what can we expect from the humanities? from humboldt to ... · reformer wilhelm von humboldt ....
TRANSCRIPT
Jürgen Barkhoff
From Humboldt to Horizon 2020
What can we expect from the Humanities?
Ju?rgen Barkhoff Cover 07/11/2012 15:17 Page 2
Jürgen Barkhoff
From Humboldt to Horizon 2020.
What can we expect from the Humanities?
Inaugural address of the
Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub
Arts and Humanities Research Institute
17 October 2012
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Welcome and thank you for coming here tonight to the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts
and Humanities Research Institute. I would like to begin with some art, Max Ernst’s
Humboldt Current from 1950.
The original can be admired in the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel in
Switzerland, and I have chosen it for the start of my talk because it brings Humboldt
and Horizon together. The Humboldt current that is represented here in an abstract,
yet densely atmospheric manner, is the cold current running from Antarctica up the
Pacific alongside the western seaboard of South America in parallel to the Andes. It
is named after the German explorer, geographer and naturalist extraordinaire,
Alexander von Humboldt, who between 1799 and 1802 undertook his famous Latin
American expedition.
And the Horizon? It is dark, in fact black; quite fitting for a symbolist picture that
alludes to the Romantic tradition, celebrating the night and the unity of nature
rather than enlightenment ideals, the cold light of scientific enquiry or focus on
empirical detail. Thus the horizon of modern science comes into sight and with it
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Humboldt Current, Max Ernst
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the - decidedly less romantic – prospect of Horizon 2020, the EU Commission’s main
European research funding instrument that will be the successor programme to
Framework Programme 7. It will be launched in 2014 and run for five years and is
expected to have a volume of 80 billion euro. Thinking about Horizon 2020 one
might be inclined to read the picture symbolically as well, as many see dark clouds
gathering on the Horizon for the Humanities: there is a lot of concern that the way
research money will be allocated in the funding instruments of Horizon 2020, the
Humanities will once again be marginalized and not adequately represented in the
thematic calls which identify areas for collaborative research on urgent societal
challenges.
Let me pause for a moment, I fear this is not a good start.
Not yet two minutes into my talk and I find myself
explaining its somewhat cryptic title, evoking the
Science-Humanities divide and spreading gloom and
doom about the Humanities. So let us try a second start:
This cute fellow, Spheniscus humboldti, the Humboldt
penguin, is also named after Alexander von Humboldt.
You might have seen the likes of him in the zoo, as he is,
sadly, an endangered species. That is what we do with
endangered species, isn't it, we build nice habitats for
them, where a few of them can flourish and where we
can admire them. There is widespread concern that Arts
and Humanities scholars might be a bit like Humboldt Penguins; that we, too, are an
endangered species, and one could be forgiven for viewing institutes such as this as
privileged habitats, where a few of us are protected from the arctic winds of
spending cuts and the ubiquitous calls for applicable research and immediate and
measurable outputs.
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Spheniscus humboldti, the Humboldt penguin
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Let me assure you, I do not see the Trinity Long Room Hub in this way and I do not
want to talk about my species as endangered Humboldt Penguins.
We could, however, take inspiration from their resilience, their dignity and their
upright posture as the chip on the shoulder of Humanities advocates, which creeps
in all too easily into debates about the role and future of the Humanities, is, in my
view, decidedly unhelpful. As is the often apocalyptic tone of the debate, the most
prominent example of which is probably Martha M. Nussbaum's important book Not
for profit. Why democracy needs the Humanities of 2008. While I agree
fundamentally with her passionate and persuasive argument that the Humanities
are central for democracy, societal innovation and responsible citizenship, I do not
think that alarmist rhetoric about ‘a crisis of massive proportions and grave global
significance’ (from the first sentence of the book) is the most constructive way of
framing the necessary debate about the many challenges to the Humanities. One
reason for this is that talk about the crisis of the Humanities is part of their discourse
since the opening up of the Science-Humanities
divide in Humboldt’s time; Totgesagte leben
länger, as we say in German; those pronounced
dead live on longer.
Starting my talk with reference to Alexander von
Humboldt, the famous scientist after whom dozens
of species and places are named, is of course a
reference to this debate as I will not talk about him
at all from now on, but rather about his older
brother, the philosopher, linguist and educational
reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt .
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Wilhelm von Humboldt
1 Martha M. Nussbaum, Not for Profit. Why Democracy needs the Humanities, Princeton, Oxford 2008, p. 1.
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Is anything named after him? Yes it is, of course, Humboldt University in Berlin. It
wasn't called Humboldt University when it was founded in 1810 but Friedrich-Wilhelm
Universität after the then Prussian monarch. Today its name is connected to Wilhelm
von Humboldt, the instigator, tireless advocate and brain behind the concept of this
reform university. In a number of memoranda he formulated and propagated the
famous Humboldtian educational ideals, calling for the establishment of a new type
of university to encourage independent enquiry and a holistic approach to education
- Bildung (which is poorly translated with ‘education’ and entirely missed with
‘skills acquisition’, but has more connotations of character development and
self cultivation).
