Harvard University Press Blog

Aesthetic Education, for the Ethical Impulse

As we were preparing to publish Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, a memo from the book’s editor served for many of us as an introduction to this important new work. Revisiting that memo now, it’s a wonder that its movie-trailer quality had previously escaped our notice:

In a world where there are so many forces conspiring to shatter any person’s sense of having a self, the deconstruction that Spivak once championed is problem, not solution. The solution lies right where great theorists who dominated the field twenty years ago denied it lay, in teaching literature as a means of causing people to realize that they have souls.

It’s not often that we’re able to imagine our memos in voiceover, but that bit conjures a dark and dramatic film, the epic story of the last great hope for a global dystopia.

We shouldn’t make light, of course, for the world described in that memo is our own, and its depredations have inspired a radical reorientation in Gayatri Spivak’s thinking. This book, presenting essays from throughout her career in newly revised form, conveys Spivak’s renewed sense of the importance of teaching literature as “training for the ethical impulse.” As the excerpted memo above indicates, globalization now ensures that our lives are characterized by the uncertainty that Jacques Derrida, Spivak, her teacher Paul de Man, and other post-structuralists once upended the study of literature to help us see. In the twenty-first century, encountering the limits of theory, Spivak now asks: “How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living?”

This book is an attempt at such reconciliation. As the conditions of the world have changed, Spivak has over the last two decades increasingly recognized the critical importance of training in the humanities. With our increasing technological interconnections leading paradoxically to our increasing physical and emotional isolation, Spivak argues, literature and the humanities can help citizens of the world retain a sense of one another as humans. While recognizing the ways in which technology conspires against us, though, she is emphatically not a technophobe. Rather, she holds that in order to reap the benefits of new technologies we must simultaneously reimmerse ourselves in the practice of aesthetic education as developed in 18th and 19th century Europe.

We recently spoke with Spivak about An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

 

Tips for Teaching What You Don't Know: Managing Your Time

So far in our mini-series of tips for teaching outside of your area of expertise we’ve learned how to design the course and how to establish credibility in the classroom. In this final post of the series, Therese Huston offers some guidance on managing your time. Huston is the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and author of Teaching What You Don’t Know. 

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Perhaps classes begin for you in the next couple of weeks. Or perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones who won’t be welcoming students until after Labor Day. Either way, if you’re teaching a course on unfamiliar material, you might be asking yourself “How will I manage my time?” Or more accurately, “Will I have a life and will I sleep?”

Yes, you will undoubtedly get some sleep, but you’ll get much more of it if you have a system. Teaching new material is a ton of work. There’s no escaping that reality and everyone I’ve interviewed about it agreed on that one point.

But the faculty who found the workload more manageable had several things in common. One important distinction they shared was a shift in their teaching philosophy—these professors did not view their role in the classroom as that of a knowledge dispenser. They described their roles in many ways; some of them focused on teaching students how to formulate good questions, others said “My role is to show them to think like a chemist | historian | etc.”

In contrast, the faculty who felt the most strained and consumed by the experience basically described themselves as knowledge dispensers, or, as I like to think of them affectionately, “knowledge gumball machines.” In their view, when students ask the instructor a question, a perfectly formed piece of knowledge should come rolling out, preferably in a pleasing color. When faculty hold themselves to that standard in an unfamiliar course on an unfamiliar topic, class prep becomes a nightmare.

So the first step towards managing your time is to reconsider your role in the classroom and make sure it’s realistic.

The next step is to have a system for preparing for class, and the system I recommend is called backward design. It’s an approach that’s well documented in the literature, so here I’ll just explain a modified version, streamlined so that you can use it for every class.

Step 1: Writing Three Questions

When you sit down to prepare for each class, ask yourself “What are the three questions I want students to be able to answer by the end of class?” They can be really broad questions such as “Why was the Vietnam War important?” or they can be more focused questions such as “Why did Johnson escalate the war in 1963?” Depending on your learning goals, they can be questions that require recall or they can be questions that require complex reasoning. Commit to three questions for a given class period. (You might want four questions if your class is unusually long, but three is a manageable number that’s easy for students to remember.)

You’re going to use these questions to shape your class prep time. As we saw in last week’s post it’s still important that you read everything that you’ve assigned, but with the three question approach you don’t have to acquire depth on every single topic in the reading. Your three questions tell you where you need depth, and they focus any additional research you need to do. Your questions also provide the three main pillars around which you can organize your lecture or discussion.

Tips for Teaching What You Don't Know: Establishing Credibility

Last week we shared the first installment of Therese Huston’s three-part series on teaching outside of your comfort zone. Huston, founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and author of Teaching What You Don’t Know, is back today with part two: establishing credibility.

