 Good afternoon. I'm Harvey Perlman, Chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Thank you for joining us today for our Spring Nebraska lecture, the first of the 2014 Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture Series. Today's lecture is being web-streamed live, so I want to welcome those who are joining us via the web. For those of you who use social media, the Twitter hashtag for today's lecture is hashtag NEB lecture. It's not double hashtag, just single hashtag. The Nebraska Lectures are an interdisciplinary lecture series designed to bring together the University community with the greater community in Lincoln and beyond to celebrate the intellectual life of the University of Nebraska by showcasing our faculty's excellence in research and creative activity. The Nebraska Lectures are sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the Office of the Chancellor, Research and Economic Development, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute known as ALI, and I certainly a warm welcome to any ALI members that have joined us today. Today's lecture is also sponsored by Humanities Nebraska, and we extend a special welcome to their members who are with us. The Research Council is composed of faculty from across many disciplines at UNL. The Council solicits nominations for Nebraska lecturers from our faculty on the basis of major recent accomplishments and the lecturer's ability to explain their work. Selection as a Nebraska lecturer is the highest recognition the Council can bestow upon an individual faculty member. A few words about the format. Following Dr. Barron's lecture, Dr. Lokea Saru, chair of the Research Council and associate professor of teaching learning and teacher education, will moderate a question and answer session. Today's lecture is a part of this spring's UNL Research Fair, so after the questions and answer we will move to a reception in the Centennial Room where we will also have the opportunity to meet students and view their research posters at the undergraduate student research and creative activities poster session. So I hope you will join us up there as well. Now it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Stephen Barron, George Holm University professor of English. Dr. Barron joined the UNL faculty in 1980, earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin and his master's degree from Eastern Kentucky University. He is a widely published poet and an expert in British romantic literature, women writers, and radical politics during the romantic period, and the poet and artist William Blake. Although he's best known for his research on poetry and literature, he also has a keen interest in the interdisciplinary nature of the arts and the humanities. Today he will discuss the role of a humanities based education in stimulating learning, curiosity, and discovery which have a critical role in helping us find answers to society's greatest questions. This is a timely topic in higher education as the media and the general public continue to question the value of arts and humanities degrees. And for academics it's no secret that funding available for humanities research is scarce compared to the hard sciences. Dr. Barron's question so what good are the humanities anyway, is a pressing one both for academics and society as a whole. Albert Einstein wants to declare that imagination is more important than knowledge imagination is the spark behind great ideas whether it's a faculty research project, a discovery that leads to a life saving technology, or a strategy to address a major societal change solutions ultimately begin with imagination. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Stephen Barron. Thank you. Now let's see am I properly hooked up? I think I hear myself. You hear me? Thank you very much for the lovely introduction. It's a real honor for me to join the succession of very distinguished people who have had the opportunity to give these lectures. And I also appreciate the fact that you all have come in from such a nice day for an indoor event. We could have class outside I suppose, but we won't. Over the last 8 to 10 months there's been an uptick in the media chatter about a crisis in the humanities. Some have gone so far as to call it a war on the humanities, which I suppose gets more attention. The issue is a familiar one. At a time when everyone's finances are under increasing stress there's fresh pressure in our culture to cut back on non-essentials. Both in educational institutions and in the broader public community the humanities tend to be prime targets for the cutters and the pruners. There's a general sense that the humanities are not very useful that they don't contribute in any clearly measurable way towards objective goals like job opportunities, better paychecks, and career advancement. Even President Obama has joined the chorus. In a speech in Wisconsin late in January he proclaimed, quotes, young people could make more money in skilled manufacturing than with art history degrees. The fact that he immediately backtracked and said, well there's really nothing wrong with an art history degree, indicates just throw away the humanities seem to have become in today's all for profit culture. Some professional humanists have suggested that the humanities have increasingly lost their way and therefore have only themselves to blame. What used to be a clear agenda in the great books tradition they say has deteriorated into high school courses in Harry Potter and the history of Pop Rock and into college courses like the philosophy of Star Trek and the art of the comic book. Notice though that nobody suggests that the widely popular college course called Physics for Poets is unacceptably low brow or that math in the city or consumer chemistry or extraterrestrial life are simply soft courses. These are all real courses at colleges and universities. What made the humanities such easy targets then in the first place? And what can we do about it as engaged citizens in a society and culture whose priorities seem to