This is the logo of Humboldt University and it shows, we might be surprised to
realize, the two brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm. Humboldt University is named,
and that is not well known, after both brothers and not
the man who invented it and lobbied for it. This is not
another put down for the Humanities, but rather an
expression that the so called saddle epoch around 1800,
the formative period of the modern world we live in, did
not yet categorically separate P.J. Snow’s two cultures in
two all too often antagonistic camps, but tried to hold
them together in a spirit of brotherhood, which the
educator and the explorer, the philosopher and the
scientist together represent.
Why does Humboldt matter? He has formulated the most influential principles which
have shaped the structures and identities of modern western universities all over
Europe; principles, which were not meant and are not specific to the Arts and
Humanities, but which gave them a pivotal role in the university and enabled them
to flourish. There is widespread concern that recent developments in the European
university landscape like the emergence of the mass university, the Europe wide
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Logo of Humboldt University,Berlin
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implementation of the Bologna structures, growing managerialism, a move away
from core funding to project funding, and, most recently and most acutely, a
reductive view that the priority of universities research has to be on 'jobs and
growths', on immediate economic benefit, are destroying the university culture
connected with Humboldt’s name; and that the Humanities are particularly hard hit.
Geoffrey Boulton, Vice Principal of Edinburgh University, and Colin Lucas, former
Vice Chancellor of Oxford, for example open their inspirational 2008 position paper
‘What are Universities for’, which strongly argues against a narrow and reductive
interpretation of innovation and relevance of research with this quote:
‘A university is a place […] whither students come from every quarter for
every kind of knowledge; it is the place to which a thousand schools make
contributions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate. It is a
place where enquiry is pushed forward; discoveries verified and perfected,
and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge
with knowledge.’2
This quote is actually not by Wilhelm von Humboldt, but a kindred spirit from this
island, John Henry Newman, the founder of the National University of Ireland, later
UCD, and author of 'The idea of a university' of 1852. Newman is the second big
name connected to the foundational myths of the modern university, and we should
give this educational reformer from these islands his due in this context. The quote
certainly is in a Humboldtian spirit (though it is an open question whether their views
are more antithetical or more complementary), and Boulton and Lucas immediately
after mentioning Newman turn to Wilhelm von Humboldt and invoke his ideals,
formulated 40 years earlier.
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2 Quoted from: Geoffrey Boulton, Colin Lucas, What are universities for? League of European ResearchUniversities (LERU) Position paper, September 2008, p. 3. Accessible at:http://www.leru.org/index.php/public/publications/publications-2002-2009/.
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A second reason why Humboldt is of interest today is that he is an inspirational figure
for university reformers and anyone who thinks about the roles of universities in a
time of crisis. In 1809 and 1810 he was head of the Prussian education system for only
16 months as a kind of junior minister, and in this short period he prepared and pushed
through a root and branch reform of the whole Prussian educational system, from
primary level to secondary level to the universities, based on the aspirations of the
Enlightenment and a utopia of free and universal education; a reform which would
have profound and lasting effects for centuries well beyond his native Prussia and
Germany. He was also highly creative in a time of scant resources and a contracting
economy: his suggestion to locate teaching and research in the same institution and
to deeply intermesh the two was partly making a virtue out of a necessity, as the
impoverished Prussian state could simply not afford to establish academies for science
separate from teaching institutions like the French. University presidents and deans
will also be interested to hear that he resigned mainly because of a controversy over
funding. Humboldt felt passionately that for the protection of the autonomy of
universities they needed to become more independent from government money. He
was arguing that the new university needed big endowments, which effectively meant
land in the Mark Brandenburg, and that got him into conflict with the vested interests
of the local landed gentry, the Prussian Junkers.
Equally important for us today is, thirdly, the historical context of Humboldt’s reform:
the comprehensive Bildung he was advocating as the prime task of universities was
decidedly aimed at society and not just at the individual, and a society in urgent need
of reform. His question was: what contribution can education make to the renewal
of a country and to lifting the spirit of a people that had just lost their sovereignty
to the most powerful European nation and to the most dangerous leader in Europe
– Napoleon; a nation that was experiencing an occupation and was no longer in
command of its destiny. He was, in short, looking to education for the country to
reinvent itself, restore its sense of direction and purpose.
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Finally, there is a fourth and rather selfish reason to look to Humboldt: it gives me
an opportunity tonight to talk about the culture and the epoch that a lot of my
research is about, and I hope that you will indulge me. After all, in order to be
credible our engagement for the Humanities as a whole needs to be grounded in our
disciplinary expertise (a theme to which I will return).