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We often assume that to be credible in the classroom we need to demonstrate a deep knowledge of the subject matter. After all, the way we establish credibility in academic circles is by showing our depth of insight on the topic at hand, be it Jane Austen’s early works or the tensile strength of super glue. So when we have to teach courses that sit outside of our expertise, we worry that we won’t be seen as credible. There is this nagging feeling that students will see right through us, might call us out as imposters.

But a college classroom isn’t like a professional meeting. Not only are there fewer coffee breaks, but as teachers we have other crucial roles to play besides being a fount of expertise. We need to create an environment where students feel comfortable asking questions. We need to assign grades, and we need to assign them fairly.

So, not surprisingly, research shows that students judge an instructor’s credibility based on more than his or her prowess with the subject matter. In fact, the research shows there are three critical things you can do to bolster your credibility.

First, pay attention to how you treat questions from students. Instructors who handle questions poorly (or worse yet, don’t handle questions at all) lose credibility points with students. You may take plenty of questions in one of your normal classes, but if you’re second guessing yourself on the material, you may be tempted to ignore any hands that go up, or you may lecture so rapidly that no one even tries to speak up. The good news? Research suggests offering an iron-clad answer to every question isn’t the most critical thing. What’s more important is that you at least attempt to answer student questions and that you regularly check whether students understand the material. So make it a practice to take questions every 20 minutes. When a student asks a question you can’t answer, and someone undoubtedly will, be ready with several replies. “Great question. I think I know the answer, but I’m not 100%, so let me get back to you.”

Second, if you want to be credible, be trustworthy and respectful. Again, that may not be an issue when you stride into a class feeling confident and in control, but I’ve seen many faculty become defensive, disrespectful, and disorganized when they’ve been up all night struggling to make sure they understand the material for the next day. Students report that credibility drops when instructors show up late for class, give vague answers to questions about grading, and fail to follow the policies outlined in the syllabus. So if you do find yourself staying up all night preparing for class (though I hope you won’t), use some of that time to anticipate the questions students might have about an upcoming assignment.

Tips for Teaching What You Don't Know

Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas that they don’t know very well. With the fall term rapidly approaching, we’ve invited Therese Huston to share some strategies for teaching new material. Huston is the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and the author of Teaching What You Don’t Know, a practical guide for making it through the anxiety of teaching outside one’s specialty. In this first installment of a three-part series, Huston starts at the beginning: designing the course.

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The word “professor” is almost synonymous with “expert.” We each work diligently for years to acquire specialized knowledge, to become a trusted authority in our discipline, and to make insightful judgments about our chosen craft. To be an academic is, at its core, to be an expert.

And thankfully, much of the time, our teaching aligns nicely with our expertise. If you’re a botanist, you teach about plants, and if you’re an expert on ancient Greek philosophy, you teach about Plato. (At least in a good economy, you teach about Plato). When all is well with the world, we teach what we know best.

But what if you’ve been assigned to teach a topic that sits outside of your expertise, a course that spills into areas you haven’t yet mastered? What if you’re a botanist whose been assigned to teach “Introduction to Zoology?” or a Plato expert who’s been nudged into two sections of “Ethics of the Internet?” If I’ve just described your situation, you might be worried that you’re going to spend the term just a chapter ahead of your students.

Welcome to the club. I hope you won’t be disappointed, but it’s hardly an exclusive one. Faculty from the most cutting-edge research institutions (think Harvard, Stanford, and Ohio State) to the most teaching-focused small colleges (think Carleton and Bowdoin Colleges) confide that at one point or another, they have found themselves teaching outside of their expertise. For some faculty, it happens in their first or second year of teaching, and for others, it’s a startling turn of events mid- or late career.

In this three-part series, I’ll offer some best practices and findings from the research literature on how to teach material you’re still mastering. With the right approach, you’ll spend more of your time teaching clearly and effectively and much less time worrying and preparing material that you’ll never get a chance to teach.

We’ll start today with some tips on designing the course.

Perhaps you’ve been designing your course all summer. Perhaps you’ve just started. Either way, you want your students to have an effective learning experience and you don’t want to drown in the process. There are two critical steps you can take before the course begins to ensure that your course is well-designed and you’re ready for the deepest waters.

First, find five syllabi you like. The Internet makes quick work of such research, and it’s the best 60 minutes you’ll spend in the planning stages. Comparing syllabi from five different professors (presumably professors who do have expertise in the topic) tells you what the fundamental readings and concepts should be, how those concepts are typically sequenced, and where you might turn for additional information. You should look for syllabi that are from institutions similar to your own. If you’re at a state college, for instance, you could include one syllabus from an Ivy League school if it inspires you, but if all five syllabi are from schools with different expectations of students and faculty, you could be setting yourself up for an untenable workload and many student complaints.

