A Case for the Humanities in the Defense of US Higher Education Against the Attacks of the Trump Administration
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
In all I have read so far in defense of US universities against the attacks of the Trump administration, I have not read anything about the humanities.
In such representative declarations as that of the Harvard President on "The Promise of American Higher Education" and Fareed Zakaria's CNN analysis of the crippling potential on US global leadership in science of Trump's efforts to control US universities, the attention is solely on science.
This is understandable, since the effects of science on individuals and communities are particularly readily evident.
US universities, though, are also centres for the study of the humanities on account of the institutional structures promoting such research and the resources made available for such work.
One of the most important books in the philosophy of religion, Varieties of Religious Experiences, was written by William James in his tenure as a scholar at Harvard.
US academics are a commanding force in the study of the cultures of various peoples across the world.
Their influence in African Studies is gigantic. From the visual arts to religion and literature, the influence of US academics and students in US universities, African and non-African, is dominant in the field, from what I can see.
One of the world's richest expressive and communication systems is the Nsibidi of Nigeria's Cross River and Cameroon, a system nurtured particularly by the highly secretive Ekpe and Mgbe esoteric orders.
The only book length investigations of these esoteric orders known to me is by US PhD students, such as Jordan Fenton and Amanda Carlson, all of them having lived in Nigeria's Cross River in pursuit of the knowledge that they wrote up in their theses.
The most most prominent adapter of Nsibidi is the artist Victor Ekpuk, who, emigrating from Nigeria, has spent most of his life in the US, the same country whose museums have carried out the most sustained showings of Nsibidi arts, enabled by such scholars as Eli Bentor, and such curators as Okechukwu Smooth Nwezi, in alignment with Ekpuk's work.
The only print book on Ekpuk's work known to me was conceived and edited by Toyin Falola, a professor at the University of Texas, to which Falola moved from Nigeria's University of Ife, and from where he has created, through his own sole authored publications and collaboration with others in the West and Africa, a comprehensive and constantly evolving map of knowledge about Africa, across practically every field in the humanities and social sciences.
The study of Yoruba culture and history, one of the most richly explored fields in African Studies, has US based academics at its centre, from William Bascom 's pioneering and still strategic work on the Ifa knowledge and divination system to Rowland Abiodun's visionary rethinking of Yoruba hermeneutics, to the ideationally dense and visually encyclopedic works of Henry and Margaret Drewal and their collaborators, to the awesome historical art of Akinwumi Ogundiran to Babatunde Lawal, a pre-eminent scholar in Ogboni esotericism and Yoruba aesthetics to Henry Luis Gates Jrs Signifying Monkey, the constellation of scholars shaping that field are significantly, perhaps disproportionately represented by US academics.
In visual arts of Africa generally, Simon Ottenberg was strategic in the international exposure of Nigeria's Nsukka arts school and the role of Uche Okeke Agulu, Salah Hassan and perhaps Olu Oguibe, in collaboration with Okwui Enwezor at the art journal Nka, was critical in the expansion of study of modern African art, complementing African Arts, another art journal based in the US, indispensable in the study of classical African art.
In referencing academic journals based in the US, a constellation of names emerges, amongst which is Research in African Literatures, long a flagship platform for the discipline.
Biodun Jeyifo, Abiola Irele, Sylvester Ogbechie, Suzanne Blier, Nimi Wariboko, Akinsola Akiwowo, Ali Mazrui, Anthony Appiah, Ato Quayson, Mary and Allen Roberts, David Doris, Oyeronke Oyewumi, my former teachers at the University of Benin- Odun Balogun, Chinyere Okafor, Okeke-Ezigbo, Titi Ufomata, Africans and non-Africans, a tiny sprinkling of Africa centred scholars in US academia, between them representing universes of knowledge, amongst humanity's finest achievements in trying to make sense of its existence, as seen from the context of African Studies.
Indian thought is one of the most adventurous in history. There might not be any avenue of speculative thinking, of spiritual exploration, that has not been developed, and to a high level, by the Indians and those they have influenced across Asia, from Japan to China to Tibet.
The US contains what is perhaps a unique constellation of academic scholars in Indian and related Asian thought, such as Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Douglas Renfrew Brooks, Paul Muller -Ortega, Jeffrey Lidke, and Maddhu Khana, among many others who have devoted their lives to investigating the most recondite subjects involving the most soaring of human aspirations to peer into the logic, mystery and dynamism of the cosmos, as perceived from thought originating from or spread from India.
The California Institute of Integral Studies and its adventurous interdisciplinary and intercultural programs, the huge work of the Smithsonian, the various national bodies funding the arts, the existence of one of history's greatest, if not the greatest co-existence of diverse disciplines, is represented by the US, established by institutions along the lines of those I have mentioned.
US academia, in the words of a writer on its history, has become the "workshop of the world", where people from all parts of the world go to learn about themselves and where people go to learn about all parts of the world on account of the concentration of resources and financial and institutional enablement for such study, facilitating extensive field work in various regions, in relation to rich libraries and robust institutional development of knowledge enabled by the US institutions the scholars are working with.
This is the amazing engine of knowledge some people are trying to destroy.
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