In this talk, I want to demonstrate that the Humboldtian ideals are neither dead nor
irrelevant, but that there is a reformulation of these ideals for our time which offers
the Humanities challenges, but also plenty of opportunities. I will use this discussion
to show what we as a research community and as a society can and must expect from
the Humanities (and for a large part of this audience it means: what do we
expect from ourselves!). I also want to use this opportunity to situate within
this landscape institutes such as this which have the twin objectives of promoting
cross-and interdisciplinary work and engaging Humanities research with wider public
debate. This is my structure:
I. Introduction
II. Humboldt’s ideals today
III. Interdisciplinarity in Horizon 2020
IV. A taster: Europe in a changing world
V. What can Irish society expect from the Humanities?
II. Humboldt’s Ideals Today
Humboldt’s idealistic propositions are known today mostly in the form of a number
of catchy slogans, which he distilled with great political acumen from more
comprehensive theories mainly from the German theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher (which is one of the reasons why we should perhaps better speak of
the Humboldt ideas as a foundational myth). They are:
➢ Unity and differentiation of knowledge
➢ Unity of teaching and research
➢ Solitude and freedom of the researcher
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Solitude and Freedom of the Researcher
This is the most misunderstood and controversial of the Humboldtian ideas, and I
shall therefore start my discussion with it. 'The lone scholar' working in solitude has
become a bit of a Feindbild, a bogeyman in recent debates that promote the
desirability and necessity of collaborative work, though the bulk of research
excellence in the Humanities is done by individuals. I think we should avoid and
ostracize the term ‘lone scholar’, as it suggests isolation
and withdrawal from the world, and use 'single
researcher' instead. ‘Lone scholar’ has asocial, antisocial,
even pathological connotations. Melancholia comes to
mind, the archetypal affliction of the learned, the
brooding thinker, the doubter.
We might think of images of the most famous isolated
and self-doubting scholar of world literature, a university
professor who enters into a pact with very dark forces
indeed to overcome his isolation. The opening
monologue of Goethe's Faust takes place in a typical
traditional ideas space, a university professor’s study as
the locus classicus of melancholia, ’a lofty-arched, narrow,
Gothic chamber’.
Enlightenment discourse shunned the melancholic as an
enemy of society, who had a dark view of the world, and
refused to contribute to the De humani corporis fabrica,
Vesalius progress of society and humanity. I found this
illustration of the skeleton as thinker, with the iconic
gesture of the melancholic in one of the earlier
promotional materials for the Trinity Long Room Hub.
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Melancholia 1, Dürer
Faust’s Monologue,Rembrandt
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That is neither our view of scholarship nor was it
Humboldt’s. For him, as already indicated above, solitude
did not mean at all that the scholar should not interact
with his community of discourse or indeed with society.
Just the opposite. Humboldt's academy was very sociable,
fostering intellectual curiosity beyond your chosen
subject, making the studium generale - in our days, Broad
Curriculum - a core element of university education,
encouraging the theologian to take a course in
geography and the physicist to go to lectures in drama
studies. It also certainly does not mean not engaging in the kind of cross-disciplinary
dialogue Horizon 2020 is encouraging and organising. To illustrate what it means
allow me a short personal reminiscence to a formative experience I had as an
undergraduate during my year as a visiting student here in Ireland. It took place in
a long established and venerable educational institution in the heart of Dublin.
In those days we would go for a pint after the library closed, and sometimes a
recently appointed young lecturer in Philosophy would come with us. One evening
we challenged him on his research in a typical undergraduate mix of naivety and
provocative boldness with the question: ‘Do you
think anything you write about is useful to
anyone?’ He responded ‘Sometimes I fear it
might’. This is not an answer with which you
would impress governments, funding agencies
or even governing bodies of universities, and it
was, of course, half given in jest. It is an answer
open to misinterpretation, but it is also one that
commands respect, when you think about it. It
was, in other words, a true philosopher’s answer.
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De humani corporis fabrica,Vesalius
O’Neill’s on Suffolk St.
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Intellectual curiosity, driven by the passion of enquiry, regardless where it leads to,
regardless of the consequences, is a formidable intellectual power of the first rate,
one that we can and must expect from our Humanities scholars (as indeed from all
scholars). This kind of solitude, the one that keeps you awake at night, chained to
your desk or the laboratory table, is the driving force that makes people world
leaders in their fields and gets them coveted European Research Council grants. And
indeed the philosopher who gave this answer was not one who spent his days in the
pub, but has today one of the most prestigious chairs in philosophy in Oxford and is
a true world leader in his area of philosophy. Innovation, the buzz word of recent
times, is by its nature unpredictable and often serendipitous, and deeply depends on
individuals that are driven by their curiosity! What solitude means however, in this
context, is that in order to fully focus on your research questions, you have to be
protected from outside pressures and you have to have the right to withdraw, to a
degree and temporarily, from those aspects of the world that are not related to your
work; that is a fundamental requirement of all research and should not be mixed up
with a disinterest for society or the well being of one’s people.
