Director's Letter Winter 2015

Over the past year, one of the hot button topics on university campuses and in certain social media circles has been the perceived threat to the humanities in higher education. Many argue that the humanities are suffering as never before—from declining student enrollments, challenges to the perceived employability of humanities graduates, weak career opportunities for humanities Ph.D.s, and perceived under-investment by universities in their humanities programs. Many of the details have been debated: Was the great period of decline in undergraduate enrollment in humanities courses recent, or was it years ago—as early as the 1980s? At whose doorstep can the fault for these issues be placed—universities for failing to admit sufficient numbers of students aiming at humanities majors? humanities practitioners for failing to make the case for our fields? society at large for looking for instant returns on investment?

The nuances of this dilemma are far more complex than the space on this page will allow. But I want to declare myself and propose a few steps—not on behalf of the humanities as a narrowly understood set of fields of study, but on behalf of a worldview that seeks to study the human experience critically and analytically and thus to understand and reinforce our core values and experiences as humans. My declaration is this: I am a humanist, although I didn’t necessarily set out to be one. A professed social scientist aiming at a career in the law and public service, I vividly recall a suite of conversion experiences as an undergraduate that set me on a different path. A history professor who brought ante- and postbellum Southern history alive for me on the lawn trod by Thomas Jefferson. A famous art historian who brought works of Renaissance art alive in a darkened classroom with a palpable immediacy. Together, such figures awakened in me not only a curiosity but also a conviction that the work of the humanities could make for a life’s project—a career. It won’t therefore be surprising that I believe in the eye-opening potential of a great teacher, or that I aspire for this Museum and its curators and educators to be great teachers (in the most open sense of the term) with the ability to afford transformative experiences. Any university that continues to marshal the brilliance of such scholar-teachers as Tony Grafton, whose words bookend mine in this issue of the magazine, and many more across the disciplines is clearly able to offer transcendent moments of discovery both in the classroom and beyond. Here in the Museum, the immediacy of the art objects from throughout human history which we care for, study, and display can be a vital characteristic in shaping just such transformative experiences. The growth in Museum visitorship generally, and in the number of Princeton University students coming into the Museum’s study spaces and galleries for their classes particularly, suggests the truth in this, even in a digital age in which the role of the authentic—of the thing itself—is sometimes questioned. 

But for all the success this Museum has found in recent years, there are undoubtedly troubles. Enrollments in many humanities programs have declined even here at Princeton, where they have long been at the heart of the liberal arts experience. There will be no short remedies. But I believe we must again (and always) deploy our best teachers—in the classroom, in the galleries, in a curator’s or a faculty member’s office—to spark the imagination and help a student discover what is possible. We must help students and their parents understand—and from this, through baby steps, seek to influence the discussion at large in society—that universities and museums are educating students for life, not just for their first five years’ earnings results. We must model the ways in which the study of the humanities can lead to a rich and examined life and better prepare us for the demands of citizenship. We must remind ourselves and the public that the study of the humanities can be aspirational, ambitious, and practical, that the humanities can be the soul of the university—and a great university art museum the embodiment and manifestation of its humanistic values.

James Christen Steward

Director