be continually shifting? What's in it for us? I'd like to explore the subject a little with you today. In October 2013 David Hollinger Professor Emeritus of History at Cal Berkeley published a wonderfully sane essay called The Rift. Can STEM and the humanities get along? STEM by the way is the acronym for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics. Hollinger points out in his essay that the media noise about the supposed death of the humanities ignores what he calls the deep kinship between humanistic scholarship and natural science. The resulting shift in the academic tectonic plates in all areas of teaching scholarship and learning he writes threatens the ability of modern disciplines to provide the services for which they have been designed. Hollinger argues that the humanities constitute the great risk takers in the tradition of the enlightenment and that they have always done so. The humanities embrace the messy risk intensive areas of inquiry that Hollinger says are quotes left aside by the methodologically narrower larger quantitative disciplines. This positions the humanities in the continually fluctuating borderlands between knowledge and opinion, between scholarship and ideology. The inevitable product of the sort of troubling questions that the humanities typically ask is critical thinking. While critical thinking both employs and relies upon empirical science it nevertheless involves a large measure of imagination and speculation of what if questions. The humanities stimulate that variety of creative inquiry that arranges various components of what is known in different configurations often discovering among the apparent disconnections new and unsuspected connections. A century and a half ago writing in a book he called on Liberty John Stuart Mill the preeminent British philosopher of the 19th century said that the greatest threat to all of us is the decline of that very sort of questioning probing critical thinking that I'm talking about here. Precisely the sort of oppositional thinking that challenges our habits of lazy thinking or no thinking at all. Mill worried about what he called the despotism of custom which he believed was a collective social force that was increasingly warring against individuality and therefore against genuine liberty. In Mill's opinion the decline of critical thinking in any society inevitably produces mediocrity. Mediocrity that comes to characterize entire societies, nations, cultures. No one leads, everyone follows so that public opinion now rules the world as he puts it. And no one notices or cares that individual liberty is a casualty. Because in this world of mediocrity people's thinking is done for them by men much like themselves addressing them or speaking in their name on the spur of the moment through the newspapers. Well substitute talk radio for newspapers in that last line and you see what Mill is talking about. John Horgan teaches engineers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey He published a blog post for Scientific American titled Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshman. And there he writes this we live in a world increasingly dominated by science and that's fine but it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In science mathematics and engineering classes you're given facts, answers, knowledge truth. Your professors say this is how things are they give you certainty. The humanities he continues at least the way I teach them give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism. The humanities are subversive they undermine the claims of all authorities whether political religious or scientific. Science has told us a lot about ourselves and we're learning more every day but the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deceiving ourselves. I could not agree more with Horgan's assertion that the humanities are more about questions than answers. That's why I'll keep coming back to ethics. The humanities invite us in fact they require us to deal with ethical questions for which sheer fact-based empirical approaches to the world don't often seem to have the time or the stomach. This is a point that Martha Nussbaum likewise made when she wrote in 2010 that the disciplines we associate with the humanities are infused by what she calls searching critical thought, daring imagination empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds and understanding of the complexity of the world we live in. This is why for Nussbaum who is distinguished professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, science she writes science rightly pursued is a friend to the humanities rather than their enemy. The Penn State mathematician Kira Heman was thinking along these same lines when she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013 that both the sciences and the humanities require deep creativity and intellectualism and ability and a desire to use reason and a willingness to change your mind. They get it and I'll come back to some of these ideas shortly. Let me bring in another voice here first that I believe is relevant to this matter of ethics and the humanities. In July 2013 the Connecticut NPR journalist Colin McEnroe wrote in his blog that the collective public complacency about the increasing instability of the global natural environment reflects a diverse absence in our culture of any real urgency to be constantly engaged in thought and debate about the meaning of life. Quotes a people capable of attaching significance to lives lived in the future wouldn't sit on its hands now he writes. His closing line underscores the point I've been making here about what the humanities are good for. McEnroe writes maybe we're getting rid of the humanities because it's hard for me to think and easier not to. From my own field of romantic or a British literature let me offer the famous example of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein one of the perennial icons of popular literature that positively overflows with both intellectual and ethical questions questions