As a complimentary – and not antagonistic - process, agenda setting by stakeholders
from outside academia is also very necessary (and I will come to that later), but we
need to remind ourselves that foresight exercises that define the research questions
we have to tackle can get it badly wrong. For example, Roosevelt’s 1937 Commission
to advise on the most likely innovations of the next 30 years missed, among other
things, nuclear energy, lasers, computers, xerox, jet engines, radar, antibiotics and
the genetic code. For that reason it is very encouraging that the ERC grants which
support brilliant individuals across all fields without being prescriptive as to their
research topic and with excellence as the only criterion have been given a prominent
place and a doubling of its budget in the Horizon 2020 proposals.
And freedom? ‘The pursuit of truth wherever it may lead to’ alluded to above is of
course also the definition of academic freedom, which for Humboldt, a liberal
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academic in the Prussian absolutist state, was a prime concern – as it is for us today.
And his insistence on freedom as a core academic value and a prerequisite for
excellent research does extend, for him and for us, to the institution, and includes
institutional autonomy and the principle of self-governance.
Unity of Teaching and Research
Research-led teaching: this is the best known of the Humboldtian principles and the
one that you find reference to in the strategic plans of every self-respecting university.
It is the ideal of the teacher-scholar who ensures in his/her teaching that the students
participate in the intellectual excitement of discovery, who treats them as equals in
terms of their curiosity and intelligence and organizes a mutual process of learning.
Though this is an ideal that we all subscribe to and that we strive to realize, the
realities of the modern mass university and ever increasing staff-student ratios makes
this ideal increasingly difficult to attain, certainly at undergraduate level. But in this
respect I see an opportunity in the much maligned Bologna reforms and a role for
institutes such as this, as the shift towards level 9 and 10, towards more taught
graduate programmes and research postgraduates allows a more intensive
interaction with the next generation of researchers. In fact the increasing number of
research groups fostered within externally funded projects offer great opportunities
to bring together doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and senior researchers,
working on common problems. Graduate programmes and doctoral schools such as
our Digital Arts and Humanities Structured PhD Programme also offer great potential
in this respect. In this building we give the centrality of the education of the next
generation expression in the study spaces on the fourth floor: the most inspiring views
of the campus are reserved for our PhD students from the Hub Schools.
But if I think of the unity of teaching and research in terms of what we as a society can
and should expect from the Humanities, I think first and foremost of the kind of Arts
and Humanities graduates and their competencies that are the ‘product’ of an
integrated approach to education. Our graduates are a reflection of our aspirations
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and our potential as researchers. In arguing against a narrow definition of specific skill
sets as the desired outcome of university education, Geoffrey Crossick, the Chair of
our Institute Board, rightly observed: ‘Universities are educating students for jobs that
have not yet been invented’.3 For that reason alone we need to emphasize generic
skills such as critical reasoning, independence of mind, creativity and problem-solving
as central to our educational mission. But even more important is the contribution
these competencies make to the notion of responsible citizenship. Martha M.
Nussbaum has written most eloquently on that, and so has John Laver, the first Chair
of our Institute Board, in describing ‘two distinctive attributes’ of Arts and Humanities
graduates: ‘reflectiveness, leading to a thoughtful tolerance that is one of the
hallmarks of a civilized culture, and a sense of being rooted in a cultural and historical
context’.4 Let me add to this the intercultural competence that comes with the ability
to read other cultures and negotiate their ‘otherness’ and in this the importance of
language skills, if a very short plug for my own subject and School is allowed!
We are all aware of the high employability and attractiveness of Arts and Humanities
graduates across all fields of employment. Let me just mention as one prominent
example the CEO of Hewlett Packard between 1999 and 2005, Carly Fiorina, the only
woman to date to have led a Fortune 20 company, who has a BA in philosophy and
medieval history from Stanford (as well as an MBA). When asked in an interview at
the world economic forum in Davos who the most influential business guru in her life
was, she responded ‘Hegel’ – incidentally one of the first professors of the university
Humboldt founded.
On this front as well we should not and must not be defensive when it comes to the
expectations that the Arts and Humanities sector has to contribute to jobs and
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3 Geoffrey Crossick, The future is more than just tomorrow: Higher education, the economy and the longerterm. Report for the Universities UK’s From Recession to Recovery Project 2010. Accessed at:http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Publications/Pages/FromRecessionToRecovery2010.aspx .
4 John Laver, ‘The humanities: afterthought or cynosure?’, in Ronald Crawford (ed.), A Future for ScottishHigher Education. Committee of Scottish Higher Education Principals 1997, pp 151-161, p. 157.
