a good article about humanities funding...something that's becoming more and more of a personal issue as i'm starting to seriously considering grants and research proposals and such...
it is pretty important, though difficult, for humanities and its subdisciplines to be able to speak the language of bureaucracy. i wish it was the other way around, i really wish it was, but that's not the reality of things and the humanities need to adapt to the reality at hand if they/we don't want to just get brushed aside. and i really do believe, despite protestations to the contrary, that the humanities are responsible for developing a lot of concrete research which has led to innovations and developments that we wouldn't have otherwise. not to mention the fact that (if i can make a broad generalization about a broad disciplinary field) it raises awareness about topics cultural and otherwise that just don't come up in the sciences. empiricism is good, but you have to know what you're looking for before you starting piling up statistics and studies, and i think there's always going to need to be this uneasy marriage between theory and experiment if we're going to keep learning...unfortunately the theory side, the humanities/cultural studies/english side, is the side that can't easily throw spreadsheets of data or video recordings of test subjects at a committee to prove what they've been doing. the kind of work "theory people" do is no less important, but isn't nearly as well suited to the kinds of people who want concrete results before spending money, unfortunately.
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