Humanites and Higher Education
the 2011 Harvard China Fund Symposium

Every school at Harvard has multiple projects and academic partners in China. Launched in 2011, an Annual Research Symposium is held at the Harvard Center Shanghai to generate research proposals and promote scholarly exchange between Harvard faculty and their Chinese colleagues.

Led by Faculty Chairs Mark Elliott and David Wang, the first symposium was held March 17-18, 2011 and focused on “Humanities and Higher Education.” Attendees included 22 faculty panelists from Harvard and Greater China, along with 23 local academics and 11 special guests/members of the Harvard China Advisory Group.
See below for the full program.


Thursday, March 17, 3-5:30PM
Session 1: A Crisis in the Humanities?
Discussants: Peter Bol (Harvard University), Chen Lai (Academy of Chinese Learning, Tsinghua University), Emma Dench (Harvard University), Bill Kirby (Harvard University), James Lee (HKUST), Qu Weiguo (Fudan University), Diana Sorensen (Harvard University)

Moderator: Angela Leung (Hong Kong University)

Over the last decade, voices expressing concern over a “crisis in the humanities” have been growing steadily louder, both in the United States and in China.  While much of the discussion reflects recent trends, social as well as economic (e.g., increased competitiveness, the global financial meltdown of 2008), it is worth pointing out that such worries are nothing new.  Indeed, one of the best-known books on the subject in English is J.H. Plumb’s A Crisis in the Humanities, published in 1964, itself a response to a perceived turn toward technology in education after the end of WWII.  In thinking about the current “crisis in the humanities,” we might begin by asking a few questions:  What are the dimensions of the present crisis?  How is it measured?  What, if anything, distinguishes the current crisis from crises in the past?  Are the humanities perpetually in crisis? (and if so, are we really dealing with a “crisis”?)  Is a crisis necessarily a bad thing?  We might then go on to consider additional issues:  What is at stake in a discussion of the importance of the humanities for society at large?  Where does this discussion take place?  Who shapes it?  What role do scholars have to play in this debate?  What are the points of similarity and difference in these debates as they unfold in China and in the United States? 

Friday, March 18, 9-11:30AM
Session 2: Critical Approaches in the Humanities
Discussants: Chen Pingyuan (Peking University), Mark Elliott (Harvard University), Ge Zhaoguang (Fudan University Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies), Angela Leung (Hong Kong University), Li Hsiao-ti (Institute of History and Philology, Academica Sinica), James Robson (Harvard University), Xu Jilin (Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, East China Normal University), Yang Nianqun (Institute of Qing Dynasty History, Renmin University of China)

Moderator: Peter Bol (Harvard University)

The gradual liberalization of intellectual discourse in the Chinese world represents a sea change from the situation of a generation or two ago, when the theoretical and conceptual frameworks available to scholars in the humanities were often severely constrained by political limitations.  Where once it required significant effort to cross the discursive divide that separated Western scholarship in such fields as literature, religion, philosophy, and history, now we find that we are often quoting from the same pool of thinkers – so that even if we are not literally speaking the same language, figuratively we share a great deal of vocabulary.  Yet we should not be lulled into thinking that the work of sorting out how best to approach problems of common concern is over.  Nor has the old problem of trying to fit theoretical approaches developed in a European context to Chinese realities gone away.  These issues remain of central importance, and raise some fundamental questions:  Which conceptual or theoretical tools appear to be most influential today, and why?  What are the important new developments in humanistic inquiry that will most profoundly affect thinking and research in our various fields?  What does the study of the humanities in China have to contribute to this emerging critical discourse? What possibilities do we see for training the next generation of scholars?  How do we imagine our fields in twenty years’ time?

Friday, March 18, 2-5PM
Session 3: Humanities in Higher Education and the Media
Discussants: Cheng Yu-Yu (National Taiwan University), James Engell (Harvard University), Jay Harris (Harvard University), Lu Zongli (Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Billy So (Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), David Wang (Harvard University), Eugene Wang (Harvard University)

Moderator: Ge Zhaoguang (Fudan University Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies)

Even if there is agreement that the humanities have a vital role to play in society, considerable differences of opinion remain as to how best to make this case to the students who attend our institutions of higher learning and to the public at large.  In liberal arts colleges in the United States in particular, the question of maintaining the integration of humanistic studies in what seems to be an ever-greater preoccupation with a pre-professional curriculum is notably urgent.  Such concerns were clearly voiced, for example, in the most recent revamping of the general education program at Harvard, as evident in the Report of the Task Force on General Education that was published in 2007.  These are questions that Chinese universities face as well.  What, then, are the lessons of the American experience, and how might they be of value to colleagues in Greater China?  As for humanities in the media, one might well ask how it is that lectures on literary, philosophical, and historical topics find enormous audiences in China via such programming as “Lecture Room” (Baijia jiangtan 百家讲坛)?  Is there a model here for the US?  How might we in the humanities better exploit social media to convey our message to the public?  How can we do so in such as way as to remain “intellectually respectable”? Is this one solution to the “humanities crisis”?