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growth. I would like to mention some figures from two recent reports that pretty
much speak for themselves in this respect. The 2006 EU report on Economy of
Culture in Europe noted that the Creative and Cultural Industries in 2003 across the
then EU 15 generated 654 billion euro for the economy, considerably more than
the IT sector and the automobile industry, traditionally seen as a key motor for
growth.5 The average qualification and earning potential in this sector is higher
than in others and the sector also grows significantly faster than others. In Ireland,
the 2010 HEA report Playing to our Strengths. The role of the Arts, Humanities and
Social Sciences and Implications for Public Policy estimates that the wider Arts
Sector, the Creative Industries and the Entertainment (Media and Film) industry
together contributed in 2006/7 over 11 billion euro to the Irish economy.6 With a
view to the Creative Technologies and the IT sector we need to note that
technological advances are in many cases driven by developments in the generation
of creative content, for which Humanities graduates are largely responsible. The
growing importance of the Digital Humanities also needs to be noted here, with
Trinity Long Room Hub projects being leaders in Ireland in this field such as the big
FP7 funded digital infrastructure project CENDARI led by Dr Jennifer Edmond or
the European Digital Humanities network DARIAH, for which Prof Susan
Schreibman is the Irish representative.
Unity and Diversity of Knowledge
This third Humboldtian principle might sound like the most idealistic and most
remote. It indeed is a Romantic idea, a reaction to increasing specialisation, the
fragmentation of knowledge and the modern division of labour during the saddle
epoch. In today’s highly differentiated research landscape this Humboldtian ideal of
overcoming artificial boundaries between the fields of knowledge reemerges in the
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5 See The Economy of Culture in Europe. KEA Study prepared for the European Commission 2006, p. 6.Accessed at: http://www.keanet.eu/ecoculture/studynew.pdf.6 Playing to Our Strengths. The Role of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Implications for PublicPolicy. HEA report 2010, p. 44. Accessed at: http://www.hea.ie/files/files/file/HEA%20FAHSS%20Report.pdf
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call for cross- and interdisciplinary work that draws together different competencies
and specializations in order to tackle problems and questions that cannot be
addressed by single disciplines. Vartan Gregorian, the President of the Carnegie
Foundation and former President of Brown University and the New York Public
Library wrote in 2004:
‘We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of
knowledge. […] The complexity of the world requires us to have a better
understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields
that intersect and overlap – economics and sociology, law and
psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and
political science.’7
In this sense I see the Trinity Long Room Hub and similar institutions which
encourage and foster interdisciplinary work as places where we can reenergize this
Humboldtian ideal, reformulate and realise it for our time. The Hub is constituted by
the (currently) seven Hub Schools and the Library representing a wealth of
disciplinary perspectives which they bring to collaborative undertakings. It is the
excellence of our researchers from across these seven Schools in their individual
disciplines together with their interdisciplinary appetite and experience, which forms
the basis of any serious interdisciplinary practice, which must be rooted in disciplinary
scholarship. Steven Jay Gold argues that there are two basic types of researchers,
hedgehogs, who pursue just one research field and methodology with great effect
throughout their careers, and foxes, who roam around curiously and try out a variety
of approaches and topics.8 Myra Strober, however, points out that we all must be
hedgehogs first before we can become foxes, both in terms of our career profiles and
in terms of the credibility of what we have to contribute to the interdisciplinary
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7 Vartan Gregorian, ‘Colleges must reconstruct the unity of knowledge’, in Chronicle of Higher EducationNr 4 June 2004, B 12.8 Cf. Stephen Jay Gold, The hedgehog, the fox and the magister’s pox, New York 2003.
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dialogue.9 Given this I am tempted to suggest adopting our neighbouring foxes in
the Provost’s garden as patron animals of the Hub, only that they don’t easily meet
one of the important criteria of the Hub’s success – visibility!
We must also be conscious that cross-disciplinary or even interdisciplinary work is a
very difficult business and that these buzz words are being branded around rather
too easily and too frequently. And we must not pretend that cross- or
interdisciplinarity is the new panacea – it is neither new - the first conversation I ever
had with a university professor when I started my studies in Tübingen in the late
1970s was about the virtues of interdisciplinarity - nor is anyone suggesting that all
or the majority of our work should be of an interdisciplinary nature. Finally we must
be cognisant of and sensitive to the impediments to deep collaboration across
disciplines. There is interesting research on this. Myra Strober, for example,
convincingly argues that the biggest difficulties that had to be overcome were of
an intercultural nature – if we see diverse disciplines as possessing not only distinct
methodologies, but also different cultures of communication. She argues that
participants in successful and productive cross-disciplinary research groups had to
show great sensitivity and tolerance not only towards specialist terminology and
different jargons, but to rules ‘with regard to a wide variety of subjects including
level of civility, degree of democratic decision-making, style of presentations, style
of discussions of texts, and style of leadership’.10 My own limited experience in an
interdisciplinary research group as a post-doc at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut
in Essen is very much in line with such observations.
