We’re trying something new in Finding Equilibrium…a series of “Six Questions” interviews with experts who can help us explain challenging issues of interest to our readers.
This week we explore the value of research in the humanities with Dean Chris Yeomans. Relative to more ‘utilitarian’ research, how does research in the humanities create value for society? How can higher education better make the case that humanities research is important? We will hear from Chris on these questions and more.
Our Six Questions posts include the unedited video of our conversation, and a link to a verbatim transcript. Below you can find a condensed transcript generated from that video with the help of the Gemini AI tool. All participants have reviewed the condensed transcript for accuracy. Let us know what you think!
Jay Akridge: Hello everyone, I’m Jay Akridge, joined here by my colleague and co-author, David Hummels. We write the Substack, Finding Equilibrium: Two Economists on the Future of Higher Education. We’re trying something new for Finding Equilibrium by creating some podcasts to experiment with that format for sharing insights on higher ed with our audience.
We’re going to be talking about some of the key issues in higher ed with experts who have unique insight on those issues, and we’ll be working to cut to the essence of the issue by focusing on six questions in our conversation. Or at least we’re going to try to keep it to six questions.
Today, our topic is research in the humanities. You know, the value of research in the humanities has been increasingly called into question. Some critics argue that humanities research doesn’t create value for society, and therefore faculty shouldn’t be doing it, and the public shouldn’t be funding it. Elected officials are listening, and such opinions look to underlie some policy decisions, such as mandating higher teaching loads and budget decisions, such as increasing the focus on STEM.
To help us take a careful look at humanities research and address some of these perspectives, our guest today is Dr. Chris Yeomans, the Justin Smith Morrill Dean of Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. Dean Yeomans moved into this role this past December and had previously served as head of Purdue’s Department of Philosophy. His scholarship has focused on the history of German philosophy and the work of Hegel, among other areas. Chris, welcome, and right up front, congratulations on your new appointment.
Chris Yeomans: Thank you, it was three months on Monday. So, I’m just in. David and Jay, thank you so much for having me; I’m a big fan of the Substack.
Jay Akridge: Really great to have you today, and so we’re going to jump right in. I think it’s natural for people outside the Academy to focus on the more utilitarian aspects when they think about the value of research. So, we cured a disease, we built a longer-lasting battery. How do you make the case for scholarship that doesn’t have the same obvious connection to outcomes and material things that people value?
Chris Yeomans: Yeah, it’s a great question. One thing that I’ll say—not to dodge the question, I promise, but to drag some other people into the foxhole with me—is most STEM research is also not like that. Most STEM research is basic research. In a lot of ways, private industry is better at building the battery or producing the actual drug that is going to help you, and it’s based on basic science that happens at the university. So, this is an issue, and particularly a public relations issue, but not just for the liberal arts; I think this is true for the sciences as well.
I’ll say a few things about it. First, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to tell in advance what kind of knowledge will be useful. There’s a sort of false picture that we start with some real practical problem, like battery life, and we somehow reverse engineer the basic science around it. It almost never works that way. The cameras in our cell phones work on the photoelectric effect, which Einstein explained in 1905. GLP-1s like Ozempic work on research that was done into Gila monster venom. You get all of these things that didn’t look that useful at the time, but as you start piecing them together, you get a different context.
Humanities research is a lot like that. A few years ago, it seemed like the most useful thing in the world was learning how to code a computer, but now with “vibe coding,” it’s not clear that that’s the most useful thing in the world.
I also think people actually value a broader range of things than we generally give them credit for. Speaking to a couple of economists, here’s an interesting data point: Heritage tourism—tourism around historical and cultural interest—is a $600 billion market. That is over a third of all tourism geared towards people trying to take in history and culture. If you look at fiction sales, historical fiction has a huge market share and massive fandom.
I actually think the things that people care about are more than just a longer battery life. People care about self-government; they care about natural and cultural identity. They care about history, the history of their nation, and understanding things like the Civil War. In the end, I think that’s because humans live more in the world of meaning than they do in physical objects. The number of human problems that you can solve with physics is actually remarkably small versus the number of human problems that you can address with literature, understanding history, or getting clearer about political concepts.
So, I actually think the humanities have a more direct connection to the world of our experience than many other fields in the university. My view is that our main problem is not one of content, but of form. Our research outputs are largely inscrutable for anybody outside of our sub-disciplines. Maybe even people in other areas of philosophy can’t make heads or tails of what I write, and vice versa.
