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This article was derived from a lecture given at the University of Limerick, Ireland, delivered on October 5, 1994.
Being a thoroughly modern academic, as soon as it was settled that I would be addressing the subject announced in my title, I raced to my p.c. and tapped into the "Information Superhighway," hoping to obtain some "hard data," some numbers with which to obfuscate. But – as is not infrequently the case – technology failed me, and so I am driven back on more anecdotal and impressionistic sources, derived from the experience of teaching for more than a decade at what likes to think of itself as, after all, not AN institute of technology, but THE institute.
I want to comment on three aspects of my work at MIT. First, the peculiarities of teaching the humanities at a technological institution. Second, the advantages of doing so. And third – and I must admit, it is my most important and even polemical point – the necessity of such an enterprise.
First, peculiarities. The most pronounced and pervasive of which is a continuous feeling of being a distinctly odd duck. It is something you can play with (if you have, as I do, a tendency to be impish, in manner if not in size). When asked, "What do you do?" I can honestly answer, "I teach at MIT." And then the plausible hypotheses are very nearly visible in the eyes of my inquisitor: physicist? computer whiz? nuclear power engineer? hotshot biogeneticist? I wait a bit, to let the misconceptions simmer, so to speak, and then say, "I teach literature – English, American, and Irish literature – at MIT." The surprise and bafflement is immediately visible, either in a certain expression (bafflement at war with disbelief) on the face or verbally: "They do that there?"
Yes, they do, and (for complicated historical and sociological reasons) they always have done. Which does not alter the fact that, in the world of my profession, MIT is "a place of little scholarly reputation." But it does mean that I have been blessedly spared participation in the starting of a humanities program at an institution that fundamentally thinks of itself as technological. That, as I understand, is thankless work indeed.
However, it is the case that none of my students and few if any of my colleagues really know what it is I do, as a scholar. At least once a term, an earnest student seeks me out after class and asks, "What do you do for research?" I try, briefly, to explain. Most recently, I would say something like, "I read and think about and write about twentieth century fiction written in English by Irish men and women." To which the student replies, "Yes, but what do you do for research?" You could see him trying to translate what I had said into the world of lab equipment, lasers, and state-of-the-art computer modeling to which he was in the process of being introduced. We had what is called a communication problem.
As for my colleagues, they pay lip service to what is glibly called "the Role of the Humanities," which seems to be a blend of providing a way for high-powered scientific workers to relax and offering some ill-defined "moral instruction." But in either case, the humanities are "soft" and only marginally relevant. And I must admit to some degree I concur, at least as to relevance in the pragmatic sense of the term. When I climbed on the plane to fly over the Atlantic for a year's sabbatical in Ireland, I must admit I didn't ask myself whether the engineer who designed the aircraft had recently read Ulysses or War and Peace or any of Kate O'Brien's novels.
The real fly in the ointment is that my colleagues unabashedly believe that they are fully capable of determining what I should teach and how I should teach it, and are prone to inventing systems of requirements which explicitly force my overworked students to carve out time from their menu of scientific and technical course work to "experience" the humanities. Or, worse yet, to be "exposed" to them, as though literature, philosophy, history, music, and languages were some beneficial microphage.
So: oddity number one is being a sort of missionary to foreign parts, if you will, surrounded by "aboriginals" who may intend no harm or ill will but who can offer little useful advice. And there are so many of them. Maybe the correct metaphor is that of a counter-insurgency operative, an innumerate "mole" in the very heart of the techno-jungle. Whenever one of those Marine Corps ads ("the few, the proud . . .") crosses my field of vision on TV, I think of the Literature Faculty, which numbers 12 (I think). The Physics Department has, I’d guess, more administrative and secretarial staff than that. We offer some 30 courses a term (in part by a kind of shell-game in which we employ part-time and "visiting" faculty) and enroll perhaps as many as 600 students a term; which is about the enrollment of the two required freshman math courses at MIT. We have no graduate students, no post-doctoral students, only one secretary for the entire department (every so often I am reminded how many other MIT faculty of professorial rank have a secretary all of their own).
I like to play on my own oddity – pre-empting satire or hostility, in a way, by reminding my classes that I am one of a handful of people at MIT who does not "speak calculus." But then again it feels odd, to walk into a classroom with a blackboard covered with formulae, left over from some prior instructor's work, and to be the one person in the room who hasn't a clue what the formulae say. A few more quick measures of the relatively peripheral status of at least my corner of the humanities. MIT has an undergraduate enrollment of some 4500. Of whom, at the moment, eight are Literature Majors. By contrast, Mechanical Engineering claims a central role in the lives of some 445 students; while Electrical Engineering (which includes under its umbrella computer science) has 950 majors, so I'm told.
