Below is a speech delivered by Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand at a recent prize-giving function for students of the Faculty of Humanities and Education, UWI.It is a pleasure to be present at this ceremony to honour outstanding students of the Faculty of Humanities and Education. I am conscious of the gravity of the occasion and of the responsibility placed upon me by the Dean and members of the Faculty of Humanities and Education. I have a special interest in the apostles of sweetness and light.
I have been asked, rather unrealistically, to deliver in ten minutes a message on the theme Shining Caribbean Lights in a Global Village.Actually, the invitation says "shinning." The verb "shin" means to climb a rope, or pole or coconut tree etc by using both hands and legs for gripping. The notion/image of shinning up a rope of Caribbean light and looking down upon the global jail and village appeals to me.I might as well confess it, the global village is a device of the world capitalist mafia who have invented a manipulable mantra called "the free market" to bury poor people in their place.But "shining." I acknowledge shining as an adjective for the makers of our civilisation, and shining as a verb for what they do.
I want to speak to this besieged gathering, for besieged is what we are, about the challenges posed to higher education, the Humanities, and meaningful human existence by certain disbeliefs that have been becoming bolder and bolder over the last 100 years, all the more so in the age of the global village. Listen to this piece of bravado in The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), a work by a shining Caribbean light.As early as the 1970's Shiva was writing about dysfunctional families, the disappearance of communities, petty and grand individualisms, and a blind materialism that was its own end and purpose:"Happiness! Is not happiness I'm after. I don't give a damn for it. What the hell is happiness? Anybody could be happy...Let me tell you once and for all, I am not interested in happiness...If you want to get anywhere, you have to forget about this happiness nonsense. You have to forget about having a nice wife and family. You have to be hard like steel. You understand that? You have to be prepared to do anything to get what you want. Anything. "Anything." How did all this come about, and how does it concern a gathering of people in the Humanities? We are specially involved: we belong to a University, we are beneficiaries of a higher education, and we work and live in the humanities.
Universities as businesses
The titles of some recent books suggest what has been happening to Universities and to the idea of higher education in the last fifty years:
i Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialisation of Higher Education
ii Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education
iii The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education.
A review of two of these books in the October 24 issue of The London Review of Books is captioned: "Sold Out."The reviewer begins by pretending to be a champion of the current approach: "This country is in desperate need of jobs and of economic growth, and in higher education as in every other sphere we are now competing in a global market. So pipe down, and let's all focus on making this system work as effectively as possible."He ends with a curious fact about the situation in his country: "Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm's length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally-acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first."
The challenge to the Humanities
In 2004, the British Academy recognised the crisis facing the Humanities and the idea of higher education.Their concerns resulted in the publication of a landmark document entitled That full complement of riches: the contributions of the arts, humanities and social sciences to the nation's wealth. In the foreword, the president of the British Academy wrote in such a way as to suggest that he was moving towards what I call "the fusion university," a kind of institution I envisioned (without effect) in another place as a necessity for and a logical outcome of the fusion society that we are. Here is the president of the British Academy drifting towards that vision:Too often government statements and official pronouncements refer approvingly to the undoubted contributions made by the natural sciences, engineering and technology to wealth generation, economic prosperity, knowledge transfer, innovation, and the development of new businesses, products and services, while failing to acknowledge the equally important contributions made by the arts, humanities, and social sciences.Cultural, social, and economic well-being depend on the successful interplay of all subjects.Creativity and innovation are as much to be found and celebrated in the Academy's fields of interest, and the boundary between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities is in any case becoming increasingly fluid as research at the frontiers of knowledge becomes increasingly inter-and multi-disciplinary.The British Academy took the fight into enemy territory in 2008 with another report entitled Punching Our Weight: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Public Policy Making.