I think a lot of it has to do with better public engagement and getting the results of humanities research to people on the topics of the day in a way that your average, educated American can understand. A lot of the things that we’re dealing with, even when they have to do with scientific questions, don’t really have scientific answers.
For example, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH, was just here a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about decisions about school closings during COVID. It’s a scientific question what the transmission rate of COVID is or whether certain populations are more or less vulnerable than others. But the question of how we should trade off exposure of older and vulnerable Americans to COVID with education losses from schools that are closed—that’s not a scientific question. That’s a moral question. Research in moral philosophy and ethics isn’t going to tell you exactly what the right answer is, but it’s going to give you a better set of concepts to understand the decisions you’re making and their ramifications.
The use of the humanities is much broader because the things that we care about are much broader.
Jay Akridge: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. There is a disconnect where the lens we look through to place a value on the humanities—maybe just pure economic value—doesn’t align with the value society receives from them. How to bridge that gap becomes the question. I know David’s got a follow-up here.
David Hummels: Yeah, your answer just then was leading in the direction that I wanted to ask about. Your college has gone a long way in touting research and educational programs specifically related to the topic of the day: artificial intelligence. I wonder if you could say more about humanities research conducted specifically to complement emerging understandings in other fields, like STEM.
Chris Yeomans: Sure. I’ll say something about AI generally, and then something a little bit more detailed. I think the way the humanities can best engage with AI is by taking the “I” in AI seriously. This is supposed to be a form of intelligence. Well, we’ve been thinking about what intelligence is for a couple of millennia now. We’ve been thinking about issues like knowledge, reasoning, explanation, and understanding. If there’s an artificial version of this, we should be able to figure out what artificial understanding or artificial explanation is like.
Philosophers have, for a long time, compared human intelligence with other kinds. For most of history, the two comparisons were animal intelligence and God’s intelligence. Animals are not mechanisms; they’re doing something that looks like intelligence even without language. And if there’s a God, God’s no doubt much smarter than we are. Now you have computational intelligence, which you can add in there. It helps us not only understand what artificial intelligence might be like, but also what human intelligence might be like in comparison.
There’s a well-known phrase that AI is not true intelligence, but just a “stochastic parrot”. But human beings do quite a bit of parroting in conversation, as it turns out. So maybe the comparison is a little more complicated.
I think there are really three ways that we engage with machine learning: using it, understanding it, and enabling its advancement.
Regarding using it, there is all sorts of interesting work going on with the application of machine learning techniques in the humanities. For example, Stanislav Pejša won our Distinguished Dissertation Award in history for using machine learning to explain how the boundaries of European countries were redrawn in the Treaty of Versailles. There has been a long discussion about whether this was pure power politics or if there was a real vision behind it. Pejša was able to digitize international affairs journals in a variety of European languages and use machine learning to show that there was indeed a plan presented in different journals. You have to have the language ability, understand the historical context, and be able to use the machine learning techniques.
For understanding it, again, we must take seriously that this is supposed to be a kind of intelligence. It isn’t just a tool; it’s something more extraordinary. Brett Karlan in our philosophy department works on the question of authenticity in AI decision-making. If you’re talking to ChatGPT about what to do with your life, the resulting decision is a combination of what you think and what ChatGPT thinks. Human beings have always made decisions in funny ways—based on parents, roommates, etc.—but we need to take this new interaction seriously. Eamon Duede also has a paper in Science called “After Science” about what happens when machine learning solves problems without explaining them. Are we still doing science when understanding isn’t increased?
Lastly, the humanities have been very important for the advancement of AI. Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar, wrote What Computers Can’t Do in 1972. It is widely recognized as having ended the era of “good old-fashioned AI” or symbolic AI. Dreyfus argued that human intelligence is embodied and cultural, and symbolic systems based on logic rules don’t have that. That argument won the day, and the advances we are seeing now come directly out of that intervention.
Today, many think the improvements from “hyperscaling”—just throwing more data at it—are flattening out. The next real acceleration is going to come from cognitive modeling—building an understanding of what thinking is like into the machine learning algorithm. Yann LeCun recently left Meta to start his own firm precisely because he thinks hyperscaling is a waste of time. This brings us back to what philosophers and linguists like Gary Marcus have been saying.