about science and creativity about stretching rules creating boundaries crossing them and living creative with the consequences of decisions made individually and jointly. Mary Shelley's friend in Europe's first superstar poetic icon Lord Byron wrote about the high that comes with all creative activity. Why right? Byron says it is to create and in creating live a being more intense that we endow with former fancy gaining as we give the life we image Last fall I asked a young doctoral student in my department during the formal defense of his dissertation on poetry and critical theory asked him why write poetry since he does just that why even bother writing poetry. His answer which came instantly and candidly was why breathe like Byron two centuries ago he understands the liberating potential of all imaginative activity of creation. The point of creative activity as Byron puts it is to live a being more intense that is what he's talking about a process that enables us to fill our days with greater passion greater life than what our ordinary daily routine provides and in creating according to Byron we gain as much as we give and what we both give and gain back is life life itself lived intensely and imaginatively but we need to live with what we create and to take responsibility for it too think of Frankenstein whether it is something that we say or write or publish after all everything we say and write publicly and do publicly for that matter is inherently political it carries with it very real ethical implications for each of us and for everyone who hears reads or sees us at work that's the terrible lesson that Frankenstein teaches after all ethics lie at the center of the humanities I believe both as academic subjects and as intellectual engines of social thought in the broader culture this fact may strike some people as less immediately relevant in some academic and professional areas like calculus and electrical engineering for instance but when we recall that Victor Frankenstein was after all a scientist maybe we should not be so quick to let science and scientists off the ethical hook nor economists either or physicians or pharmaceutical makers or automotive engineers humanities remind us that we are all passengers together on this planetary ship called Earth not just in our local social and professional units but also in our collective citizenship in that ethical society to which we all aspire we need to be opening avenues to greater ethical awareness not shutting them down remember Rodney King's famous words in 1992 can't we all just get along apparently not it seems more often than not but the so-called war on the humanities is a phony one a constructed conflict that does neither side any good and both sides a lot of harm perhaps we need more thinking like that of the biologist Edward O. Wilson who in 1998 published a book called conciliance the unity of knowledge Wilson coined that word conciliance which he defines as quotes literally a jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact based theory across disciplines to create a common ground of explanation Wilson offers as examples of this sort of creative juxtaposition phenomena as environmental protection and the neurobiology of aesthetics and he lists among people who practice this habit of mind folks like Charles Darwin and Francis Bacon Albert Einstein and the Marquis de Condorcet now in my mind there's no question at all that both the humanities and the stem disciplines are inherently valuable in fact they're fundamentally necessary to one another both in the world of academia and in our broader contemporary culture when either side tries to go it alone the other side is proportionally diminished in the transaction and everyone loses without contraries is no progression William Blake wrote in the 1790s and he also wrote opposition is true friendship the humanities play a vital part in the energetic intellectual and ideological engagement that is the strength of any free and dynamic society the romantic era Irish writer and educational reformer Elizabeth Hamilton wrote in 1811 quotes imagination is not a simple faculty but a complex power in which all the faculties of the mind participate therefore the imagination of the person in whom they have all been cultivated will be rich and vigorous two centuries ago they often had a clearer view of what really makes the world tick than many of our own empirical bean counters seem to be able to manage in 2014 so how did our contemporary culture arrive at the curious notion that there's something strangely monstrous about the humanities in our economically challenged and increasingly corporatized notion of education the humanities have emerged as a sort of vampire sucking away the lifeblood that is the funds from a public body that apparently would be much better off rid of this imposition, cured of this disease, exercised of this demon so what good are the humanities anyway at the heart of my question is that matter of good what is good, innocent little word what is good is it the same thing as good for asking what the humanities are good for implies that we can measure them somehow in terms of what they do and how they do it and presumably how well and perhaps especially for whom after all we can more or less do that in manufacturing in construction in the creation of genetically modified foods and even in those educational curricula that we now refer to as STEM what happens though when the field in this case the humanities can't be measured in that way then what one answer is simply to follow the money in colleges and universities students in the STEM fields and their parents assume that their investment of time and funds will lead to not just to jobs but in fact to good jobs there's that word again what makes a job good salary perks options for advancement, general job satisfaction good gets measured in material ways so too for the faculty who teach those students reputation, professional advancement and of course salary are often tied to one's success in attracting and keeping major financial