It is commonplace knowledge, and I have talked and written on this before, that the humanities are in crisis.Reference D’haen ^{1 ,} Reference D’haen ² In fact, the humanities being in crisis is an almost perennial complaint of the field. Now, however, the claim seems to be true, or at least truer than ever before. It is true of the ‘broad’ humanities, comprising also the social sciences, or – in an even broader definition – what in French is called the sciences de l’homme, or in German the Geisteswissenschaften, but it is especially true of the humanities in its more narrow definition in English, covering what is usually referred to as ‘the arts’, but also disciplines such as history (although in the US the latter is often included with the social sciences). And it is true even in the part of the world that is usually seen as the birthplace and core domain of the study of the humanities, i.e. the Western world, particularly Europe and the US, or North America, or even the Americas. In all cases we see a marked reduction in the weight given to university education and research in the humanities. This reduction shows in the diminished funding of the field, but also in the diminished importance it is granted in the total context of higher education.

Under the pressures of economization, and the perceived need to invest in what will keep or make their economies competitive in the global market, governments encourage students to opt to study science rather than the humanities, in whatever definition, and of late, and even more specifically, to opt for STEM disciplines, which are also receiving increasing funding. This is particularly apparent in the United Kingdom, where the teaching grant has been withdrawn for all but STEM-subjects, and where significant numbers of arts departments – and especially foreign language and literature departments – have been closed down. This is true even of the most reputed institutions in the UK, such as SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) of the University of London, where, as of 2015, the government stopped funding the teaching of Urdu and Indonesian. But the same is going on in other European countries. For instance, in 2013–2014, even while I was chairing a curricular programme review of all modern language and literature departments at the six major Dutch universities, the University of Groningen closed its departments or programmes of Danish, Norse, Icelandic, Finnish and Hungarian, and sharply reduced its offerings in other European languages except English and Dutch; the University of Utrecht closed down Portuguese, the last such department remaining in the Netherlands; the University of Amsterdam had already closed down Romanian, also the only such programme in the Netherlands; and the Free University of Amsterdam had closed down all foreign language departments except English. It is fair to say that all foreign language and literature departments in the Netherlands are under extreme pressure to survive, the exception being Departments of English. Nor is this a new thing.

The Times Higher Education on 25 June 2012 reported that 12 European countries had cut spending on higher education by 10% or more, with the Netherlands being in the company of Latvia, Lithuania, and a range of Southern European countries. That the situation in Denmark was not much better may appear from a slogan that the Danish Educational Association launched at the time: ‘SSH – use it, don’t lose it!’ And in Germany there was the threat of closing down all humanities/arts courses not immediately serviceable to industry or business. Funding for research has likewise almost dried up for the humanities, with many governments tending to shift the burden of research from national or institutional sources to European ones (and especially the large Framework programmes such as the present Horizon2020 programme), which hold only limited possibilities for the humanities/arts, all the more so as the latter are usually bundled in with the social sciences in SSH, with SS clearly taking the lion’s share. Nor is the situation much better in the US. The 2015 budget for the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), adjusted for inflation, is only half of what it was in 1980.Reference Busl ³ A 2016 study shows that there has been an almost 9% decline in humanities bachelor’s degrees since 2014, with English losing 8%, history 12%, and classical studies 19%.Reference Jaschik ⁴ And in 2015 plans were announced to severely reduce or close down altogether humanities and social science departments in more than 50 universities.Reference Dean ⁵