But whatever the difficulties, it is clearly the case that a lot of the most exciting,
most innovative and most relevant research is happening at the edges of disciplines
and at zones of contacts between the Sciences. That is reason enough for expecting
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9 Myra H. Strober, ‘Habits of the Mind: Challenges for Multidisiciplinary Engagement’, in SocialEpistemology, 20, Nr 3-4, 2006, pp 315-331, p. 324. See also her book Interdisciplinary Conversations.Challenging Habits of Thought, Stanford 2011.10 Strober 2006, p. 327.
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from the Humanities sustained engagement in this regard. More importantly still
and absolutely compelling is however that a lot of the formidable challenges facing
the world today can only be tackled in interdisciplinary cooperation.
III. Interdisciplinarity in Horizon 2020
That is the point of departure for Priority 3 of Horizon 2020, the EU Framework funding
programme 2014 to 2020, which is organized around a number of societal challenges
that are to be addressed through cross-disciplinary research. It is divided into seven
themes.11 Nobody looking at these would disagree that these are formidable challenges
not only for Europe but globally, and seeing them assembled together here makes
already a pretty convincing case for the setting of research agendas from outside
academia. The two last challenges are explicitly identified as those to which the Social
Sciences and Humanities can make central contributions. In fact, Challenge 6 - Europe
in a changing world - which offers a lot of potential for the Arts and Humanities, was
only recently added after intensive pressure from the Social Sciences and Humanities
lobby. The overall budget volume of this Priority 3 is likely to be over 34 billion euro
with around 4 billion of this for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This in itself is an
interesting and indicative proportionality, but still a lot of money over five years for
the Humanities. Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn has repeatedly issued reassurances
that Humanities and Social Sciences perspectives will be fully integrated into all research
pillars of Horizon 2020 and not just the last two. However, if one looks at the thematic
descriptions of Challenges 1-5 so far, one finds no reference at all to the role the Arts
and Humanities can and should play. This is deeply worrying, not because the
Humanities want a bigger chunk of the cake, but because the challenges identified
cannot be effectively investigated and addressed without their perspectives being an
integral element of the research set-up and research process.
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11 The Horizon 2020 societal challenges are 1. Health, demographic change and wellbeing; 2. Food security,sustainable agriculture, forestry and marine research; 3. Secure, clean and efficient energy; 4. Smart, greenand integrated transport; 5. Climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials; 6. Europe in a Changingworld: Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies; 7. Secure and societies – protecting freedom and securityof Europe and its citizens.
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All these challenges have to be addressed not only at the level of technology, but
crucially at that of attitudes and motivations. Tackling each of them, be it health,
food and agriculture, energy, transport or climate action depends decisively on
investigating underlying social, cultural and behavioural dimensions. In each of these
challenges it is, after all, human behaviour that has created the problems and human
behaviour in all its complexity is, alongside with technological innovations, also one
key to their solution. Health, demography and well-being, for example, cannot be
properly investigated without looking at issues such as definitions of ‘health’ and
‘mental health’, the link between wellbeing and belonging, the role of creativity
and the arts for our sense of well-being, attitudes towards ageing or mechanisms of
inclusion and exclusion around age or mental health. Equally topics like food
security, energy, transport or climate need research into, for example, habits of
consumption, attitudes towards waste, the cultural significance of food, attitudes
towards nature and landscape across different cultures, symbolisms and emotions
invested in nature and environmental debates, the competition between individual
rights versus collective responsibilities and, ultimately, the human resistance to or
ability for change.12
Negotiations about the formulation of the final shape of Horizon 2020 are still
ongoing, and via the Coimbra Group and ECHIC, the European Consortium of
Humanities Institutes and Centres, of which Poul Holm is currently the President, the
Trinity Long Room Hub is involved together with others such as the EUA, LERU,
ALLEA or the Academia Europeana, in a sustained and intensive lobbying effort to
ensure that due prominence is given to the Humanities aspects of these challenges
and to involve their representatives in all stages of the shaping of their agenda.
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12 For a comprehensive discussion of this see Social Sciences and Humanities: Essential Fields for EuropeanResearch and in Horizon 2020. LERU advice paper Nr 11, June 2012, Accessed at:http://www.leru.org/files/publications/LERU_AP_11_SSH_Essential_fields.pdf.
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IV. A Taster – Europe in a Changing World
Before I come to the close let me give you a little example of the potential of
Humanities research to contribute to a better understanding of the present
challenges under the ‘Europe in a changing world’ theme. They have to make a
crucially important contribution by grounding the acute crisis and our reaction to it
in deeper historical and cultural contexts. Let me do this with reference to a topic
that exercises most of Europe and most of Ireland on a regular basis these days.
This recent illustration of German Chancellor Merkel in the New Statesman is not
operating with crude Nazi references such as a moustache and a swastika.