support whether federal, state or corporate and there's no question that the lion's share of funding goes to STEM disciplines Max Niesen wrote in Business Insider in June 2013 schools, humanities get a tiny fraction of the federal funding that STEM programs do, many schools he continues public ones in particular are already under huge financial pressure so they're going to focus more of their energies on the things they can get others to pay for according to this familiar formula if a discipline attracts and generates money it's good if it doesn't, well it's superfluous, look around the National Science Foundation's budget was over 7 billion dollars in 2013 on the other hand the entire combined budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts together amounted to less than what the Pentagon spent on one single spy dirigible meant for Afghanistan, that was never even used because it didn't work financially incentivized measurement has become inseparable from how the humanities are regarded increasingly familiar instruments like the Common Core standardized testing and mathematically matrixed outcomes assessment reflect the push to quantify subject areas, sadly one consequence of this debate has been that the humanists and the STEM people have found themselves positioned in the public discourse often unintentionally and certainly against the better interests of both, they found themselves set up as adversaries competing with one another for the ever dwindling pot of gold, and other consequences the intellectually and culturally eviscerated although increasingly specialized curricular model that now passes in much of America for what the old rhetorical chestnut called a well rounded education but the over specialized but still painfully uninformed citizen, not just a modern phenomenon a century and a quarter ago lecturing in the ugly polluted factory city of Birmingham in 1880 the British socialist manufacturer William Morris said that even a supposedly well educated man will quote sit down without signs of discomfort in a house that with all its surroundings is just brutally vulgar and hideous, all his education has not done more for him than that, end quote. So how had this narrow desensitized citizen evolved in a supposedly enlightened era? At the beginning of the 19th century his fellow Englishman William Wordsworth had written this, the world is too much with us late and soon getting and spending we lay waste our powers little we see in nature that it is ours we have given our hearts away. For Wordsworth he was subscribing to a materialist world view governed by an economics of getting and spending that had cost us our hearts human life and experience were being reduced to a balance sheet a double entry ledger of the sort to which Charles Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge had sold his own hard heart before the three spirits brought it back to life. What Scrooge had lost of course was his humanity and here then is the connection right at the level of language between that individual personal humanity and those interrelated areas we call the humanities. Ironically when I teach a Christmas Carol which Dickens wrote in 1843 I always ask my students how old you think Scrooge is and they usually answer oh mid fifties well do the math if you do the math that would make him born roughly around 1790 the year in which Byron was born and only a couple of years before Percy Shelley and Felicia Hemmins so I ask my students alright why is Scrooge then not a passionate romantic like they were but rather this hard heartless penny pinching materialist without a drop of the milk of human kindness and they usually say well he chose money in materialism think of it his counting house chose that over beauty and aesthetics remember the woman he gave up her name was Belle her very name is a French cognate for beauty it's an answer whose moral significance is perhaps best measured not by Keynesian economics but rather by the imaginative calculus of the humanist what Wordsworth and Morris and Shirley Dickens believed had been lost in the increasingly materialist mechanical product centered 19th century was the infinitely responsive heart not just feelings or emotion but also passion and imagination so let me bring in Mary Shelley's husband Percy here in 1821 he wrote an essay called a defensive poetry in response to a satirical essay by his friend Thomas Love Peacock called the four ages of poetry Peacock claimed that all the arts in the modern age are hopelessly irreversibly deteriorated from what they once were therefore Peacock argued contemporary artists and their works are also ever less and less valuable both as art and as practical that is useful products of culture what good is art Peacock is saying what good is art when technology science and industry and profit now furnish the criteria for gauging value Shelley's response addresses the growing cultural prioritizing of empirical data at the expense of something else Shelley writes we have more moral political and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice we have more scientific and economical knowledge that can be accommodated by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes we want as in lack we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine we want the poetry of life our calculations have outrun conception we have eaten more than we can digest man having enslaved the elements remains himself a slave Shelley's point was that already by 1821 society had become so enamored of data that it had lost the capacity to see how they figured into any larger social, moral intellectual or cultural calculus so what's to be done well here's what Shelley suggested in that same essay he writes the great secret of morals is love we're going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought action or person not our own a man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively he must put himself we have to forgive them the sexism of 200 years ago he must put himself in the place of another and of many others