Now, what are we to make of all this with an eye to the relationship between the sciences and the humanities when it comes to higher education? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Some, such as Stanley Fish, one-time enfant terrible of English Studies in the US, and a former Dean of Humanities at Duke University, simply admits that the humanities are of no ‘use’ whatsoever.Reference Jay and Graff ⁶ Others, such as Frank Donoghue, also from English Studies, think that the humanities will be rationalized and economized out of existence in increasingly ‘corporate, vocation-centred universities’ geared exclusively to ‘profitable’ studies (Ref. 6). In some ways, we see this happening already in the Netherlands and Belgium, where courses in translation and interpreting – which would formerly have been housed in what in the old days would have been called Polytechnics in Britain, Technische Hochschulen in Germany, or Hogescholen in the Netherlands – are either incorporated into universities proper, as in Belgium, or created where they did not exist before, as in the Netherlands. Pretty much the same thing goes for Britain and even Ireland. The rationale, obviously, is to provide a ‘useful’ alternative to the ‘old and useless’ courses in language and, especially, literature. Never mind that, in fact, there is no ready market for the numbers of translators and interpreters that are now being spawned by these programmes, or that the graduates of such programmes often fail to qualify for the really interesting and rewarding (also in the financial sense) jobs, such as conference interpreters, but most often end up as community or court interpreters, at low wages and with very uncertain and unstable job prospects.

Yet other commentators take a higher road than that of ‘mere’ employment possibilities. Martha Nussbaum, a well-known philosopher of education at the University of Chicago, in Not for Profit (2010), and earlier in Cultivating Humanity (1997), argues the value of the humanities as Bildung project, for the individual but perhaps even more so for a form of citizenship.Reference Nussbaum ⁷ Of course, this is not a new thing. In the nineteenth and throughout at least the early part of the twentieth century, Bildung was a central concept in German higher education, and to German citizenship. Indeed, whereas originally Bildung was meant to serve the full development of the German individual in a Germany divided into countless smaller units such as principalities, duchies and counties, along with a few larger kingdoms, eventually it came to play a role in ‘building’ the German state of gebildete citizens. What Nussbaum has in mind, though, transcends the sphere of the individual and the nation. What she envisages is a ‘world citizenship’. However, unlike with other such ideas, as expressed by Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century and others following his lead, Nussbaum is not aiming at a cosmopolitanism geared to financial or intellectual elites, but at instilling empathy with all people in the world, sharing universally human feelings such as joy, pain, suffering, etc., vicariously through works of literature and the characters they portray.

Alternatively, there are those that argue for re-orienting the humanities towards a kind of critical vocationalism, developing the skills that were traditionally fostered by what used to be called a liberal education. This is the tack taken some years ago by Paul Jay and Gerald Graff, both well-known American professors of English, and more recently by the well-known television presenter and political scientist Fareed Zakaria in his In Defense of a Liberal Education (Ref. 6).Reference Zakaria ⁸ A liberal education, he argues, typically favours the development of skills characteristic of the humanities: reading, thinking and writing well, and doing all of this with a critical attitude. Of course, it is precisely the latter that might make promoting a liberal education and the humanities not only less attractive but actually dangerous to some, even though a measure of critical thinking does not necessarily imply negative criticism. In any case, Zakaria argues, it is those humanities skills that open up career possibilities for humanities graduates beyond the traditional outlets for such graduates – teaching and research in the humanities themselves. Indeed, the skills alluded to can also stand someone in good stead in politics, the civil service, or industry and business.

Perhaps though we should take a somewhat longer view of things. More than a hundred years ago, the university mostly served the interests of a social and economic elite. In those days the classics were the staple of a university education. Gradually, with the waves of democratization setting in already in a very specific way in the United Kingdom – with the introduction of English literature courses at Working Men’s (and somewhat later also Women’s) Colleges in the UK – and in a more general sense in the USA after the First World War, and also after the Second World War in Europe, the study of literatures in the vernacular took precedence. This is because the students now entering the university system could no longer be relied on to have the classics background typical until then of high school graduates. Of course, more systematic studies of one’s national literature had already begun to enter high school and university education with the rise of nationalism and hence also national literatures over the course of the nineteenth century. But it is only with the successive waves of democratization, however differently they played out in different countries, that the study of modern languages and literatures, along with the study of history, basically replaces the study of the classics as the core of the humanities. At the same time, we see all other kinds of studies beyond the humanities increasingly gaining in importance, the humanities themselves thereby coming to play a smaller role in higher education overall, and the classics dwindling to a still highly respected but in fact relatively marginal position.

