine them to make society more fair or more just.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

And this is, to me at least this is what is at the heart of democracy. The ability to take events, take documents, talk about them, disagree about them, interpret them in different ways, and bring multiple perspectives to them. I study Russia and Russian history and this is in fact one of the things that is most absent from Russian public life. It makes what we do here all the more important.
- Dr. Stephen Norris (Associate Professor of History)

We think of ourselves as digesting texts, that is, we're in a society that is inundated with messages all the time. As I point out to my students, frequently half of them in any class are wearing messages on their clothing, and they do this without any sense of their own volition. They are often kind of surprised, like "Oh my God! I'm advertising something!" Television shows, all kinds of sophisticated representations that try to mobilize our beliefs, they try to get us to see the world in a different way, or have sympathy for different kinds of people and if we don't understand the way that those representations work, then we are really in danger of being controlled by them. And so I offer my students this metaphor. They tend to see themselves as digesting narratives or digesting messages, so they see themselves as sort of consumers who take in a film and maybe take in something from it to sort of nourish themselves, and maybe add to themselves and then they move on to the next thing. And so I say to them, "What if you are not digesting those narratives? What if the narratives are digesting you?" That is, what if you think of a narrative as a machine for making you different? You go in one end and you come out the other side and you may be different. The machine actually is a way of mobilizing your emotions. Getting you to feel certain kinds of intense emotions at various moments and linking those emotions to particular ideas.
- Dr. Tim Melley (Professor of English)

And one of my arguments to my students on my syllabus for why they should even care about taking this mandatory class that was truly the most hated course at the university was, none of the jokes in The Simpsons make sense if you don't have a background in the humanities. The writers of The Simpsons were from Harvard, most of them. They have a deep, thorough training in the humanities. And so they can make jokes about Plato and Socrates being in a casino. But if you don't know who those figures are then you don't get the joke.
- Dr. Helen Sheumaker (Adjunct Associate Professor of American Studies and Curator of Education)

The Humanities and Public Engagement Documentary Unit

Historian Robert Thurston has long been interested in coffee and the role it plays in our daily lives. His examination of the production and use of coffee provides some fascinating insights into questions that lie at the very heart of the humanities.
- Dr. Allan Winkler

Good Coffee
Coffee has been, of course, terribly important in the history of globalization. I think it's fair to say that coffee was the first commodity that was truly traded on a global basis. And so many people think that globalization is a very young phenomenon, McDonalds, Starbucks and so on, but it isn't. It goes back pretty far now. Coffee has been terribly important in the history of Latin America, helping to produce a lot of instability in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil and on the other hand, helping to bring political and social stability in Costa Rica. So it's actually gone both ways. And coffee also is connected and played a really important role in the development of a new sense of what a worthwhile individual was in terms of manners and wit, some people say the art conversation was started to begin with in the English coffee houses. Coffee figures in so many films, so many novels, as a key part of social life and social interaction. So it has all those connections to the humanities, to how we have interacted with each other, what the worth of a person is. My own interest is in images of coffee in literature but especially in areas of advertising and coffee has been extremely important in indicating to the people how they should behave, what sophistication means, how to set a good table, so again I guess there are all sorts of connections of that type between coffee itself and the humanities.
- Dr. Robert Thurston (Professor of History)

Dr. David Sholle: And now, what do we think about the workers who grow coffee, the care of the land, the health of the nations where coffee is grown? Why has coffee become a great cultural beverage?

So then, then does our film have to do with the humanities? We have been out interviewing coffee people, looking at coffee farms, so we've been filming things that exist today and in process of doing that, by the way, we are creating, I think, an important historical document. We are creating an original source. What were the farmers in Panama doing at that time? What were the issues related to organic coffees in Costa Rica? How were people working to improve the situation for migratory birds as they go north and south through the Americas. And then I think beyond that we do have a serious historical component to our film, in the sense of talking a lot about how labor conditions have changed for pickers and farmers themselves. Land use patterns have changed over time and then simply how governments and non-governmental organizations like the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, how they have responded to changing conditions and what they are trying to do now to improve the lives of the pickers, bringing the humanities' questions of taste, social interactions, the history of images, history of environment, political history, all that together with what's happening right now with the coffee business. It's often kind of a shame to study the humanities and then not bring them up right to the present, not bring them up right to what's happening now.
- Dr. Robert Thurston (Professor of History)

What is Good Coffee?
A good coffee is one that is produced with integrity, grown with certain customs, certain requirements and like I said before, with a lot of passion.

Good coffee has several things: Well picked, not too ripe and not too green either.

A good cup of coffee has to be related very closely with the quality of life of people that are involved in the whole process.
- Carlos Vargas Leiton (Coope Tarrazu)

I once asked ... what's specialty coffee, and ... the pretty standard answer was it's a cup of coffee that comes from a unique origin and tastes good.
- Price Peterson (La Esmeralda, Panama)

I think that math and coffee are endless.

 

People on the street:

There's so much pressure on our society to make money and be successful and measure by money that there's really not much of a reflection on what actually the human being wants and what society wants.

The emphasis gets placed a lot on business, in that area of corporations where a lot of people might say well, what are you going do with those humanities, but it's really that whole aspect to me of college that helps people to relate better with others .

Those business- or economics-focused degrees don't know how to write necessarily well, or how to think and process information.

If we are talking about humanities in our society, if that's how our society was running this, I think that we wouldn't need to have this huge, 700, you know, billion-dollar bailout plan, because we would be helping one another fix those problems already.

Generally gives us a good idea of where we've been to where we are going.

And I saw an article several years ago that said a philosophy major was your best hire.

 

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