the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own the great instrument of moral good Shelley writes is the imagination yes I know what does a long dead white male British poet have to tell us about contemporary American culture well to paraphrase Bill Clinton badly it's the idea stupid and perhaps those who shrug off a poet may be less like less inclined to shrug off somebody like oh say Albert Einstein who declared imagination is more important than knowledge for knowledge is limited whereas imagination embraces the entire world stimulating progress giving birth to evolution it is strictly speaking a real factor in scientific research it's interesting it's instructive to hear one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the modern era saying such a thing partly because it seems so out of character with our cultural stereotype of the empirical scientist buried in the laboratory but Einstein understood that strict factual knowledge does not offer the one and only route to the destination as he put it I believe in intuition and inspiration at times still certain I am right while not knowing the reason indeed in an apocryphal remark attributed to him he also asserted that quotes creative imagination is the essential element in the intellectual equipment of the true scientist nor was Einstein alone in the priority he placed on the creative imagination Edison is supposed to have observed that the inventor must first imagine that which she or he then invents the imagination is a singularly vital part of anyone's intellectual makeup because as Shelly put it it awakens and enlarges the mind by presenting it with a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought this domain of the unapprehended is the arena in which the humanities operate many years ago as an undergraduate student I read a novel by E. M. Forster called Howard's End pretty much forgotten the details of the novel but I've never forgotten the epigraph that Forster placed before the story two words only connect that simple phrase has guided me through what now are some four decades of teaching and scholarship it's the imagination finally that encourages us to discover and then to explore those often unsuspected relations that exist among things that we might not normally place within the same frame William Blake demonstrated the limitations of empiricism by pointing out that if people are really made up of nothing more than the combined data provided by their senses as some 18th century philosophers had proposed then from a perception of only three senses or three elements no one could deduce a fourth or fifth because man's desires are limited by his perceptions he says none can desire what he has not perceived which seems to me to rule out everything from God in heaven to government without taxation or Lincoln Nebraska with synchronized traffic lights it is the imagination that works in this essentially uncharted territory in which the normal rules governing physical and intellectual cartography really don't work very well I emphasize this point because here is where we can at least begin deciding what good the humanities are it's not easy because the primary disciplines of the humanities are generally less interested in good that is empirically verifiable answers than they are in the troublesome and often provocative questions this kind of imaginatively questioning attitude lies behind the line that John F Kennedy borrowed from George Bernard Shaw when in a speech to the Irish parliament in June 1963 Kennedy said other people see things and say why but I dream things that never were and I say why not because the imagination is inherently both playful and curious it tends to disrupt expectations in ways that today we call out of the box what gets lost among critics of the imagination and of the humanities which are presumed guilty by association is that the world is filled with so many things whose nature identity and even value are so often relative and shifting rather than absolute and stable Napoleon once remarked that victories would come so much easier if the opponent would stand still while he maneuvered it's the duty of the humanities to teach ourselves as flexible moral, ethical and spiritual citizens they do this by teaching us about those people and those things that are not us by sharpening our abilities to observe and to learn by stimulating that variety of love that is grounded in a selfless interest in the well-being of others who may be complete strangers to us the humanities empower us to imagine intensely and comprehensively as Shelley put it and in the process they make us not just better citizens but also more humane ones and it is that heightened sense of not only our own humanity but also that of others that is a particular goal of the humanities it's a goal that is more worthwhile indeed more essential now than ever if we're ever to survive in a world whose ever increasing fragility is quite literally in our hands let me conclude then by circling back once more to Percy Shelley's point about the imagination which after all is the creative engine that drives and empowers the humanities his point that the imagination is the great instrument of moral good it permits each of us to experience and to practice love which we might call empathy but he called it love by enabling us to get outside of our self-centered individual selves put ourselves in the places of others and making their pains and pleasures our own I ran into a striking application of what Shelley is talking about in an article by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas McGuire called war literature the constitution and fostering reluctant killers McGuire who teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs writes that the study of literature of war puts a human face on war an individual human face in doing so McGuire writes the literature of war reminds us that quote war always squanders humans a fact that complicates our commitment to the sanctity of the individual McGuire the professional soldier charged with training