A reader brought to our attention this article in the March 10, 2009 edition of The Buffalo News. It features the Govindaraj sisters, founders of Minerva, a company which aims to deliver “education in the humanities … to people whose careers lie in business, nonprofits, or in education at the secondary and elementary levels.”

Sisters Deepa and Preethi cherish no pie-in-the-sky vision of a world where Botticelli and the bottom line get equal fuss. They market their humanistic intervention as “bring[ing] the humanities to people in order to make them better at their jobs.”

The Govindaraj sisters cite as Minerva’s raison d’être the time-crunch commonly experienced in the Information Age, its generally accelerated nature militating against the reposeful, contemplative delights of arts and letters. This, the article continues, epitomizes “the brave new world of the humanities in 2009”; though, given current conditions, how brave this new world proves remains in doubt, particularly as an opinion prevails that “the humanities, in an Internet universe, are less important than before.”

Fortunately, there persists a dissenting opinion of equal force “argu[ing] strongly for the place of humanities education in preparing Americans for careers and civic life.” The article quotes National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Bruce Cole’s justification for this dissenting opinion:

“To really be prepared for a job — any job — you need to have some understanding of who you are and what your history is, and where you want to go. You need to be able to think clearly and write a good English sentence, to have a good critical awareness, and that is fostered by a liberal arts awareness.”

Yet opinions pro and contra converge on one point: namely, “that humanities training can barely be squeezed into today’s college curricula, which tend to skew toward the professional and technical fields.”

There’s a specter haunting humanities, the specter of worker productivity. Technology marches ever onward, demanding that skill development keep pace. Expectations of having to retrain at regular intervals in the future only motivate university students to maximize the amount of know-how acquired in the present, meaning the humanities, which emphasize general over specialized knowledge, only get more and more marginalized.

God's plenty: the latest refuge of humane letters.

The ongoing institutional marginalization of the humanities essentially makes for a brave new world resembling more that of Huxley’s John the Savage than Shakespeare’s Miranda. University humanities departments, having become veritable reservations, offer quaint spectacles of antiquarian primitivism the dwindling trickle of funding has reduced them to, while the larger world continues its button pushing and number crunching.

The Govindaraj sisters, however, mean to deliver the humanities from this fate, and they go about doing so in an utterly modern manner — by creating a private-sector solution. If anything, their Minerva resembles a sort of humanities Halliburton, an outsourcing option that today’s streamlined college course offerings all but cry out for. “Minerva’s mission of “provid[ing] a solid humanities education in accessible, though intense, seminar settings,” conjures images evocative more of corporate in-services than college lectures.

Such forward thinking has apparently served the Govindaraj sisters well:

Minerva started small but has grown steadily. It now encompasses up to eight instructors at a time and has worked with more than 3,000 participants.

The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote, “The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk,” which essentially means one can never understand an event’s significance until the event has completely transpired. The humanities find themselves in crisis, to be sure, and the Govindaraj sisters offer one possible solution. But we at Generation Bubble believe theirs does not represent the most desirable solution, because a Power-Point humanities education is really no education at all.

No, the humanities’ survival depends on their withstanding all compulsions to profitability, and not on their adapting themselves to whatever humble capacity corporate imperatives ordain for them. The success of Govindaraj sisters’ Minerva is, ultimately, symptomatic of a creeping technocratic hegemony. This, friends, we must resist.