What we now see happening is a further turn of that same screw. Along with changing technical and social conditions, we now see more popular media supplanting what by the second half of the twentieth century had become the core humanities. Like the classics before them, the study of modern languages and literatures, and to a lesser extent perhaps the study of history, will retreat into some kind of academic reservation, with all accompanying connotations of ‘the happy few’, ‘ivory tower’, ‘luxury studies’, etc. And just as modern languages and literatures once grew as new-fangled upstarts, so now new disciplines, often themselves born as hybrids between disciplines from hitherto different fields of study and research, will come or have already come to the fore: cultural studies, media studies, creative industries, digital humanities, or new area studies such as European Studies. While most of these ‘new’ disciplines incorporate some of the methods and achievements, along with some of the subject matter, of the ‘old’ humanities disciplines, along with methods and procedures, as well as knowledge, from other fields, be it the social sciences, or the sciences proper, such incorporation inevitably also implies a re-orientation and retooling. In fact, if there is anything I learned from what is going on in my own university, but even more so from the programme review committee I recently chaired in the Netherlands, it is that the ‘old’ core humanities and these newer disciplines seem to function as communicating vessels. In other words, disciplines such as cultural studies, media studies, creative industries, digital humanities or European Studies make up for, and in many instances actually surpass, the numbers of students that have been lost by the traditional humanities disciplines.

Another interesting development is that the teaching of the humanities, notwithstanding Martha Nussbaum’s telling Not for Profit title, is in fact returning for… profit, and in something resembling again the traditional liberal arts education. This is happening in regions that used to be at the heart of the study and teaching of the humanities, but that in recent times have been withdrawing from them, at least when it comes to government support and funding. A good example is the Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. This private for-profit research university started out as the International University Bremen in 2001 (with preparations going on as early as 1997), and with input from Rice University of Houston, Texas. It changed its name to Jacobs University, in honour of the support from the Jacobs Foundation, in 2007. The Wikipedia article on the university lists it as from at its start offering courses and curricula in engineering, the sciences and the humanities. From some research I did in 2012, I remember programmes then on offer listed as ‘integrated cultural studies’ and ‘global humanities’. At the time of writing, 2016, the university website in fact does not list any typical humanities courses, but does include a number of programmes in the social sciences. The preparatory ‘Foundation Year’ aiming to introduce international students to studying in Germany does include humanities courses. Undoubtedly, the apparently relatively recent shift to a more exclusive concentration on the sciences and engineering is once more a sign of the times. However, the points I wanted to make are that notwithstanding it being situated in Germany, all instruction at Jacobs University happens in English, the student body is predominantly international, and that tuition for the Bachelor Programme runs to €20,000 per year. In 2015, Jacobs University signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Nanjing University in its bid for intensified collaboration with Chinese institutions of higher education.

Perhaps more instructive, though, given its specific focus, is A.C. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities in London. Tuition (2016) for a Bachelor Programme, on a three-year pre-payable basis, is slightly over £33,000 for UK, EU, and EEU students, and slightly over £54,000 for international students. The New College of the Humanities offers programmes in Economics, History, English, Politics and International Relations, Philosophy, Law, PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics), and PPH (Philosophy, Politics and History), no foreign languages and literatures, no classics.

