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Hello, I'm Helen Small, I teach English professor of English in Pembroke College and in the faculty of English at Oxford.

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The book I just finished is about the ways in which we have conventionally argued for the value of the humanities.

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So it's unlike, I guess, most of the work in the field because it isn't aiming to be a polemic or a manifesto in the first

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instance is actually addressed to people who find themselves needing to make the arguments.

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And what I wanted to do was what we actually do in the classroom, what what we do in our books all the time.

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But we often feel too defensive to do when we think about this subject, that is,

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ask ourselves the hard questions and figure out what the main arguments are,

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put them through their paces, give them a hard time and see what's left standing at the end.

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SP2 - A lot of academics are content to study their subjects in an 'arts for art sake' environment.

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What made you become such an advocate for the cause?

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I became really interested in the humanities debate and wanted to see what I could do with it around 2010.

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So I just finished the previous book. I was thinking about what my next subject should be.

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And of course this was the time when students were taking to the streets, especially in December of that year,

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as they looked at this sudden hike in the funding of an undergraduate education from three thousand pounds,

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as you know, to up to nine thousand pounds for most of them.

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The students who were on the streets were often the best advocates for the subjects they want to study.

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A lot of them came from the humanities, but of course, not just them, also social scientists and scientists out there.

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And they were often pretty clear about what they were doing.

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But it seemed to me that those of us who were speaking from the university and worrying about the pressure that might be placed on the

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humanities especially to become more demonstratively useful to society or produce results that could be tied to improvements in GDP.

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And that kind of blunt economist thinking were often becoming too defensive

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and were delivering arguments that seemed to be bigger than we could sustain.

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So you will see that I have a particular beef, I guess, with democracy needs this argument when it's put very, very boldly like that.

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OK, so as I listen to the arguments, I wanted to really just test them out to try to figure out what are the what is the basic claim here?

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Where does it come from? What does it assume the antagonism might be? What are we arguing to defend ourselves from?

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What are the assumptions about what we study and what the skills and the strengths of it are historically and what they are now?

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Which arguments have we used in the past that we might need to change?

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Because what we do now is substantially different from what was done in, say, the whole Victorian period when a lot of these arguments were formed,

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as it seemed to me, time to update the arguments not just in the mode of polemic, but as a kind of critical exercise in its own right.

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It's quite hard to make, such, as you say, academic arguments available to the public.

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Is that part of what you do? Yes, it is. But I did want people to delve deeper.

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So so my ideal audience is is, if you like, a mixed audience of if you're being really ambitious,

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it's the people in Whitehall, isn't it, who are making policy decisions and you want them to access that.

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You know, the core claims that are being made, think about them critically and then go away with something they can use.

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But I'm also writing a course for people like me.

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So people who are immersed in teaching some of this material in a regular basis as part of our Victorian or 20th century classes,

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and to want to get into the depth of it historically and in terms of rhetoric and all the other things that are there to be studied.

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I think the other thing that you're raising, though,

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is is through the huge difficulty implicitly of arguing for the humanities because you're arguing for something that is so broad.

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So how do you defend something that runs the gamut really from sort of Sufi mysticism through to middle German or,

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you know, theories of music, you name it. It's the boundaries shift on what we include within the humanities.

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And I said quite a lot of trading going on across the boundary with the social sciences, most obviously.

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But arguing at that level of generality means that you have to get above.

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You get it. You have to get at a higher level of abstraction, really, than you can use.

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When you were arguing for, for example, what English does in the way of training you to be sceptical about rhetoric,

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those claims that are easier to nail in more specific, but trying to find what works across the humanities involves not just abstraction,

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but a certain amount of grouping of things that are, you know, that are common across them.

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And has that been your biggest struggle then, getting to that level of abstraction?

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I guess that is why the very first chapter in the book and the second lecture

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that you'll hear if you listen to the podcasts is not strictly evaluation.

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It's a description of the definitive work that the humanities can claim to do.

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So it's really about a basic way of justifying the humanities on the grounds that they

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do something that is distinct from the work of the social sciences in the sciences,

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and it's trying to figure out exactly what that work is,

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what is what is the subject we have in common and what are the techniques that we have in common

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and going about our work and the values that we have that are maybe partly distinctive to us.

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How do the authors that you're looking at the moment come into that? Some of them have specific authors associated with them and some of them don't.

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So to start historically with the earliest one, the democracy argument has a very strong, authoritative presence in Plato.

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So really, you're dealing with Plato's argument that the philosopher is a gadfly to the police,

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someone he's teasing and goading it into a more active state of being in the case of John Stuart Mill.

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I was intrigued by this. You have one extremely famous person in history, philosophy,

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who takes on an rearticulate the idea that the humanities and of course, you wouldn't have the humanities.