others to conduct warfare in the process to take lives perhaps many lives the troubling questions that humanists need to ask have to do with defining and conducting what he calls just wars from McGuire quotes rather than being antithetical to the military profession the humanities constitute the indispensable component of the military professionals formation they help to give the military professional as they help to give us all of us a deeper appreciation of the value of human life and culture and appreciation that can translate into more humane and compassionate leadership the humanities counteract war's tendency to depersonalize the combatants on both sides by reminding us of the human faces and the sanctity of all life and thereby making each military man and woman at the very least a reluctant killer for McGuire as for Shelley and his romantic era contemporaries the humanities keep us honest and human they teach reading and thinking citizens to recognize and appreciate the bonds of fundamental ethical humanity that link us all regardless of party faction, nation, gender or whatever even when we must do battle against our fellow citizens of this single environment we call planet earth it's my strong conviction then that the humanities are good for that operation of the imagination that takes us out of our isolated selves that situates us among others who are both like and unlike ourselves helping us both to see and to measure, to imagine and to create the humanities foster creative critical and ethical thinking in every area of our individual and collective lives they help us to engage actively with the fundamental issues the core questions of individual and collective liberty they don't just help us to think they require us to do so so if there really is a war on the humanities going on in our culture then the humanities themselves offer the best anti-war medicine I can think of and the most humanely useful and restorative one they humanize us that among so much else is what the humanities are good for thank you thank you Steve it was great and I can tell that everybody appreciated it and now Dr. Sarub will moderate questions if you have questions Dr. Barrett please use the microphone or she will give you the microphone so fire away hi good afternoon so I think the best way to proceed would be for you to come down here and I'll give you the microphone before I go ahead and ask a question and then if the next person has a question we'll just form an ongoing line great lecture I'm just thinking about a book by Jonathan Crary he's the founder of his own books and it's called 24 7 and what it basically posits is that since we have such a complete overload of pop culture at this point that everything is only just good at this particular moment and we've lost a sense of the past and we also have no sense of the future and I'm also thinking about a quote by the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñel who said in 1983 if you're everywhere at once you're nowhere at all so I wondered if you could possibly comment upon the use of the humanities to help us sort through the avalanche of information which comes to us every day from such a multitude of sources and which is in many cases just sort of superficial chatter at the same time we don't get a chance to more deeply explore the issues that you were talking about just now in your lecture I almost thought you were going to bring up Santa Ana and the idea about those who failed to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it one of the things that the humanities teach us is that we keep doing many of the same things I mean whether it's the rise and fall of civilizations the rise and fall of cultures the revisions of the curricula in our various departments it's a wheel that just keeps going around and around and around and one of the things I go back to my guy Shelly one of the things that he did he wrote a very complicated play called Prometheus Unbound which is a retelling of the myth of Prometheus and in his play Shelly has Prometheus regret having used Zeus because he says I'm sorry to have caused pain to anybody and everybody else in the play goes oh my god he's caved he's given up he's the only one who gets it and gradually everyone else in the play realizes that that vengeance and that sort of stuff is the wrong model rather than fixing the machine of evolution Shelly says throw the machine out invent a whole new scheme one of the things that the humanities can do whatever field we're in is give us that sense of historical continuity that ought to help us get a better grip on how to deal with everything from the plight of the tiger beetle to what's going to happen in Ukraine they offer us perspectives and as I tried to say the consensus is the more I tell my students working on literature it's not rocket science it's harder which it is same thing with art history same thing with music same thing with history it's very much like trying to mount Jello in an album but the humanities challenge us to keep asking the questions the point of the questions that the humanities ask is to get us all to ask better and better questions I'm going to make a comment that I wouldn't dare have made about three and a half years ago I dare say that there are that scientists largely know more about the humanities than humanists know about the science absolutely that's a comment I have a question though more of a question that I wonder whether the real problem isn't so much what good are the humanities anyway but that's facing us in higher education but what good is a college education anyway the people like Peter Thiel who are paying students to drop out of college and go on and do something entrepreneurial are speaking to a current in society about getting on with what's practical and what's good have you thought about that in the context of the humanities yeah one of the thing the area that I do so much work in is really the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century and one of the great fears that was in the culture certainly