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Monday, November 23, 2009
The Impact of the Humanities
At the TLS, Stefan Collini has a trenchant critique of the British government’s “Research Excellence Framework” for research funding in the universities. A key factor will the assessment of “impact”:
approximately 25 per cent of the rating (the exact proportion is yet to be confirmed) will be allocated for “impact”. The premiss is that research must “achieve demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society”. The guidelines make clear that “impact” does not include “intellectual influence” on the work of other scholars and does not include influence on the “content” of teaching. It has to be impact which is “outside” academia, on other “research users” (and assessment panels will now include, alongside senior academics, “a wider range of users”). Moreover, this impact must be the outcome of a university department’s own “efforts to exploit or apply the research findings”: it cannot claim credit for the ways other people may happen to have made use of those “findings”.
Collini’s main interest is in the “potentially disastrous impact of the ‘impact’ requirement on the humanities”:
the guidelines explicitly exclude the kinds of impact generally considered of most immediate relevance to work in the humanities – namely, influence on the work of other scholars and influence on the content of teaching
Collini points out a number of profound “conceptual flaws” in the proposed process, among them the assumption that all disciplines across the university can and should be assessed in the same way, and the pressure on researchers to devote their time not to the “impact"-free zones of writing and teaching in their areas of specialization (because influence on work in your field, for instance, does not count as “impact") but on marketing. His concluding peroration:
Instead of letting this drivel become the only vocabulary for public discussion of these matters, it is worth insisting that what we call “the humanities” are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is – insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context – an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”. It may not be too late to try to prevent this outcome.
Though I agree it is essential to make the argument about the intrinsic value of “the humanities,” it seems at least as important to challenge (as he does) the mechanisms for measuring impact, because the “end in itself” argument risks perpetuating popular misconceptions about the insularity of humanities research, when in fact it is quite possible to argue that our impact on the wider world (particularly, but not by any means exclusively, the cultural world) is already substantial, but probably too diffuse to be measured even by the “thirty-seven bullet points” comprising the “menu” of “impact indicators.” Two academic articles I read recently provide some supporting evidence for this claim.
Here’s Cora Kaplan, for instance, in a recent essay in The Journal of Victorian Culture:
Sarah Waters has a PhD in literature . . . ; she has said that her research on lesbian historical fiction suggested to her the potential of an underdeveloped genre. In its citation and imitation of their work, Fingersmith paid generous tribute to Victorian novelists; it also has a considerable indebtedness to feminist, gay, lesbian and queer critics and social and cultural historians of Victorian Britain. It would not be too frivolous to see Fingersmith - together with other examples of fictional Victoriana - in their synthesis of the detail and insights of several decades of new research on the Victorian world and its culture as one measure of the ways in which Victorian Studies has developed over the last half century. (JVC 13:1, 42)
And here are Patricia Badir and Sandra Tomc responding, in English Studies in Canada, to calls to take the humanities “beyond academia.” Offering a polemical summary of “what the humanities in general, fueled by highly esoteric post-structural theory, have accomplished in the way of widespread social and cultural contributions over the last twenty years,” they begin with the premise that poststructuralism began as a “theory propounded by a tiny priesthood of high intellectuals”:
But this priesthood had acolytes--graduate students at first, then, by the mid-1980s as “theory” inevitably made its way into the classrooms of ivy league professors, undergraduates. The undergraduates . . . did not uniformly move into Ph.D. programs, thereby assuring theory’s continued enclosure in a specialized community. They moved into a variety of illustrious professions and industries, including, most significantly, America’s powerful and ubiquitous culture industries. . . . [T]he Hollywood of today is ruled by ivy league degrees, most of them earned in the 1980s or 1990s, and most of them . . . heavily larded with humanities courses--courses in English, film studies, American studies, gender studies, history. These people were taught by their professors to value certain kinds of aesthetic objects. As they assumed positions of authority in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they began to patronize films and filmmakers that meshed with what they had been taught was cutting-edge culture. The signature films of the early 1990s . . . featured the “politically correct” identity issues and self-referential formal experimentation lauded in the postmodern classroom: Thelma and Louise; Philadelphia; The Crying Game; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Piano; Pulp Fiction; The English Patient. In television, . . . the transformation to postmodern forms has been even more radical: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; The X-Files; Alias. . .
“One could make the same argument,” they go on, “for the field of journalism,” and they go on to do so, and to the “massive industry” in “‘literary’ objects” including not just books but adaptations. To calls that the humanities address the interests of “civil society,” they reply that “the humanities have, in a large measure, already shaped contemporary civil society”: “the fashions we are being asked to follow are our own.” (ESC 29:1-2, 13-15). I’m sure it’s easy to argue about which are the “signature films” of the 1990s, but the general case that specialist research in the humanities makes its way into the wider world by way of our classrooms seems presumptively strong--but that is just the kind of “impact” apparently discounted by the Research Excellence Framework.
