The first time I pulled out a guitar in my U.S. history lecture course at Leiden University, the 80 or so students perked up. Some leaned forward, intrigued; others slouched deeper, too cool for school. Someone snapped a photo.
“I don’t want to just talk about history,” I told them. “I want you to feel it.” I was raised on a farm in the Oregon high desert—the desolate heart of the American Far West—and my dry sense of humor doesn’t always register with Dutch Gen Zers. “Old songs are texts that illuminate the past,” I said, “and since you’re a captive audience … well, I guess you’ll just have to listen.”
I didn’t take my guitar to class out of desperation. But for those of us in the humanities, these are tough times. In the United States, President Donald J. Trump is using federal funding as a cudgel to attack American higher education. The humanities have been especially hard hit. For more than a quarter-century, humanities programs in the U.S. have fought a rear-guard battle against dramatically declining enrollments. One reason is the rising cost of college tuition, but the humanities free-fall also reflects a broader cultural shift. A generation of young people has come of age in an era of dot-com politicians, digital “disruptors,” and swaggering billionaires, whose advice is to avoid the dusty bookshelves of the humanities and learn coding instead.
The humanities are under threat in the Netherlands, too. Dutch universities have been structurally under-funded for a quarter-century. The Schoof Cabinet’s €430 million cuts to education are adding to the strain, and we’re bracing for larger classes, a tougher teaching load, and less time and money for research. At the Leiden University Institute for History, where I teach, hiring has been frozen, the research sabbatical indefinitely put on hold, and annual funding for research barely covers the cost of a round-trip plane ticket to New York.
Much is at stake in the upcoming elections.
Ironically, humanities programs are fighting for survival at a moment when the skills we teach are needed more than ever. The defining challenges of the 21st century require solutions that are collective, transnational, and inter-dependent, and the humanities are critical in providing the skills for constructively engaging other peoples, societies, and nations. We provide our students with a fundamental toolkit for turbulent times: how to think analytically, read critically, and write argumentatively. Our students learn time-management, self-discipline and problem-solving. And it’s in the humanities that students define themselves by grappling with big questions like what does it mean to be a citizen? What are our collective responsibilities as humans? And how can we live a worthy life?
I wasn’t thinking about all that when I took my guitar to my lecture course. I was just doing what humanities scholars do in classrooms every day: innovating, being creative, working to connect with students. It doesn’t always work. But on that day, my rendition of the 1863 American Civil War song “Weeping Sad and Lonely” received a resounding applause.
After that, the guitar became a staple in my lectures. As we moved through American history, I sang a mid-20th century protest against inequality and a ballad of late-twentieth century deindustrialization. I did a 1968 paean to conservative values and a 1975 declaration of women’s sexual independence. One song at a time, we came to recognize how American songwriters have identified and debated the defining developments, conflicts, and challenges in American history. It was fun, but it was also valuable. As John F. Kennedy once declared, “the life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose—and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
That’s true of the humanities, too.
Last semester, during a lecture on the African American Civil Rights Movement, I asked the students to rise and join hands. We sang “We Shall Overcome,” a staple of the Black freedom struggle. It is both uplifting and melancholy, a call to action that seems to recognize the necessary pain that change entails: “Oh, deep in my heart/ I do believe/ We shall overcome some day.”
After it was done, the students shuffled out, looking at their phones or making a beeline for the nearest espresso. I packed up my stuff, already thinking about the next week’s lecture. There’s little time for reflection during a 12-week semester, and, as one of my PhD committee members once told me, if you count your life in semesters, it passes terribly quickly.
But one thing is clear: the humanities are needed now more than ever. And we shall overcome.
William Michael Schmidli is assistant professor at the Institute for History of Leiden University