in Britain and to some extent on the continent at that time was as the workforce increased as industrial technology increased as literacy began to spread more and more people were studying as it were and instead of these well-rounded individuals who tended to be aristocrats in the 18th century but well-rounded individuals who knew a bunch of things about a lot of things we were starting to get specialist and gradually they couldn't talk to one another anymore and I think that's the problem that we've got today this is why I say that the humanists and the scientists and the STEM folks we're on the same page and we can't allow ourselves to be driven apart by social demands by curricular reforms by whatever is saying that these things are all incompatible they have to work together and it seems to me part of the job of not just higher education but primary and secondary education in the school systems is to really build the intellectual classroom without walls the idea that we go and for 50 minutes we think about history and then we go over here and for 50 minutes we think about mathematics and then we go somewhere else and think about no put them all in the same room and let them all talk to one another and see how what we can learn about mathematics from studying music and so forth it's the model that I use in my teaching I've always been the person until we got more technology I've always been the one with the boom box in this hand the slide projector in this hand because to me whatever I'm teaching is the intersection of a lot of roads leading in and a lot of roads leading out so that when I have a chemistry major in my literature class the chemistry major has something to contribute because we discover guess what the romantic poets we're all talking the jargon of scientific discovery the language that the scientists were using at the time is very very similar they use the same terminology that the creative writers are using and I think that we've allowed ourselves to have these barriers set up for us it's the nature of a curriculum it's the nature of having departments and many of you probably have been through interdepartmental wars where when I came here many years ago I started a course called literature in the other arts and I caught flak well my chair caught flak about an English professor going in and showing pictures that's not your department that's somebody else's department well yeah but like Rodney King said can't we all get along I mean that would be my answer we as educators but we also as informed citizens we've got to try to deconstruct these barriers that are being put up for us because there's an awful lot of young people finishing college degrees with very special degrees and going out and finding they can't get a job in that and they can't do anything else and one of the things that we all need to be more conscious of in our disciplines is teaching that kind of skill set of flexibility that allows us to adapt to the changing job environment just like it allows us to adapt to the changing natural environment I've probably gone a long way from where you asked me to go Thank you Dr. Barrett in my reading in order to prepare to celebrate Blake's Jerusalem as you know philosophers that deal with the subject of beauty the study of it, the appreciation, the knowledge of it Longinus, Immanuel Kant and certainly Elaine Scarry professor of aesthetics at Harvard so if I could ask you a personal question I think it was Immanuel Kant that said some people just cannot get a sense of aesthetics they simply do not know what beauty is and so therefore they don't know what the good and the truth so on a personal level do you agree with that because if someone does not have an appreciation of aesthetics and all that entails and especially as you said today it carries into the ethical and the moral areas of our lives too and they certainly can't have an appreciation or a willingness to be participants in a social conscience like why do you not recycle so my question is do you think some people just cannot get it? No, no it's a matter of vocabulary isn't it to say oh look at the balance look at the symmetry look at the equilibrium of this figure or whatever then you have the person who goes to the gallery and hears something on the wall and says that's not art I could do that and of course you want to say well then why didn't you but if you ask that person okay if that's not art what is by Jove eventually they'll start to articulate what their aesthetic values are same thing happens in the classroom they just have been sort of connoisseur out of their senses which is the line that Blake used I mean I teach poetry students hate it because they've been so mystified and run round circles and all this stuff and I say forget all that let's have some fun and I think we need to do that with all the disciplines the idea that somebody just can't get it no I'm sorry we can all get it the person who really doesn't get it is the one I think we ought to listen to because that person is going to tell us why we don't get it you know it's kind of like the idea of having mercy on someone coming to the end of the semester our students will ask us to have mercy so long as we have mercy on them we're looking down and we're giving them something that they don't deserve and that keeps that distance between us but if we forgive them for screwing up if we do something nice it narrows the distance we don't have to get on their page and they don't have to get on our page but there's a midway page where we can both be very happy and get along and they won't complain about the grades and we won't give them failing grades probably but that's my answer no I don't think there's anybody out there who doesn't get it I just wanted to ask one thing why do you do what you do because I love it you mean as professor person your general consensus of everything you do because most of the students here are going here to get a degree for whatever they're doing communities, STEM, whatever but in general we all already know this reality we possibly