Host: Centre for Higher Education Futures, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University

Discussant: Johnny Laursen, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University

Registration: The event is open and free to all. Registration for the event is, however, mandatory.

Abstract

I have two answers to the question in my title - ‘no’ and ‘yes’, and in that order!

First, some history.  In the UK, in the 1960s, an acrimonious debate was launched by the scientist and novelist, C P Snow - ‘The Two Cultures’ - in which Snow pointed to a culture war of his time, his concern being that science was being marginalised by the humanities.

Snow need not to have worried for, amazingly quickly, science triumphed and overcame the humanities, such that the trope of the crisis of the humanities emerged and is still with us.

Two questions:

1. How do we understand this plight into which the humanities have fallen?  Answer: although they have had huge forces ranged against them, they have also been partly culpable for their own demise, having become defensive and parochial.
2. What, if any, are the options in front of the humanities in the C21? 

Answer: Different options have been emerging, with ideas of ‘the university without condition’, ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘post-humanism’, an ‘ecology of knowledges’, ‘dissensus’ and ‘global citizenship’. Some of these are bizarre and would spell the complete demise of the humanities, and others would cast the humanities into a position of supplicant.

My view: The humanities are needed more than ever - the challenges of the world will not be met in an algorithmic, bio-informational, landscape - but we need a totally new conception of the humanities, not least because the humanities are heavily implicated in the formation of the Anthropocene, and its several maladies.  The humanities have been far too human! 

It is time to awaken the humanities from their all-too-human, relativist and constructivist slumbers and to become not just realist but critically realist, beginning their orientation from the world - the whole world - and to discern absences in the world, and to bring their resources to bear on ways of ‘absenting’ those absences (as Roy Bhaskar might have put it). 

It would be a ‘Big Issues’ conception of the field, an umbrella aim for which might be ‘ontological justice’, where the humanities would be reconfigured to play their part in forming the Ecocene.  Of course, we have to leave behind the very term ‘the humanities’ - but with what term might we replace it?

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Pro-Director and Dean. He has been a leader in developing the philosophy of higher education, a project heralded by his first book, The Idea of Higher Education (1990). He is the inaugural President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society, a past Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), has had conferred on him both an earned higher doctorate and an honorary doctorate, and - among many prizes - was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Educational Research for his ‘outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice’. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the SRHE and the Higher Education Academy, has produced 35+ books (several being translated into various languages) and 200 papers, given 150+ keynote talks across the world in 40+ countries and is a consultant in the university sector (in which role he has recently been advising UNESCO and other international groupings).  His latest book is The Philosophy of Higher Education: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2022) and in press (jointly) is Culture and the University: Education, Ecology, Design (Bloomsbury).  He has been described as a ‘thought leader’ in higher education and ‘the master scholar of the university’.