And I am not resigned

[hawkwing_lb]

I received this email today. It made me feel rather ill.

Dear PhD Student,

I am delighted to announce the Dublin Region Higher Education Alliance (DRHEA) Graduate Education Competition Future Voices: How Ireland’s PhDs will enable National Recovery. This call is open to all PhD students from all disciplines in Trinity.

You are invited to submit a short abstract and poster outlining how your research will influence national recovery. The 10 shortlisted candidates will make a 3-minute presentation to a Future Voices Assessment Panel, in front of a multi-disciplinary audience, on Wednesday 7th September 2011 in Dublin Castle.

The first prize winner will receivecid:image003.png@01CC3B0D.3F011170500 and iPad2. The runner-up will receive an iPad2.

I would encourage you very strongly to participate in this competition.

So, basically, "We are delighted to give you this opportunity for you to tell us how best your contributions to arts, humanities, and science, might be co-opted by the profiteering arseholes whose screw-ups have resulted in major cuts to all your funding. Oh, and we won't even offer you enough of a prizefund to pay for a month's rent."

I feel strongly about this. Strongly enough that I have written a sarcastic abstract which I intend to send them. I have no skills with poster design, so that will fall by the wayside. But it makes me feel better to say this:

---

My name is Liz. I'm a student in the Dept. of Classics, Trinity College Dublin. My Ph.D. research concentrates on the experience of healing and medicine in ancient Greece between 400BCE and 200CE, and it is my intent to demonstrate to you in this brief abstract just how my research will enable national recovery.

I'm not going to lie to you. Historical research produces few easily quantifiable benefits. Its fruit is knowledge and the joy of discovery: the exhilaration of chasing the logic of a hypothesis until one can pin evidence underneath it and turn it from suggestion into theory; the challenge of confronting established theory and suggesting new ways of looking and seeing, new paths into which to direct our thoughts; the honour and duty of teaching, sharing knowledge, and challenge, and honest intellectual argument.

A laboratory scientist or an engineer can design a widget; a business graduate can make a marketing plan to maximise your profit from selling it; an economist can tell you (truly or falsely) that the market is too full or not full enough of widget-production. What can historians do?

Well, frankly, we can tell you that it is not research which will enable national recovery. We can tell you that in cases where there is economic and political tension between the centre and the periphery, the periphery never comes out better than it began.

We can tell you, in the words of L. Annaeus Seneca, that it is not what you endure, but how you endure, that is important.

And we can tell you that 500 euro and an iPad will not enable economic recovery, either. Because no, there isn't an app for that. There isn't an app for acting with decency and fairness, in defence of human dignity. There isn't an easy fix for hard problems, and what looks like the obvious action to take can all-too-frequently make the problems worse.

I can tell you about my research. About the sanctuaries of the healing god Asklepios at Kos and Epidauros; about the great festivals in honour of the god: about the fear and hope, suffering and relief, of suppliants who came to those sanctuaries seeking miraculous healing. I can tell you about medicine, and an ancient physician's tools, and how people in other times and other places looked at the world through different eyes.

Ask me what good that is. Ask me how it specifically enables national recovery. Go ahead: I know you want to.

I'll tell you.

You're thinking too small.

My research contributes to the nation. It contributes to the sum of human knowledge. It is not immediately tangible, nor is it easily fungible: it is akin to Socrates' search for the knowledge of "what excellence is." [Plato, Meno, 86d] I seek knowledge of history because the search makes us better people. Because without art, and joy, and history, and knowledge, one doesn't live. One merely survives.

And if we're going to create a national recovery, all of us together, the merely surviving is not nearly good enough. We have to have dignity and joy. We have to live.

I don't want your iPad. I don't want your money. I want you to believe in art. I want you to believe in history. I want you to believe in humanity.

In all the humanities, and in a future worth living for.

Comments

[green_knight]

I wish you were entering - that's a very strong defense of the humanities.

[hawkwing_lb]

I have no poster-making skills. But I'm still going to send this to them. Maybe it'll reach one or two people and make them think.

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

"I want you to believe in art. I want you to believe in history. I want you to believe in humanity."

I think that is my favorite part.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

You are a kind and supportive friend. :)

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

well, you know what they say - it takes one to know one :p

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

<3

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

This is beautiful.

From one historian to another, thank you.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to be productively angry.

(Thank you.)

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Truth. But they have their ears stuffed with money and cannot hear you.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

One does what one can. Maybe if we all shout really loudly? :P

[desperance.livejournal.com]

*salutes*

You speak truth to power. It's all we can do.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Short of violent revolution, yes indeed. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The degree to which bureaucrats try to remake us all in their image is sickening.
History binds us, locates us, defines and shapes us. It's part of what we breathe and how we stand, how we speak and who we know, where we go and what we can do. It's not an iPod or a tv show. It's bigger than a profit margin or a 'heritage industry'. It's bigger than the impoverished minds that can't think outside the money box.
I fought through the last recession in much the position you are in now, and I survived. You have my support.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

The corporatisation of all aspects of life is a cancer which will eat away everything good about democracy, leaving only ever more blatant oligarchy in its wake.

Not that, you know, I have strong feelings or anything.