In the Netherlands, it is the so-called ‘university colleges’ attached to ‘regular’ universities that offer English-taught predominantly liberal arts education curricula, and that again draw on an international student body: Utrecht University College, located in the city of Utrecht and run by the University of Utrecht, Roosevelt College, located in Middelburg, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, and the place of origin of the family that furnished two American Presidents, and likewise attached to Utrecht University, and Leiden University College in The Hague, run by the University of Leiden. University College Utrecht started in 1998 and prides itself on having been ‘the first modern Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) international honours college on the European continent’. Tuition (but this also includes room and board) for EEA students runs to slightly less than €12,000 for 2016–2017, and slightly more than €17,000 for non-EEA students. For Leiden University College in The Hague, tuition and institutional fees amount to some €4000 per year for EEA students and some €13,000 for non-EEA students, excluding living expenses such as room and board. Roosevelt University College charges slightly less than €3000 for tuition for Dutch, EU and EEA students, and slightly less than €9000 for non-EEA students, always excluding living expenses, so just for tuition. I am mentioning all these financial breakdowns to illustrate that such initiatives are indeed ‘for profit’, although some undoubtedly more so than others.

If we go further abroad, we find a number of comparable developments. The Todai-Yale Initiative, at the University of Tokyo, aims to strengthen ‘the international promotion of Japanese Studies and Japan-related research in the humanities and social sciences’. ⁹ There is also the Singapore National University–Yale collaboration known as NUS-Yale, which runs programmes largely comparable to the Dutch University Colleges. On the NUS-Yale website it says that

Tuition runs from S$19,000 for Singapore students to almost S$57,000 for international students, or, in US dollars, US$14,000 to US$42,000. The University of Nottingham (UK) runs campuses at Ningbo, China, and outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At both sites a Faculty of Arts and Education offers courses and degrees in English, International Communications, and Education, including from a Centre for English Learning Education. For the Ningbo Campus, tuition is 80,000 RMB, or US$12,300, per year for a three- or four-year Bachelor programme, and 90000 RMB, or US$13,800 for a Master’s. At the Malaysia Campus, the tuition fee for humanities-related subjects is RM 38,000 or approximately US$10,000 per year. At the Malaysia Campus there is the opportunity to study foreign languages (French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean) in combination with International Relations. There is also a programme in English Studies. At the Ningbo Campus, as far I can see, no languages other than English are offered. In fact, it is not a coincidence that at all of these university colleges the programmes offered largely concentrate, when it comes to the humanities, on disciplines bordering the social sciences, such as history, politics, and international relations, and as far as languages are concerned, on English, reflecting today’s global linguistic and other realities.

New York University in collaboration with East China Normal University runs a campus in Shanghai, which includes a number of humanities courses, especially as related to China and East Asia. It runs another campus at Abu Dhabi, with specific attention to the Middle East and the Arab world. At neither of these campuses is the emphasis on the humanities, but they are part of what could be regarded as extended arts and sciences curricula, with various possibilities of concentration via majors and minors. Tuition at NYUAD is US$50,000, and at NYUShanghai approximately US$25,000. Texas A&M at its Qatar campus explicitly lists a ‘Liberal Arts Program’ as part of its offerings, next to Chemical, Electrical and Computer, Mechanical Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, and Science Programmes. The Liberal Arts Program, the website says, ‘gives students the opportunity to delve into critical social sciences like history, political science, and English studies’. ¹¹ Tuition as of 2015 is calculated per credit hour, with students taking 12+ credit hours paying QAR 58,780 or some US$16,000. Carnegie Mellon University also has a campus in Qatar, but offers no humanities courses. Northwestern University in Qatar offers undergraduate degrees in journalism and communication studies, with a Liberal Arts component, and advertises on its website that

Tuition and fees are approximately US$50,000.

In all these instances, then, the humanities emerge as a marketable commodity, and as an entry mainly for non-western students to ‘westernize’ themselves so as to better prepare for a role in an increasingly globalized world in which ‘the West’ continues to play a leading role, at least for now. Alternatively, the Western students that enrol at NYUAD or Shanghai, or any other such initiatives, also better prepare themselves for a world in which globalization is rapidly shifting around reputations, and economic and political priorities and relative weights. These students literally ‘orient’ themselves for such a changing world. Given that the interest is there on the students’ side, especially with the international students, why not use that interest to also keep alive our crumbling humanities departments by turning them into profitable, or perhaps almost-profitable, enterprises, offering courses, in English, that cater to such an international student body? In this way we could conserve at least part of what Nussbaum holds out as the task of the humanities in this day and age and in our societies, and if possible, or necessary, in combination with the ‘newer’ disciplines I mentioned earlier. Nussbaum argues the value of the humanities for a ‘world’ education for her American students. Something similar could apply for our students, whether in Europe, China, or anywhere else.

As I hinted at earlier when briefly discussing their history over the last two centuries or so, the humanities have traditionally been perceived or even used as identity building machines, whether for the individual or the nation. I want to invoke the work of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck here, and especially the idea he espouses in his Futures Past, that our view, in the present, of the past, is determined by our expectations of the future.Reference Koselleck ¹³ As long as that future was essentially perceived as national, the emphasis given to the humanities, which almost always implies a historical dimension, inevitably also remained largely focused on the nation, its history, language and literature. Given developments in Europe over the last few decades, with the building of a European Union, we might re-focus our study and teaching of the humanities on what makes for a common European identity. This might remedy the often-denounced cultural deficit of the European project to instil the citizens of the member states with such a common identity. In the longer run, this might also enhance the interest in, and involvement with, European politics of these citizens, leading eventually to also remedying the even more often-denounced ‘democratic deficit’ of the European construction.

If we look even further afield, and ahead, we might put the humanities in the service of that ‘world’ citizenship that Nussbaum suggests as our common future across the globe. Or, if we want to use a different register, we might put it in the service of a ‘planetary’ future, whether the kind Gayatri Spivak posits in Death of a Discipline, or that envisaged by ecologist thinkers.Reference Spivak ¹⁴ In both cases, I would suggest, the role of the humanities shifts dramatically, both inside and outside of Europe. Specifically, when it comes to the role of the humanities beyond Europe, we might think of it as doing what Rodolphe Gasché argues in his Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept.Reference Gasché ¹⁵ Discussing Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka and Jacques Derrida, Gasché argues that the philosophical task of Europe is to dissolve itself by turning its own bedrock principle of universalism into the world’s property, with ‘Europe’ thus de-exceptionalizing itself. For students of literature this sounds almost like an echo of Goethe’s call, already in the first half of the nineteenth century, for a Weltliteratur or ‘world literature’. The reference to Goethe, and to literature, is not coincidental. After all, as Nussbaum and Koselleck tell us, it is in the stories – or histories, again it is no coincidence that these shade into one another, or actually coincide, in at least most European languages that I know: histoire, Geschichte, verhaal/geschiedenis, story/history – that we tell ourselves, individually or collectively, that our world takes shape.

As European citizens, it is important that we ‘tell our story’ to ourselves, but also to the rest of the world. Just as importantly, the other parts of the world, however one defines them, should tell ‘their’ stories to themselves, and to the world. In many ways, this is precisely what Europe has started doing with its university students via the Erasmus-exchange programme, which – notwithstanding the humorous take on it in the very popular movie L’auberge espagnole – has offered millions of European students the opportunity to get to know another country, another educational system, and a ‘greater’ Europe, largely thanks to the humanities courses those students take. Via international student exchange programmes such as ISEP (International Student Exchange Program), many non-European students are also participating in this venture. This, of course, is also what China has started to do with its Confucius Institutes around the world, teaching Chinese language and culture. But just as the world beyond Europe rightly insists these days, and increasingly so, that the story of the world – or what the late Edward Said (and Gayatri Spivak, after Martin Heidegger’s use of the term in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’) called ‘worlding’ the world, that is to say fashioning it in a particular image, invariably one determined by the dominant power, whether a country or a continent – cannot be limited to the story told by the European humanities, so we in Europe should take care that by forsaking ‘our’ humanities ‘our story’ does not become someone else’s story, some other continent’s story. Instead, as world citizens we should juxtapose the various stories/histories that the humanities tell us, to arrive not at one story for the entire world but a story of stories that make a world.

