A little over a year ago, LSU President William F. Tate IV announced a landmark campaign to reassert LSU as a prestigious state university through a “Scholarship First Agenda.” It promises to “capture” Louisiana’s heritage by helping people understand the state’s “history, culture, literature and the like” and to also “protect the people of the state by way of research.”
At its face, Tate’s agenda has thus far been a success. It has acquired $27 million from Shell, $245 million from Our Lady of the Lake Hospital and Louisiana Children’s Medical Center and recently reached an agreement with Louisiana’s largest ports to “develop cybersecurity talent and technology for critical infrastructure,” according to a recent press release.
But if one digs a little deeper, more troubling aspects of the agenda emerge, all of which harm a common victim: the humanities. The accomplishments of LSU’s history, literature, language, philosophy, political theory, arts and religious studies departments have been all but completely ignored and there’s an apparent refusal to seek funding for them.
These departments’ lack of recognition has been subtle. Virtually all efforts to advertise the Scholarship First Agenda, mainly social media posts celebrating the accomplishments of students and faculty, are focused on science and coastal research. In fact, in an entire week of nonstop Tweets acknowledging the hard work of members of the LSU community, only one of LSU’s posts had something remotely to do with a humanities subject.
It’s not like there aren’t plenty of opportunities to tout LSU’s success in the humanities. In the last year or so, there’s been a slew of them: alumna Ana Reyes’ novel “The House in the Pines” made it all the way to No. 2 on The New York Times best-seller list, History Boyd Professor Suzanne Marchand won an ultra-prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship last year and two years earlier, Associate Professor Benjamin Kahan received the same award.
Failing to seek funding for the humanities has shown to be more explicit; it’s completely missing on the agenda’s website. The areas Tate wants LSU to focus on, like cancer research, cybersecurity, Louisiana’s coast, agriculture and energy resources, are all STEM subjects. Nowhere does Tate articulate a vision for cultivating or funding LSU’s role in advancing wider knowledge of poetry, fiction, philosophy, or religious studies.
What’s particularly frustrating about this is that the humanities require much less money to fund groundbreaking research than any STEM or social science field. History, for example, doesn’t require labs and rarely requires resources to conduct surveys. All the funding most historians need is travel funds to get to faraway archives, or some money to subscribe to databases of newspapers and other primary sources which are far less expensive than paying for lab rats, research assistants, or complex, multi-million-dollar pieces of machinery.
Which isn’t to bemoan the fact that other, non-humanities disciplines at LSU are receiving money for research. It’s a fact to be glad about, actually; at least somebody’s getting a slice of the pie. But it should be pointed out that a little bit of money in the humanities goes a long way, and that only the slightest bit of attention applied to English history or philosophy might result in finding the funding they so desperately need.
In all, the agenda has only one bit with anything to do with the humanities: Tate’s promise to “capture” Louisiana’s culture through people understanding its “history…literature and the like.”
But even here, Tate misunderstands what the humanities are about. True, they are partially about the preservation of culture and historical memory, but they are most importantly about broadening one’s horizons through the exposure of a plethora of experiences, voices and minds in the forms of novels, poetry, art and works of philosophy and history.
If we take Tate’s prescription for reasserting LSU’s prestige, we would be forced to cordon ourselves to literature and histories of Louisiana and Louisiana alone – a rich tradition, but nowhere near the treasure trove of ideas that exists beyond our state’s borders, beyond our country, beyond our civilization’s canon.
Tate’s way is not a viable option for LSU. To be a flourishing university, faculty, all faculty, must be given the means to study those things that they believe in, whether or not it brings in money or makes headlines. To educate well, a university must allow and even require students, all students, to study a variety of subjects, not just those that are immediately useful to Louisiana, LSU, or its president.
Universities are not the sum of their grant money. They are a corporation of knowledge, all knowledge – from science, technology, engineering and math, to history, languages, the fine arts and philosophy. An inconvenient fact for the agenda, perhaps, but a true one, nonetheless.
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old graduate student from Shreveport.