Nonetheless the Terminator Schwarzenegger alluded to here is, of course, also an
Austrian like Hitler, and we should not forget that the term leader is quite neutral
in English, while its German translation is not at all. Discussions about the Euro crisis
are currently dominated either by an undue narrow focus on the economic issues, or,
where history and different traditions are invoked, by the reactivation of old
simplistic national stereotypes and Feindbilder such as this. What is lacking is, on the
one hand, a historic appreciation of the enormous achievements of the European
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‘Europe’s most dangerous leader’, New Statesmen, 20 June 2012
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Union since the end of World War II (which is one of the reasons why the decision
by the Oslo academy to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 to the EU is so
significant), and, on the other hand, a willingness and ability to get beyond the
national stereotypes and investigate into the different historical experiences and
mentalities across Europe that form the basis of current attitudes, convictions, policy
decisions and blind spots.
I recently heard a talk by a prominent European central banker in which he proposed
solutions to the Euro crisis like the fiscal and financial instruments needed to keep liquidity
going and restore the confidence of the market etc., strictly sticking to the economy, as
you would expect. In a smaller, semi-private circle beforehand, however, he took a very
different perspective: reflecting on the German refusal to agree to Eurobonds and burden
sharing he referred to the fact that Germany, in terms of its cultural imprint, was a
predominantly Protestant country and that Protestants, unlike Catholics, did not believe
in forgiveness and a fresh start, facilitated by confession, but rather in atonement through
a long period of suffering and hard work. Let me assure you he was not German, but he
spoke knowledgably, respectfully and in a genuine attempt to make plausible the current
German policy choices beyond the familiar economic arguments.
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‘Not Ze Munny Ze Disziplin’, Peter Schrank, December 2011
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Whether he knew it or not, with this analysis he was referring, among other things,
to one of the most influential theories of mentality, Max Weber’s 1904/5 The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which Weber linked the Calvinist
dogma of redemption in heaven through hard work and success in this world to the
successes of northern, Protestant countries in the emerging capitalist market. That
Merkel is the daughter of a Protestant pastor of course helps to make this argument
plausible. Why did he not mention this cultural dimension of his analysis in his public
talk? I suppose he did not feel that he had the competence and authority to speak
out in this way. But we Humanities scholars have, and we should feel that we should
speak out. And we do.
Joep Leerssen, Professor of Modern European Literature in Amsterdam and a member
of our Institute Board, for example, led a big externally funded research project on the
cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. We all have
those stereotypes in our heads whether we want it or not and they are only too readily
activated. His team traced their discursive history with a view to demonstrating that
they were not based on empirical fact, but rather shaped by a discursive and rhetorical
environment which needs to be carefully reconstructed in its historic and cultural
contexts to be understood.13 Stereotypes are to a large part dominated by processes
of ‘othering’, interpretations from outside with a long imagological tradition of
ascribing national characteristics. To come back to Merkel, we expect her to be
associated with the militarist Prussian tradition like in the next cartoon.
But if we see her, the Northern German from the GDR, being pressed into an ill-fitting
(culturally speaking) Bavarian dirndl, bringing an unbecoming German brew of fiscal
union and treaty changes to the European table, we immediately associate the
Oktoberfest. But did you realize that this caricature is also quoting the oldest written
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13 Cf. Manfred Beller, Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation ofnational characters. A critical survey, Amsterdam, New York 2007.
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source on the Germans, the Roman historian Tacitus
who, in a classic example of ‘othering’, ascribed
to the barbaric Germanic tribes a propensity for
heavy drinking?
Exploring European identities in the dynamics
between self-image and ‘othering’ is just one
aspect of an immensely rich field of enquiry which
is necessary to better understand how European
nations and people and the different layers of
national and European identities relate to each
other; research that can contribute to a better appreciation of different traditions
across Europe and improved intercultural understanding. A lot of research into this
is going on here in Trinity. The seven Hub Schools, the Library and Institute Board
have just agreed on a first Hub priority research theme, which will also be one of the
College Research themes, on ‘Identities in transformation’. This brings together many
research strands from across the Hub Schools and
will allow us, in the years to come, to make a
concerted and considerable contribution to current
debates in Ireland and in Europe.
V. What can Irish Society expect from
the Humanities?
Arts and Humanities matter. But how de we know
that? We as humans are fundamentally meaning
seeking creatures and as such we need the reflection
of our questions and aspirations in critical reasoning
and open debate, and the refraction of our highest
hopes and deepest fears in art and culture. We need
this as much as we need food on the table and the
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‘Frau Merkel serves up her strongbrew’, Gerald Scarfe, December 2011
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air that we breathe. Imagine, for a moment, a world without music, visual art, drama,
film or poetry, a world in which we could not make links with the past of our people
and position ourselves in relation to tradition, or a world in which we could not
connect with other cultures and unfamiliar people via our common reservoir of artistic,
cultural or philosophical expressions of our shared humanity – it is a world that I cannot
imagine, regardless how hard I try, as it would quite simply not be a world inhabited
by humans. Or, to make a more direct connection with politics, allow me to quote my
colleague Darryl Jones from the School of English, who earlier this year, from this
lectern at a conference he organised on the idea of the university, so poignantly
reminded us: 'When the Fascists take over, when the dictators move in, whom do they
take first? The artists, the writers, the journalists, the intellectuals. That's how
dangerous they are'.