The real advances will come when we can integrate this into business strategically and learn to govern and regulate it properly to protect privacy and keep humans in the loop. In medicine, they are calling this “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence”. You need to be able to compare different regulatory frameworks, which is what scholars like Kaylyn and Daniel Schiff do in political science. The advancement of AI is not just about making a better widget; it’s about figuring out how it fits into social, political, and economic life. That’s a problem for management professors, history professors, and political theorists, not just computer scientists.
Jay Akridge: Appreciate that perspective on the humanities’ engagement with technology like AI. One critique we hear is that much of humanities research concerns subject matter that hasn’t changed. Shakespeare finished writing 400 years ago, yet scholars continue to publish hundreds of articles. There were 50,000 books on the Civil War in 2001, and that number doubled by 2012. Don’t you run into diminishing returns at some point? Is there still value to society in such research?
Chris Yeomans: I work on Immanuel Kant, and it’s often said there were already 2,000 books on his philosophy at the time of his death. We’re still writing and finding things. I’m going to throw my STEM colleagues under the bus again—they have it even worse because the laws of nature presumably haven’t changed since the Big Bang. Yet physicists, biologists, and chemists still have stuff to do.
I think we’re actually better off because human life is constantly changing. We do a lot of modern history, like Kathryn Brownell’s book on how cable news and the 24/7 news cycle changed politics. Our fields change more than people realize. Sometimes the topics haven’t changed, but they are just incredibly complex.
Regarding the Civil War, we tore this country apart and then stitched it back together. It’s an extraordinary episode, and I’d be surprised if we ever ran out of new things to say about it. Just as we’ll never get to the end of physics, I don’t think we’ll reach the end of Civil War scholarship.
Often, the things we study haven’t changed, but we have. We have different perspectives, so different facets of an event become apparent. My basic view is that human beings are slow learners. That’s why I started studying Hegel; he thinks it takes many generations to figure out really basic things. Each generation builds on the last.
Think about the Civil War through films like Glory (1989) about African American soldiers. Once you’ve assimilated that story—that they were fighting for their own freedom—you’re ready for more complex work like Jonathan Lande’s research on the actual experiences of those soldiers and the difficulty of moving from slavery into army discipline. You need that first level of complexity before you can tackle the next. It’s like any discipline; you take step one, then you add another variable or realize the first step was only an approximation.
I don’t think we get diminishing returns, but we do get increasing specialization. This happens in STEM, too. My math professor friends tell me there are papers they write that only a half-dozen people in the world can review. You get there by adding dimensions of complexity. This leads back to the humanities’ “PR disaster”—it’s not the content, it’s the form. We need to find the people who can explain that next level of complexity to a broader audience without them needing a PhD.
David Hummels: I want to bring the conversation to this political moment where there is a lot of questioning about the independence of universities and academic freedom. Scholarship that questions how society operates is always going to be more controversial. What role do you see humanities research playing in challenging the way we live and govern, and how do you manage that when governments don’t like to be questioned?
Chris Yeomans: It is the topic of the day. One important thing to realize is that the challenge we are involved in at universities is continuous with the everyday challenge that goes on in families, workplaces, and the military. Everywhere there are human beings responsive to rules and norms, there are disagreements about what those rules mean.
I think we can get a false binary where there’s “ordinary life” where everyone agrees, and then “weird academics” who challenge everything. I grew up in a Marine Corps town; Marines were very happy to criticize the Corps, their officers, and the President. Even in a military command structure, there was plenty of dissent. I think of the humanities as just a more self-reflective and articulate version of this constant renegotiation of norms that is the fabric of human life.
We need to maintain that continuity. In our introductory classes, we should take students where they are and use their issues as an entry point into academic discussions. We can say, “This is just what good citizenship is like”. We offer the tools, and they make up their own minds.
Another false picture of contemporary life is the strict binary between left and right. The reality is much more complex. What one person means by “conservative” can be quite different from another. In a political theory class, you can show students that this is an n-dimensional space. Take the French Revolution: they cared about freedom, equality, and solidarity. Much of history since then is a “pick two” scenario. You might find a view on the right and a view on the left that both prize solidarity, but one prizes freedom more and the other prizes equality. You might have more in common with your political opposite than you think.
This doesn’t necessarily help with governments that don’t want to be challenged, but it helps show that universities aren’t outliers. In “Cornerstone for Business” courses, I love showing students that authors who are very pro-capitalist have views they might not accept. