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The Evolution of the Humanities

The humanities flourish when they extend into societal, environmental, and community spheres.

Adapt or die. The biological maxim applies to more than just living beings—just as finches on the Galápagos Islands changed physiologically to fill different environmental niches, the institutions that make up our society similarly need to adapt. One such group of institutions is the humanities themselves. The humanities today face pressures to find their place in our ever-evolving academic and societal landscape.

Professor Robert D. Newman, director of the National Humanities Center and former dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah, is particularly invested in seeing the humanities flourish. In a BYU Humanities Center colloquium hosted on September 12, 2022, Newman laid out his vision of an increased alliance between the humanities and environmental movements—in Newman’s words, “a bridging of the academic and public divide, so that any space between the practice of the humanities and advocacy for social and environmental justice is vastly diminished.”

National Humanities Center Director and environmental humanities advocate Robert Newman
National Humanities Center Director Robert Newman

Newman emphasized a number of ways the humanities must change. Primarily, humanities scholarship must reevaluate its focus on the individual—particularly in light of recent movements which emphasize race, gender, and identity as individualizing forces. “Can a concentration on individual identity, no matter how significantly tied to issues of social justice, serve the need to embrace the collective?” he skeptically asked.

The humanities, Newman explained, are at their most transformative when they help us realize how we fit into a community. They have the potential to “conjoin social and ecological justice, as well as [be] a dynamic intersection between personal and societal transformation.” To realize this, however, the humanities will need to adapt in certain ways.

One practical change will be a shift away from the cloistered, isolated model of academic humanities to a more community-centric model of humanities. This “would do wonders for our own self-esteem, as well as the esteem in which we are held,” Newman said.

Further, the humanities must join forces with the sciences in the fight against what he called “the most crucial problem of our time”—climate change. This shift requires a realignment of humanities pedagogy to encourage students to focus on what Newman called “legacy projects,” which he described as “projects wherein students are compelled to consider how their actions have impact beyond themselves, and what consequences their lives have on future lives, both human and not.”

Take, for example, the notion of environmental sustainability. Students of philosophy could make arguments all day about the ethical obligations of sustainability in the abstract. But they could also work with scientists to apply their argumentation in practical, real-world scenarios: they could perform their own environmental research, start movements in their communities, and write articles for public readership. These latter projects exemplify Newman’s envisioned legacy projects—their implications and impact extend well beyond the scope of traditional academic humanities.

Newman painted a picture of an increasingly interdisciplinary humanities landscape: a brave new world that promises to entirely restructure the humanities that we once knew. “Emerging disciplines like environmental studies, cognitive studies, narrative medicine, computational linguistics, and information theory, for example, will become the university departments of the future, all of which would have a humanities component in conversation with other fields,” he said.

As the humanities continue to adapt, more than their role in universities will be at stake. Humanities students and scholars will increasingly find themselves with a wide range of weighty responsibilities. “Saving democracy, saving civil society, saving the planet, is all intimately intertwined with securing the future of the humanities,” Newman concluded.