I started this article with a review of how in present-day universities there is an increasing tendency, at least in the West, to invest almost exclusively in the sciences, pure and especially applied, and how the humanities are considered expendable in the global race towards technical innovation, and the economic benefits thereof. But if we take the planetary tack, or regard world citizenship as indeed also concerned with the feelings of ordinary people around the world, the humanities – in the lives they have us lead vicariously via the characters they portray, whether in words, paint, or any other plastic material, or in music, or in the versions of history they present us with – also assume an ethical responsibility. From this perspective, the humanities are necessary to determine the ethical boundaries of what technological innovation may or may not bring about, for the individual, for the collective, for humanity, for nature, for the planet.

The responsibilities I thus see as naturally accruing to the humanities, then, already furnish sufficient reason to keep reserving an important place for them in higher education, and hence in university curricula, and not only for their own sake but also as a necessary ingredient in any kind of academic education. There is more, though, and again it has to do with economics, and in this case the economics of higher education itself, and of university governance as directly related to science. The ever-rising costs of scientific research and the ever-increasing demand for speedy returns on investment therein, will ultimately lead to the more cutting-edge and potentially profitable parts of the Sciences moving out of the university and into specialized laboratories, whether funded by the state – one may think here of the German Max Planck Institutes – or – and probably increasingly so – private industry. In fact, some of this has always already been the case, with major players in the chemical industries (such as Bayer or Monsanto) or electronics (such as Philips, Sony, General Electric or Bell Telephone) conducting their own research, often more cutting-edge than what goes on in (at least most) universities. The same holds for more recent companies such as Microsoft, Apple or Google, and I am sure there are Chinese examples of this too.

While the study and teaching of the sciences, then, will probably always continue at university level, the risk, certainly in the longer term, to me seems to be that with the exception of what may finally turn out to be a relatively small number of top-notch universities, what will remain for university training will be the teaching of uncontroversial basic scientific ‘truths’ by means made possible by technological advances in communication, such as MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses). The humanities, on the other hand, while certainly not unaffected by the latter development, are naturally more resistant to ‘impersonal’ modes of teaching, as they rely on dialogue and the exchange of ideas in vivo, especially so if they are to fulfil the mission I ascribed to them earlier. Moreover – and from a university economics and governance perspective, possibly decisively – the chances that the humanities would move out of the university are fairly slim, precisely because of their ‘unprofitability’. Even more, if and when the humanities are profitable, it is only within a university context. And if, in their more advanced manifestations, they too move into specialized places of learning, these are almost invariably located in the university, not out of it – suffice it to think of the proliferation, initially in the US but increasingly across first the Anglo world and then globally, of Centres for the Humanities, Humanities Institutes, etc., many of them united in the CHCI, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Summing up, then, my argument is that it is a grave mistake to simply sacrifice the humanities in favour of the sciences, whether pure or applied. Obviously, this is not a plea against the sciences, but for the preservation of the humanities. My reasons are the following. To begin with, the humanities are necessary to determine the ethical boundaries of what technological innovation may or may not bring about. Second, only the humanities provide the scope for fashioning, both retrospectively and prospectively, individual and collective ‘scripts’, making sense of, or giving sense to, the past and the future. Third, the ever-rising costs of scientific research and the ever-increasing demand for a speedy return on investment therein may well lead to the more profitable parts of the Sciences moving out of the university and into specialized laboratories, probably increasingly so in private industry. Finally, the chances that the Humanities would move out of the university are fairly slim. Taken altogether then, it makes sense for universities, and their founding bodies, whichever they are, to invest more in the humanities than is at present the case, because they – and not the Sciences – may well turn out to be the real ‘core business’ of these institutions in future.