So You Want To Study Secularism?

According to a report in yesterday’s New York Times that is making its way around the internet this morning, this fall Pitzer College will become the first institution to create a department of secular studies and offer a major in secularism. Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, proposed the department as a way of concentrating study on modern society’s shift away from religion as its primary organizational structure. The Times quotes Zuckerman as saying that “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people—Czechs, Scandinavians—now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.”  

At HUP over the last handful of years we’ve developed an essential little list of books on this very topic. Consider this our pitch for course adoption.

Our list on secular studies is anchored by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, published in 2007. The book begins with a simply phrased question that captures the spirit of inquiry behind Pitzer’s new endeavor: “What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” More simply asked than answered, of course.

Taylor notes three senses in which modern Western society could be said to have become secular. One applies to public spaces or social spheres, where behavior and interactions were once guided by religious principles but have now been ostensibly emptied of God. As Taylor notes, this sense of secularization is not incompatible with a continued individual belief in God and embrace of religion. So, a second sense he then identifies is that of a falling off of religious practice and belief.

A Secular Age mostly concerns itself with a third sense, which for Taylor consists of “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” To Taylor this entails a fundamental shift in what it means to believe, which occurs when belief itself becomes merely an option. From the Introduction:

So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in this third sense, which I could perhaps encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainly millions today of whom this is true.

The William Cronon Affair

Last week in this space we heard from Christopher Newfield about the deliberate unmaking of public higher education through increasingly drastic budget cuts. As many of you who follow academia are surely already aware, there’s a troubling assault on public education proceeding right now on a different front, in the form of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s attempted intimidation of University of Wisconsin–Madison professor William Cronon.

On March 21st a Cronon-penned op-ed ran in the New York Times. In the piece, titled “Wisconsin’s Radical Break,” Cronon brought a historical perspective to bear on the effort to strip public employees in Wisconsin of their right to collectively bargain. As Cronon explained, the push is at odds with the past of the Wisconsin Republican Party, which was the force behind many of the state’s 20th century advances:

“Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a ‘laboratory of democracy.’ The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.”

Cronon contrasted that past with the actions of Governor Scott Walker:

“Wisconsinites have long believed that common problems deserve common solutions, and that when something needs fixing, we should roll up our sleeves and work together — no matter what our politics — to achieve the common good…  Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War.”

Cronon’s denunciation of the Wisconsin Republican Party’s “abusively nontransparent” exercise of power is scathing, to be sure, but it was built on a fair-minded account of the state’s past. In other words, William Cronon’s op-ed is exactly what we need public historians to do. His was a call for a return to openness in a state that has long valued it.

Cronon’s op-ed wasn’t from out of the blue, as a week prior he’d written similarly on his blog, aptly titled Scholar as Citizen. In response to Cronon’s increasingly public writing, the Wisconsin Republican Party has made their own push towards openness: they want to open Cronon’s email. Specifically, under Wisconsin’s open records law, they have demanded “Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon's state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.”

As explained over at Daily Kos:

“It's hard to conceptualize this as anything but an attempt by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to discredit all of their critics by looking for a couple of questionable emails in the personal files of one of their critics. Further, the request cuts against the spirit of transparency laws, which are intended to help relatively powerless individuals learn about the activities of very powerful organizations. In this case, a very powerful organization, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, is using the law to go after one of it's [sic] relatively powerless critics.”

Further Unmaking the Public University

We published Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University a  few short years ago, just as the country was descending into a financial crisis that has had enormous implications for public higher education.  We’ve just released a paperback edition, and so we invited Newfield to explain some of what's occurred since the book’s original publication.

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Unmaking the Public University appeared in mid-2008, and offered a genealogy of this pivotal institution’s unsustainable financial and cultural situation. Since then, that situation has gone from bad to worse. There is some good news that I will discuss, but mostly we have seen the undesired validation of the book’s main claim that the public university hadn't just hit an economic rough patch in the 2000s, but was being systematically unmade. Reviewing the convergence of the cultural and financial campaigns, I also claimed that this unmaking has been intentional.

The book explains in detail that we have been witnessing a decades-old effort to give the public university a lesser place in American society, which in turn downgraded its major social creation, a racially-mixed mass middle class, one whose professional knowledge and cultural sophistication had by the 1960s entitled its members to a much larger slice of the political and economic pie. The crisis that surfaced with the collapse of Lehman brothers in the fall of 2008 has created widespread awareness of the threat to the future of the mass middle class that I described in the book.

