COLUMN: Culture, cheap at the price

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99Remember the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts several years ago? For all the outcry from moralists opposed to wasting taxpayers' money on supposedly offensive artwork, the real debate was about state subsidy of the arts. The GOP, fresh from its sweep of the 1994 elections, intended to reduce or even eliminate funding for the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and similar organizations. Democrats, by and large, wanted to maintain funding levels. The dirty truth is that academic research in the humanities, social sciences and even the natural sciences -- not to speak of the performing, literary and visual arts -- is grossly inefficient. Billions of dollars are spent on salaries, books, facilities and grants, but how much of this enormous sum is repaid in terms of direct profit to economic growth or development? Very little indeed. Archaeologists, anthropologists, astronomers, poets or painters are highly unlikely to make enough money to join the ranks of the wealthy. What they do certainly won't affect your daily life: For the most part, they're not about to invent a new convenience or alter the way our society does business. The global economy, the stock market, civilization as we know it will be fine without them. Or perhaps not. The value of academic and artistic work cannot be measured. Perhaps even more than economic prosperity or social harmony, they help define a civilized society, one that appreciates not just consumer goods and services, but also the intellectual growth of its citizens. Academic research expands knowledge and teaches humans more about themselves. Literary and artistic creation gives voice to those who wish to share their voices and vision with the rest of us, to provoke and offend us, to make us think. Not every country is capable of sustaining high levels of academic and artistic activity. As a well-known medievalist points out, the best humanistic learning has always been a delicate product of historical circumstance. No doubt one of the prerequisites is sufficient money and levels of education: Underdeveloped countries simply don't have the necessary resources for more than a handful of their scientists or historians to compete on the level of the West. But almost as important is a society's willingness to respect the value of such learning and art, and the corresponding political will to subsidize -- let's come out and say it -- intellectual research. I am not afraid that the humanities and sciences will ever lose their mission and central place in America, even as high-tech and business-dominated as our society is. But I do fear that the increasing, all-encompassing focus on the "bottom line" and disrespect for anything that turns a lesser profit will lead these fields to slowly fade away, leaving only a wealthy, self-satisfied, but tragically uncivilized grin. Reducing or denying financial support because such activities are economically inexpedient smacks almost of revenge: You're taking our money and not doing anything profitable with it. You consume, and all you produce is a book or a sculpture or a couple of articles. We'll teach you to value the importance of money. But the importance of money lies in what you do with it. I strongly urge those who believe that public spending for the humanities, arts and sciences are vital to a healthy human society not to stand by as public universities and national grant foundations find their budgets slashed in the name of downsizing. Don't let sensational media distortion of a few aesthetically questionable paintings or potentially offensive works of literature go unanswered in the minds of the public. Call your political representatives and tell them that even if you're not a poet or artist or historian, you want to give as many others as possible the chance to be one, so that society can enjoy the fruits of their labors. And I strongly urge Penn and similar institutions to consider spending more than the minimum amount required to keep arts and sciences programs afloat. Consider paying faculty enough to keep them from constantly having to entertain new job offers. Consider providing sufficient stipends to graduate students to spare them from having to scrounge for travel funds to attend major conferences to present papers -- or fleeing academia altogether. If universities want to fund only those fields of study that lead to financial rewards for both themselves and their students, then we may as well eliminate anything that doesn't fit into a "professional" discipline -- and dispense with any high-minded illusions of "liberal education."