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He was talking in the first instance about poetry, then more broadly about literature,

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make a contribution to happiness in cultivating a certain kind of feeling,

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quality in our thinking and a certain ability to mix and analytic thinking with a more responsive human approach to things.

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That's enormously famous. But there's been a huge resurgence in thinking about contributions to happiness,

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public benefits in the way of improvements of individual and collective happiness in recent years in which mill has pretty much disappeared.

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So you're looking at economists, behavioural economists,

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especially some psychologists who seem to have stepped away from history of their own subjects.

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So what became part of the purpose of that chapter is putting it back in and trying to remind people that there was a very,

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very well-developed argument here, which still needs to be taken on board.

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And that might actually make for a richer and better calibrated argument than we have if we get him.

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And in the one other person who has a strong presence in the book is Arnold,

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who for years has figured in these debates as the kind of high cultural defender of the best that has been thought and said.

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Where I've used Arnold is really rather differently.

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And I suppose you could say I'm making a case for a modern unwieldiness, but with a much more specific grimmett, which is that Arnold was,

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in effect working as a bureaucrat in the Department of Education at the time that he was writing Culture on Anarchy.

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He's the one who had most cause to think hard about how the humanities should respond to the pressure to be useful to society.

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And he had a very finely worked out answer to that. That's the bit model that interests me here.

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So could you go into that a little bit? Why? Why we should study the humanities.

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We have obviously a quite well outlined argument already available in a series of lectures online.

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But we were wondering if you could so I can give you the summary version of it, if you like.

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So what I've done is to to fish out,

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to provide a taxonomy of what seemed to me the four arguments that have been returned to time and again with good reason.

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So the first of the detailed lectures that you hear talks about it offers a definition of what the humanities are and what it is that they do.

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It's different. And the core description,

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the best I can get to something unifies all of them is that the humanities study the meaning making practises of the culture,

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and that they do that in ways which place an unnecessary pressure on qualitative as well as quantitative thinking.

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And the second chapter looks at that old pressure from Adam Smith onwards to justify ourselves in terms of the usefulness in practical ends.

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What we do that is of immediate benefit to society. And it takes Arnold as a way of thinking about that debate.

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And the next of the lectures looks at the argument that comes out of John Stuart Mill, as I said,

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which is that the humanities have a contribution to make to our individual and collective happiness.

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We're really in the end and I don't think most philosophers have a problem with this.

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So some politicians do. The collective happiness is just the sum of individual happiness.

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How many people you can put in the way of a fuller understanding of life, the emotions as well as reasoned,

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a better and deeper understanding of what reasoning is and what it can do for you and your life.

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The next of the arguments is that famous one, which has become hugely important to the English arguments about the humanities in the last few years.

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So the argument that democracy needs the humanities because they teach us a range of ways of understanding what a society is,

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how human beings work and live together, what the underpinning values are, what we mean by justice,

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what the good what the human good is in ways that go beyond simple economic benefits to to societies.

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I put quite a lot of pressure on that argument, but I think if that argument of all arguments can't take a bit of scrutiny,

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then it's in trouble because that's really what it says. So we need to do it for ourselves, including an argument.

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And then finally, I turn to the history of arguing for intrinsic value.

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Not all the other arguments that I look at, the idea that we are useful, though,

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perhaps in ways that put pressure on economists standard ways of thinking about usefulness,

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that we contribute to happiness, that we are a force for good in the democracy.

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Something does remain.

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That argument, by the way, all of those arguments, what we might call consequentialist, are based on the idea that we have conflicting.

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Is in the world, but none of those arguments really is enough by itself,

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because if you don't have alongside them a notion that the object you're studying matters for its own sake,

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then there will always be something that will do the job you're looking to do better or more directly.

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OK, more efficiently and quite a lot of philosophy of value being used in that lecture.

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But I hope it's accessible enough for people to understand why I think that might be the better term to use.

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So if we take for granted the value of other humanities disciplines, say art history or history or whatever,

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why should we study English specifically when I don't make the case?

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I deliberately deprive myself of that job of defending myself, if you like, on my particular bit of work.

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As I said, I think the job of arguing for the humanities is really about trying to find

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what we have in common or what grouped together we do that is distinctive.

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It is really striking when you look at the history of arguing for the humanities, how many prominent figures in it have come out of English?

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So, John Guillory, for example, the United States definitely not here, but most of those people, when you look at them,

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also have a much, much wider interest in Portland on different kinds of skills beyond those of English.

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So I would like to see other people entering the debate. It would be great to see a musician in there.

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There are some very good historians in there. We need some more linguists in the frame.

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I think it would be good, good for the debate if we were represented more broadly across the humanities.

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So even though you're a professor of English, you see that English is part of a family of humanities, rather.

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Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Yes, exactly that.