One arm of the pincers movement I described—the budget war—has intensified in the wake of the financial meltdown. What we can call the Great Liability Shift from private to public debt now provides an automatic, one-size-fits-all justification of any scale of public burning of state outlays, from the nearly 20% one-year cut offered to California higher education by Democratic governor Jerry Brown, to the delirious 52% cut currently proposed by Pennsylvania’s Republican governor for the state’s flagship campus.

The other arm of the pincers movement—the culture wars—has found new life in widespread attacks on the public sector in general and on teachers in particular. Public sector workers—teachers and also nurses, firefighters, paramedics, psychological counselors, surveyors, assessors, just for starters—typify the skilled workforce that the post-war public university helped to make solidly middle class. The current campaign to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees is a campaign not simply to reduce the cost of the public sector but to reduce its confidence, status, and perceived value to the society as a whole. This attempt at a wholesale cultural demotion of the public sphere includes the continuing deprofessionalization of teaching through the reduction of teacher control over the classroom, but is not limited to that. We are witnessing an increasing—and increasingly desperate—effort to discredit a core belief of democratic culture, which is that the public sector plays a formative role in social development.

Unmaking shows how the conjunction of the American right’s cultural and budgetary crusades created traps into which middle class voters and higher education officials have fallen again and again. Middle class voters found it convenient to forget that economic advancement depends on the general provision of high-quality health, educational and other services that only the public sector will provide. They have in effect been voting for the increasing mediocrity of non-elite higher education that has undermined their own ability to compete. Similarly, higher education officials still appear to believe their own claim that cuts in public funding for public universities can be replaced with private funds, if only these are pursued with sufficient entrepreneurial zeal.

Liberal Arts at the Brink

Victor E. Ferrall, Jr., a former college president trained in law and economics, is the author of Liberal Arts at the Brink, new this month. As he explains in the book, intense competition to attract the most promising students has created an untenable economic reality for liberal arts colleges. In the piece below, Ferrall does the math for a typical liberal arts college and argues that the only solution is to increase revenues. Not by raising tuition, but by decreasing discounts and repairing the public perception of liberal education.

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Every day, one clarion call, louder than all others, sounds from the towers of academe: “We need more money!” College development departments swell. Fund-raising campaigns follow one after another, like taxis in the airport queue. Alumni are relentlessly pursued for donations. The number one criterion for choosing a president is ability to generate contributions. Does the candidate have a golden rolodex? The name of the higher education game is Grow the Endowment. For most colleges, however, the growth is never enough. Why is this?

Consider Old Overshoe College, a typical small liberal arts college with 2,500 students and an endowment of $125 million. A few colleges, of course, have larger endowments -- $500 million, $1 billion, or even more -- but most do not. Like almost all colleges, Old Overshoe (known to its students as OOC) spends only a small portion of its endowment -- on average 4.6 percent each year -- hoping that such restraint will permit its endowment to grow (or at least not contract). At this spending rate, OOC’s endowment contributes $5.75 million to its annual revenues, or $2,300 per student.

The list price (tuition) to attend OOC is $30,000. Again like almost every other college, few OOC students actually pay the list price. Most receive substantial discounts in the form of financial aid. The average financial aid discount at OOC is 45 percent ($13,500). That is, the average student pays $16,500; not $30,000. OOC takes in $41,250,000 in total annual tuition revenues (2500 x $16,500), but it forgoes $33,750,000 (2,500 x $13,500) by discounting. Since its annual operating expenses are $75 million, the $5.75 million in endowment revenues that OOC receives are important even if the money covers less than 8 percent of OCC’s expenses.

The most serious financial problem OOC faces is not that its endowment is too small, but that its huge discount is too large. Every one percent of discount costs it $750,000. If OOC could cut its average tuition discount from 45 to 37 percent, it would take in an additional $6 million; more than its endowment is providing. In order to generate the total amount of revenues it is losing by discounting, OOC’s endowment would have to be more than $725,000,000! This is never going to happen. OOC is lucky if its endowment grows 2 or 3 percent per year.

What OOC clearly needs to do is cut its discount rate. Even though it is financially strapped, however, like almost all other colleges OOC it is increasing its discounts. Why?

The Humanities and The Bottom Line

In a popular culture seminar a few years back, a classmate of mine was feeling a bit exasperated with some of the theory that we were working our way through. He said something to the effect of “This stuff is completely unintelligible to the average person on the street.” Our professor, already frustrated with our general reluctance, responded by explaining that nobody would ever walk into a graduate level math class and complain that a novice would be lost, helplessly overwhelmed by specialized terminology. Why should what we do be held to these higher standards of instant outsider comprehension?