won't be able to get a job directly after college maybe in a year or so after college we still might be searching for something to do I'm personally trying to figure out it's just all really worth it I'll give you my speech that I give my students just about every class I see some former students of mine in the group here you'll recognize this my valedictory address which is basically okay we've done our thing for a whole semester what you must do when you go out of this classroom is you must continue to figure out what it is you love what is your passion you follow your heart even if you have to study something else to pay the bills you do what matters to you because God forbid that you get a degree and can't get a job in what you want to do and you've given up what you did want to do to follow that if some of us are going to end up unemployed some of them will go out on the mall with the cup and sing and others will just be very bitter and turn into scrooge but why do I do it I've been very fortunate I like what I do and I've been able to get a job that says you know that's fine you do that that's harmless enough and I love it so that's my answer follow your heart no matter what no matter what the cost figure out what that is that you know is right for you You noted that William Blake said that opposition is true friendship so if we are collectively in a moment where there's opposition to the humanities lack of funding cut in programs designated as specials in schools why would this be a good moment to reinvent the humanities are there ways that people can do humanities that lead us to more imaginative lives or results I wish I knew the names I just saw a piece recently on some visual artists who were doing really neat kind of geometrical curvilinear artworks both two dimensional and three dimensional and they got them out of somebody's mathematical formula program which puts all of these things into play and then spins them in a sort of CAD environment why is it a good time to talk about this again because at least in the educational environment I think it's true in culture too economics right now it's been the economy has been such a mess for the last six years and God knows how many really there's only X amount of resources and we're constantly trying to figure out how we can preserve our little bit of turf whether it's academic or personal or imaginative whatever and because it seems like a limited amount it's like the old argument many years ago when feminism was getting started the notion all the men who said women shouldn't have rights because it'll take away from mine as opposed to what's to be gained here by opening things up same thing has to happen I think with the humanists and the STEM folks and the politicians and the economists and the administrators we all need to be sitting around the table saying look how can we make this work better it's clearly it's going on in the country both in the colleges and universities and in the K through 12 curriculum how can we how can we do the more that we're always asked to do I mean look at what's now being done for instance in high schools all the things that many of us didn't have to have to live in a much more complicated world where the students sitting in the front row may be packing any number of weapons and somebody else's on drugs but we've got to sit down and figure out some way to work this together so that we can get on some kind of a page we can all live on or we're going to kill one another physically maybe certainly intellectually you were talking about the importance of the humanities one of the reasons you said was critical thinking wrestling with ideas looking for things like truth and beauty and wrestling with the author's ideas and I agree with that totally but it seems to be that one of the reasons that people turned against the humanities was that some years ago the ideas of deconstruction postmodernism came in where they said there is no such thing as truth once the author puts it out there it's up to you to play with and it seemed to me like in the various humanities not just English courses but others there was no longer the search for what the author was saying and wrestle with his ideas to play with words on that and I think that's one of the times at least when people started turning away from humanities what did we gain anything from that postmodern period is it over have we gone back to it how will we know my read of it is that we are moving away from that there's less of this notion that everything is relative ultimately the old story was told about Samuel Johnson Oswell walking in London one day and they were talking about Bishop Barclay and Bishop Barclay had said nothing really exists except as we perceive it that the world isn't out there it's just a mental construct and Johnson goes over and kicks a stone in his treatise thus I refute Bishop Barclay you can't live where everything is situational ethics and intellectual relativism at some point you've got to say here's a sign post here's something even if you set up a sign post so that you can argue against it it at least gives some basis to the argument and I think this from what I understand there's a lot of this going on in scientific theory and the ethics of science the idea that at some point we have to say okay there is such a thing no matter there is such a thing as big bang or whatever something we have to all agree on or it's just it's hurting cats Chancellor Perlman has an aesthetically pleasing object well I thought the conversation could continue informally he's been waving a flag up here and since you wanted at least some non-relatives the truth will call this meeting to end but I'm sure Professor Barron would be happy to engage with you privately or all of you could move to the centennial room for the undergraduate research fair and talk there as well so we have a small gift you know I hesitate giving a gift like this to a scientist but to an artist and a humanist it's easy and we hope you enjoy it and why don't you join me again in thanking Steve thank you