Enough grousing, surely. What of the advantages? Because it draws so heavily on the governmental and industrial support, MIT is relatively wealthy, although like all American colleges and universities, budget-cutting is the fashion of the day. Which puts my department at a disadvantage. Even were we to cut all of our budget for support services, it would accomplish little in terms of absolute savings. The amount allotted to me for supplies, xeroxing, phone calls, and book purchases is, by the standards of the Institute, a pittance.
My students may be confirmed non-readers whose busy (not to say overloaded) schedules allow little time for contemplation and who are astoundingly unsophisticated as analysts of literature, but they come from among the very brightest late adolescents in the entire world, and (because of the particular nature of the requirements of the Institute) they take my classes by choice, rather than by compulsion – a great blessing indeed. I pity my peers at other institutions who suffer as part of the staff of those monstrous catch-all "required freshman humanities courses" which seem terribly much in fashion, these days. And because I do not participate in the cultural habits of problem-sets, number-crunching, competitive grade-curving which is usual at MIT (more about that in a little bit), I can offer classes which are not only humanistic but humane – small, intimate, personal, and (I hope) pleasurable. All of which contributes – if not to better learning – at least to a different style of learning from the large lecture halls and laboratories where the scientists and engineers ply their pedagogical trade.
And one more thing, about that lack of sophistication: Some years ago, I taught for three years at Harvard, where I also earned my degrees. That institution is full of students who pride themselves – with varying degrees of accuracy – on their sophistication. It can be immensely frustrating to have to re-invent the intellectual wheel, so to speak, as one often does in Humanities classes at MIT – to restate and prove the very intellectual bases of things like literary analysis. But it can be just as frustrating to cut through layers of pseudo-literacy. My students at MIT have a refreshing way of unabashedly asking "obvious" but richly fundamental questions.
Let me indulge in an anecdote which will make sense only if you have read Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which as you may know tells the story of an odd love-triangle, between the voluptuous Hester Prynne, her sinister husband Roger Chillingworth, and the rather anorectic Puritan clergyman Arthur Dimmesdale.
The plot of the story sounds like a television melodrama, but Hawthorne's prose style quickly establishes a more solemn (not to say sleep-inducing) plane of reference. This is "Art," after all, not Beverly Hills 90210. One day, as a class and I were plodding our way through metaphoric thickets in talking about the book, one young fellow raised his hand and rather tremulously asked, "You know what I can't figure out? Why would a powerful and beautiful woman like Hester ever fall for a simp like Dimmesdale?" The class laughed, but I was compelled to point out that Hawthorne had carefully constructed his novel to avoid that very question, since the tale opens long after Arthur and Hester have fallen for each other, and in fact after the birth of their illegitimate child. Which in turn let us talk – rather productively, I think – about how the construction of a work of fiction, the apparently simple-minded issue of where the author chooses to begin and end her/his story, can in itself have a powerful metaphoric and communicative force. A good conversation about the ways in which how you say something forms (or deforms, it may be) what you say, was generated about a book that we all found more than a little boring, and by a question which no cosmopolitan young Harvard intellectual would have dared ask.
I will resist the temptation to proliferate anecdotes. In sum, bright students, an ability (even the necessity) of dealing with first issues rather than flashy epiphenomena: that, to my mind, offsets a peripheral status, the lack of a first-rate library (Harvard's library is only ten minutes away, in any case), and the like. But what of my third point: the necessity of the Humanities at a technological institution?
At times, it is possible to be drawn into that discussion on more-or-less pragmatic grounds; which is, as we would say in American slang, a no-win proposition. We are back to the designer of that airplane again: studying literature does not, I think, make chemists better chemists or nuclear engineers build safer reactor housings. Then again, about 10 years ago I knew a woman who was pretty highly placed in the personnel office of one or the other of Boston's plethora of computer-engineering companies. She insisted that her company, when they needed a new software engineer, always went looking for philosophy majors who had a modest computer literacy. Or historians. Or even poets. The computer-science majors, they had found, were unable to approach problems in fresh and productive ways; the poets had to do so, since they had not been drilled and drilled and drilled on the old "wisdom" which had lead to the problem in the first place. So I may well be wrong about the pragmatic value of the humanities. An extended article by a sometime colleague of mine, Professor James Engell of the Harvard English Department, in Harvard Magazine recently, avers that humanists who go on to law school and (more surprisingly) medical school do rather better than their more programmatically, pre-professionally-trained contemporaries.