I was reminded of that exchange, and the validation it brought, while reading a recent New York Times Opinionator column by Stanley Fish, who we’ve of course published several times over the years. Sparked by the crushing decision by SUNY-Albany to disband its French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theatre departments, Fish has written two columns in as many weeks on the “Crisis of the Humanities.” Towards the end of the second column, in the course of proposing a new approach to justifying the continuing existence of the humanities, he says:

“Turn an accusation — you guys don’t deliver anything we can recognize — into a banner and hold it aloft.”

It’s an approach well worth considering.

For the most part, though, the columns are Fish being Fish.  "An equal opportunity antagonist" is how we described him in the copy for The Trouble with Principle. Iconoclastic, a bit dismissive, and generally quite certain. Opinionated, like the column heading says. The bulk of the second piece is his response to the many, many comments generated by the first. The commenters who’d argued, against Fish, for the financial (rather than academic) value of the humanities cited a few articles repeatedly, he says. Two of them are the work of Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Pubic University. To Newfield’s claim that “. . . English and Sociology make money on their enrollments, spend almost nothing on their largely self-funded research, and then . . . actually have some of their ‘profits’ from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields,” Fish responds: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Newfield, on his blog, Remaking the University, defended his take:

In this climate, it is particularly urgent to get the numbers right, and for everyone affected to inform themselves about what the numbers actually are. America's most prominent English professor, the New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, got into the act last week by commenting that the SUNY-Albany cuts could be rejected on professional grounds but not on budgetary ones, since the humanities "do not earn their keep." Fish was roundly criticized for this, and takes up a couple of pieces of mine (the one he doesn't link is here) and by the UCLA English professor Robert N. Watson (UCLA Today version). The good news is that Fish describes the much more aggressive stance university leaders need to take in relation to political and business leaders. On the other hand, the post unhelpfully reiterates the common misconceptions about university funding that Prof. Watson, I, and others, working independently, have been trying to undo.

Fish continues to describe research funding as "soft money" that adds to university budgets. In reality, extramurally funded research loses large amounts of money, e.g., $720 million in losses on $3.5 billion in gross research revenues at the University of California. This means that extramural research funding is not actually available as soft money to "shore up" the humanities or anything else, but requires large infusions of internal cash flow to keep going. These infusions, aka "cross-subsidies," can only come in large amounts from a combination of state funds allocated for instruction and/or student tuition, also generally paid with instruction as a primary goal. UC President Mark Yudof himself has acknowledged in a response to Prof. Watson that this means that "the humanities indeed can be seen as cross-subsidizing science, engineering, and similar departments."

Defining Conflicts, Defining Ideas

I spent this Labor Day entangled in a series of conversations with the laboring academics in my life. We covered a lot of ground, almost all of which felt like it was moving under our feet as we spoke. We talked tenure. We talked tuition. We talked the glut of grad students and unemployed PhDs, the overreliance on adjuncts, and the effects of rapid university expansion. And we talked about what’s feeling like an increasingly frightening rhetorical attack on the professional/pensioned classes in this country. It’s a strange spot we’ve ended up in, where a common public enemy can be made of a tenured professor at a public university and an autoworker drawing the pension and healthcare that they spent a career earning.

Much of our conversation had been sparked by Christopher Shea's NYT Book Review essay on the growing backlash directed at academics, and what Shea sees as the expanding gulf between rich and poor institutions of higher learning. There’s clearly a conflict being framed here, and changes on the horizon. It’s easy enough to sit where I sit and say this, but a conjured cabal of do-nothing academics making six figures isn’t really the issue. Maybe the more important conflict is still the one between those who think that a liberal education in the humanities (the clear target through most of these debates) is a valuable thing, and those who think that it isn’t. 

For its tenth anniversary issue, The Chronicle Review asked scholars and illustrators to name “the defining idea” of the coming decade. Cambridge classicist and Harvard University Press author Mary Beard contributed an essay on this very debate. An excerpt: 

For all of us working in universities and particularly in the humanities (though not entirely—pure mathematicians face the same problem), the primary challenge of the next decade will be to explain why what we do is essential, not optional. We will need to put the case very clearly: A world in which no one has access to Homer or Dante in their original languages is a world that has lost more than the icing on the cake—but its very foundations. We will also need to explain that such studies can't simply be put on hold and picked up later when the money begins flowing again. By then, the tradition and the skills that uphold our knowledge will have died. (It would take a new Renaissance to get them back.) 

The full essay is available here, along with contributions from Jaron Lanier, Peter Singer, and more than a dozen others.