On Thursday, Sept. 4, Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented the current state of the humanities in contemporary academia. The theme of the presentation specifically centered on the humanities in the rise of the digital age. While digitization has greatly propelled the study of the sciences, Cole explains it has also created a "crisis in confidence" among the humanities studies at many institutions and universities. ǃÆ
"The humanities tend to treasure the individual while the sciences treasure collaborative scholarship," said Cole. "There is a need to democratize the humanities. It will create wisdom and vision in citizens."
Additionally, Cole hopes increased access and data-driven scholarship will create new knowledge and new questions to advance the sciences. Through digitization, it will now become an integral bridge that will span continents to create partnerships and connect various humanities specialties under common interests.
In order to achieve these advancements, the NEH is taking many proactive steps, particularly by awarding study grants particularly in the research of supercomputers and increasing workshops for teachers to show them the tools and resources available. With these efforts, Cole believes it will restore humanities education in a time when vocationalism is dominating the core curriculum at many universities.
"Here at Vanderbilt, we have a wonderful liberal arts education core but that's not the case all over. There's a rising tide of vocationalism. I believe you come to college to get an education, not instruction," Cole said.
In addition, We the People, an NEH program aimed to strengthen the studies in American history and culture, has also worked with the Library of Congress in the preservation and digitization of about 70 million pages of historic newspaper documents available to the public
"With tools that allow you to search it, it turns this enormous obstacle of 70 million pages into one of the great resources for American history," Cole said. "What you look up will be available to the public, for free and hopefully continue this way forever."
One of the largest ongoing projects is Picturing America, an initiative that awards schools with masterpieces of American art in order to promote a greater understanding of American art and history. In a three-month window for application, nearly one-fifth of all public schools and libraries in the U.S. applied for awards and 26,000 will receive Picturing America sets, including 504 recipients in Tennessee and 33 in Nashville.
"We want to encourage humanities scholars in making complex ideas understandable and being vicarious leaders," Cole said. "By making academic thought more accessible to the public, we ensure that the wisdom of the humanities spreads wider and sinks deeper into the fabric of the American people."