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And as I say, I can I can do my best to extract out of or group together the arguments that are true for all of us.

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But I think it would be really good if people who were actually practising, for example,

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musical aesthetic theories were able to enter the debate and say whether they think those arguments are true for them.

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The one argument that you will see isn't pushed very hard. For example,

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in what I'm looking at is the argument that we make a contribution to aesthetic appreciation

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of the world or that the things that we do are beautiful or have aesthetic value.

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I didn't want to make that argument because it seemed to me that it wasn't obviously true of very large groupings within the humanities.

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For example, history is what my colleagues do when they look at the history of, you know, of a political debate or the history of nations or whatever.

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Is that aesthetic? I don't think it is primarily.

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So I've tried not to pin it, not to pin these arguments on things that might capture some of what we do, but are not only true of us and indeed where,

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for example, a scientist will tell you are a very strong aesthetic components to what a scientist does or discovers or describes.

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So in Darwin's Origin of Species, you could argue for that as a work of the humanities and of course,

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the work of the sciences and the humanities and sciences ever be reconciled in that way again?

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Yeah, the second of the lectures where I'm dealing with how we how we can best describe ourselves and discriminate ourselves from other kinds

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of of work within the university is trying cautiously to step over that old train of argument about two cultures and more recently,

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three cultures, where there is people following on from Snow and Leavis of trying to try to describe a tripartite university,

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humanities, social sciences, sciences. And what I'm what I'm really arguing.

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There is as many people would agree with me, I have agreed already with this.

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I will tell you that the antagonistic model of describing ourselves against others has not served us very well in the past.

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It produces a pretty quick caricature of what we and our supposed and like partners.

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And are there ways in which to study?

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The humanities has become even more relevant and important in our recent times, quite apart from the student protests in 2010,

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I think we are under huge pressure across society so so that we use all of us who work in any way with

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the public sector to account for ourselves in terms that are although they are much more cannily,

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intelligently, broadly defined now than they were, are basically econometric.

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And I think there are very, very big problems with trying to do that. Once you try to capture the social benefit that the humanities create,

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you start to impose upon the people that that benefit has been done to and a burden of telling you that the benefit has been made and felt,

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which to me turns us from a public beneficiary into a public or public public benefit giver into a public nuisance.

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We have to account for the good of what we do. And there's no I think there isn't any longer much credence, if there ever was,

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to the idea that government should hand out large amounts of funding and would ask us to say how we used it for the good.

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On the other hand, there comes a point at which your description of the good that you do starts to

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take up the time and expenditure of money that doing the good itself should be.

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What would you say about the imbalance between funding for the humanities and the sciences?

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I think that imbalance is necessary and right. It doesn't take as much money to do the work of the humanities as.

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Comparatively, with the laboratory sciences, this medicine seems to me, and I think it seems to many of my colleagues working in humanities,

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that the best work in humanities is done by individuals or very small groups thinking at their desk or in small rooms and writing,

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thinking, discussing, writing. That's what we do being in the library, you know, researching on our computers and information we need.

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But it doesn't take a huge infrastructure to do those things.

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And if you look at the size of the grants that are now being handed out for collaborative humanities work,

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it's clear that at that level, as others, we're increasingly being modelled against the scale of funding for the sciences.

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I'm not at all convinced that it will produce better work. I think in the end you need a lot of small grants directed at individuals or small

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groups doing hard thinking in a room where they don't need big machines to do it.

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They may need a different computer, a decent laptop and a well stocked library.

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What you do need, of course, is that the people in the university were arguing for the humanities share of the budget,

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understand what it is that they're arguing for. But it might help to know, for example,

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that the HLC or OSSY UK Research Council's UK estimate that the U.S. should have around three percent of the budget distributed to all subjects.

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That's tiny. I imagine that's even smaller than most students would care if asked to guess.

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And one final question to young people studying humanities at the moment,

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it's difficult because firstly the funding is short or that's the perception of public perception.

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And secondly, in a time of economic distress, we can feel.

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Undergraduates, sixth formers, can feel that perhaps they should be studying something more useful.

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What would you say to that?

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There's a really interesting report if people want to look at it on Oxford University's website, which describes where students go once they graduate.

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And a very interesting law is high up there. Management is high up there.

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And a lot of students go on, of course, to further their study in areas that aren't just humanities based.

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They would incorporate some economics, a little business training or whatever on top of it.

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So these things aren't antagonistic. But the more important message is that we train people in thinking critically about language,

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about arguments, about expression, about how best to get one's point across and to think through a problem.

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I really think any student thinking about these issues could afford to start introducing themselves to the

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wider debate that's been going on there in the last several years about what the value of these things is.

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So it's you can track these through the reading lists or attached to the website.

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But there are some very interesting debates out there about how best to defend what we do, not just in the eyes of the world, but in your own eyes.