I certainly don't want to argue that the humanities produce more moral beings. Our recent governor was a classics major, at Harvard no less. The sometime president of the Massachusetts State Senate (an Irish-American tenor, as it happens) can still read classical Greek. The first man, however, has proven to be somewhat "ethically-challenged" about the problems of the so-called "underclass." The latter is reputedly one of the most crooked politicians to have played a role in a state which is famous for crooked politicians. Somehow reading Homer and Aeschylus did not make them better men, by any reasonable moral measurement. Gerry Adams, much in the news from Ireland of late, was, at one point, a writer of fiction. There are many who now, despite his claims to be the author of an historic peace, consider him to be a terrorist and murderer.
But as I hinted before, I think that instruction in the humanities, especially when it engages the students in analytic conversation about literary works or historical problems, offers important (I would even say ethically and intellectually vital) training on the score of style. First, unlike technological and scientific education, which often finds itself in an horrific struggle to "cover" an ever-increasing, ever-complicating body of material, the humanities offer a kind of learning where more is not necessarily better, or faster is automatically much preferable to contemplative.
Let me be clear – I am not arguing for a kind of know-nothingism. If learning in the humanities is not inherently sequential, it is surely accumulative. The more poetry you read, the more richly and enjoyably and comprehendingly you can read any individual poem. The more you know about the literary-historical and sociological and ideological forces at work at a particular moment in time, the more intelligible literary works arising from that moment will be. But it is also true (as I've tried, perhaps too facetiously, to suggest already) "beginners" need not keep silence.
Which produces two more important elements in humanities instruction. First, it need not be competitive (an aspect of technological learning, MIT-style at least, that is too often underscored in an atmosphere of "right" answers and grade-curves). Anyone can offer an idea; it may prove to be improbable or unproductive of further insight, but it need not for that reason go unheard. The wackiest ideas may turn out to be the most intellectually energizing.
Secondly, learning in the humanities, to delve into current jargon a bit, "empowers" students in a way that learning in the sciences may not. After all, the physics professor wrote the problem set, so he surely "knows the answers." But, as I have tried once to argue at great length, in a volume published of all things by the Harvard Graduate School of Business, some of the best questions in a humanities classroom are those to which the Professor does not "know" an immediate answer. It is possible and productive to put a humanities student in charge of her/his learning at a much earlier stage in the humanities than it seems to be in the sciences and technologies.
One (nearly) final point: insofar as humanities instruction often and inherently involves discussion and conversation, it is personal in a way that lecture-oriented technological instruction rarely is. Students can derive feedback from their teachers and peers immediately, not some days later, when the problem-set is returned, graded. They can learn to incorporate and respond to other ideas; or to defend their notions from the questions and responses of listeners. I suppose now I am abandoning my own demurrer, if that is the way to put it: there is, and no mistake, an ethical dimension to learning in the humanities: a message about the equality of many thinkers and talkers, the value of intellectual give-and-take, with the added force of learning how to distinguish valuable from shoddy, intellectually engaging from vapid.
Let me close with one more anecdote. A few years ago I was teaching a course that raced through the body of poetry written in English, more or less from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. It was a lively group of students, of intriguingly varied perspectives and backgrounds. In the class was a young man who did not speak once, during the entire term. The final essay fell due, and his appeared under my door on the expected day with a long, typewritten note appended.
My heart sank. I am impatient – to put it euphemistically – with requests for extensions of time or explanations of how "I was just too busy to do as well as I would have liked." At MIT, everyone is too busy, all of the time. I foresaw a disaster in the making, or at least some shopworn excuse.
So much for "what the professor knew." The note at home in Boston opened by saying "I always thought I knew what poetry was, a sort of rearranged prose. That's why I took this course." Full marks for honesty, at least. "But I was wrong." Hmmmm. Where is he headed? He now said, "Thank you for teaching me a new way to think."
The essay he submitted was lucid, precise, and well-organized. So he more than earned his A, and more than made my day. And gives me a terse way to round off these remarks: the humanities are important at any institution, whether technological or not, because they teach all of us (teachers and students as well) new ways to think.
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