These are extremes, but as such they crystallize our thinking. But before I declare
the Hub an anti-Fascist bulwark (which I think you will not find expressed in the fine
symbolism of its architecture), let's take it down a notch or two and return to the
Ireland of today.
What can Irish society expect from the Arts and Humanities, especially in the present
crisis which is after all, first and foremost, a crisis of attitudes, of expectations and
of values? We can expect and must indeed demand that the Arts and Humanities
involve themselves and make themselves heard, and I see it as a prime task of an
institute such as this that it fosters and enables involvement in public debate,
develops a culture of engagement with the big questions that are facing us today
and in doing so demonstrates the difference our research makes. This is not easy
and implies, among other things, a readiness to embrace new formats of delivery and
engagement, and to cultivate a language that is not only understood by our peers,
to refrain from the jargon and the delight in hermetic language which you
sometimes find in academic discourse.
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We must be ambitious in this, but must also be realistic and not overburden the
Arts, Culture or the Humanities by expecting them to fill the ethical void in public
life and singlehandedly rescue us from the despondency that the roller coaster of
boom and bust has left us with. This would just be the flipside of declaring the
irrelevancy of the Humanities that one hears occasionally, equally wrong and
equally dangerous. Such illusionary expectations would amount to a reinstallation
of the artists, the philosophers and the cultural commentators as high priests of
culture, burdened with the impossible task to replace, in a secularised world, the
certainties of religion. The most idealistic versions of the Bildung idea around 1800
aspired to that, and their highly ambivalent legacy teaches us to be cautious in
this respect.
But we can reflect, for example, what civic responsibility and active citizenship entails
and requires today for the ‘renewal of the Republic’, to borrow a phrase from the
President. What we can expect and demand from the Humanities is leadership in
the debate against the pragmatism, materialism, disillusionment and widespread
cynicism that we encounter. Over the next few months, the Trinity Long Room Hub
will, for example, spearheaded by the Department of Classics, make a contribution
to this debate by organising a series of consultations with men and women from
various strata of society on such questions.
And we will contribute to the upcoming decade of commemorations, which will re-
examine the formative period of war, revolution and nation-building, the memory
contests around its remembrance in Ireland and Europe and their impact on the way
Irish and European societies interpret and represent themselves.
The upcoming Irish Presidency of the EU and the fortieth anniversary of Irish
accession to the EU in 2013 will also give us important opportunities, which we will
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grasp, to discuss how Irish society positions and redefines itself in relation to the
European project and the European reality. Together with our Social Sciences sister
institute in the Faculty, the Institute for International Integration Studies or IIIS,
we are planning a Trinity Forum on Europe. This will be two interlinked parallel
lecture series with a mix of TCD contributors and prominent guest speakers in
which we will investigate questions of European identity and Ireland’s position
towards it from the complementary perspectives of the Humanities and Social
Sciences, thus instigating a dialogue across this particular divide. We will also
organise a Trinity Week Symposium with the working title ‘Conflicting Directions,
Competing Identities: Ireland and Europe’. I am looking forward to discussing and
developing many more ideas with you in the coming weeks and months on
how best to energise these necessary debates by bringing academic and public
discourse together.
I am coming to a close. I warmly thank you for coming tonight to the Trinity Long
Room Hub. This extraordinary building is a huge asset, as it provides a prominent and
symbolic space to bring scholars across the disciplines together and to connect
academic debate with the wider public. Against all those concerns about the
marginalisation of our subjects, putting it here in the middle of the historic campus
is a bold statement made by the University and its leadership two years ago about
the centrality of the Arts and Humanities to its mission and its contribution to society.
The striking modernity of this building enters into an exciting dialogue with its
classical surroundings and expresses the interaction between the past and the
present that the Humanities enable and enact. From each of its many windows it
opens new and unexpected vistas onto the campus and in this symbolizes the multi-
perspectivity and freshness of insight which interdisciplinary dialogue offers. It is our
responsibility as an Arts and Humanities community to make sure that what is going
in inside is just as visible and striking!
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I think it has become clear that the question posed in the subtitle of this address
was not meant defensively, as in so many debates about the Arts and Humanities.
It was meant as a challenge. It is a challenge - to all of us. It is a challenge that
requires a lot of imagination, commitment, team spirit, sustained effort and
courage. But it is needed! And it is worth it. Expect a lot. Expect more. Watch this
space! Create this space!
Thank you!
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