I’m sure more (and perhaps more concrete) examples could be provided by most academics looking at intersections between their own fields of specialization and the world “outside” the academy. A concerted campaign to demonstrate the “impact” of humanities research might do as much good as insisting also that, whatever its “impact,” the work is valuable in itself. And it should probably be carried on not (just), as with my two examples, in the pages of academic journals, but as publicly as possible--in the TLS, but also through blogs, letters to the editor, talking to our neighbours--you name it. Many thousands of our students are out there somewhere, too, who could surely testify to the “impact” of our work, not just on their cinematic tastes, but on their thinking, reading, and voting lives. After all, the REF may be specific to the UK, but the narrow version of utilitarianism* it represents is not.
*Narrower than Mill’s, certainly: “Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind - I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties- finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future. It is possible, indeed, to become indifferent to all this, and that too without having exhausted a thousandth part of it; but only when one has had from the beginning no moral or human interest in these things, and has sought in them only the gratification of curiosity.”
Comments
Not that I’m exactly denying the basic argument, but that list of films is extremely weird if the objective is to show the academy’s impact on Hollywood--The Piano and Priscilla are both Australian films; The Crying Game is UK; The English Patient is (obviously) adapted from a novel--you’d think one might need to show the impact of post-structuralism on Ondaatje rather than on Hollywood to make that example work.
I feel like I’m at the sharp end of this, as are many: my whole department is right now earnestly debating what the shift from RAE to REF, and the dread ‘impact’ criterion, will mean to us. But, see, whilst I’m prepared to be as alarmed as the next academic about the potential for transformaton of my research into ‘vulgarized versions of an increasingly market-oriented “product”’ ... at the same time part of me thinks ’not‘.
You start off by noting that this is a funding exercise. In the UK, the REF is in effect a mechanism for ranking academic institutions to see which gets the most government money and which the least. There is, I think, a genuine worry here that ‘impact’ looks like a nebulous and barely-relavant metric; but the Collini piece you quote seems to be articulating the worry that any metric is being applied at all. I don’t think we can get away with that.
I’m not sure the exhortation that academics be allowed, and paid, simply to ‘exist beautifully’ has any traction in this day and age. Don’t you think that Collini’s phrase ‘vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”’ has the elitist whiff? ‘Vulgar’ meaning ... what, that people in general have some connection to what we do? Is that so bad? ‘Market-oriented’ in the sense that ... (what?) we’d rather just pretend that our research miraculously happens independent of anything so soiling as money or markets?
So, to be clear: I think the Mill quotation isn’t quite the right perspective on this business. I think it isn’t because we’re not talking about people pursuing their intellectual and research guiding-lights wheresoever they lead; we’re talking about paying people. The shift is, in effect, from ‘we’re happy to pay you to do this research whether or not it has any impact’, to ‘since we’re paying, we want your research to be impactful.’
You say: ‘a concerted campaign to demonstrate the “impact” of humanities research might do as much good as insisting also that, whatever its “impact,” the work is valuable in itself’ ... and that seems to me right. Except that: in my own case, my academic research has been negligible to the point of invisibility, in impact terms; and if some of my other activities have had, I have to be honest with myself, some very very modest impact (writing novels, blogging, whatever) then the University of London has not paid me to do these latter things. I’ve done them in my spare time. Of course they’re informed by the former things I do, it’s all interconnected; but my point is just as the ‘valuable in itself’ argument falls down when we recall that the context here is not ontological merit but money, so it seems to me that there would be a disconnect between taking in government money for the academic research on the ‘impact’ strength of a completely separate part of my professional life.
Adam, I don’t envy you the conversations you’ll be having in your department about this, that’s for sure. You may be right about the “elitist whiff” of the Collini piece, but I think there are other ways the concern about research being ‘market-oriented’ might be read, such as some projects being favoured over others (individually or systematically) because it is easier to market them--even though over the long term who knows which one is more important or valuable.
Re your own “negligible” impact: my idea about the ‘impact’ of humanities research really was more that collectively we are much, much more than the sum of our parts (which is also what the two articles I cite are talking about). It may be hard to discern any specific outside impact of any one thing we do, to be sure, but cumulatively the effects are incalculably diffusive.
I think a defense could be mounted, by the way, for the receipt of government money for things that look something like “pursuing intellectual and research guiding-lights wheresoever they lead.” Government money goes to things that are understood to be public goods, like the preservation of heritage sites or the arts or whatever, doesn’t it? I guess that’s something of what seemed apt to me about the Mill quotation--it acknowledges a kind of human flourishing that is difficult to measure economically but (as I understand him) should nonetheless be part of the utilitarian calculation of benefits. But I haven’t pored over Utilitarianism in a long time so I might be muddling things up.
Andrew: good point about those particular film choices--and it might be less encouraging to their cause to compare the box office receipts for them to whatever blockbuster thrillers or disaster pics came out over the same years.
Well, you know, Cornel West had a bit part in one of the Matrix flix. There’s impact for you.
EDIT Whammm!!!! Giggle!
Doesn’t Cornel West just sit behind a futuristic desk as a member of the Council of Zion? Not sure that’s impactful emough.
Ker-BLAMMY!!
West also provided, along with Ken Wilber, a ‘characteristically vibrant’ commentary track for all three films’ DVD releases. Somewhere, some socially-maladapted pseudo-cinephile was touched by their chatter, deep down.
ZOT!!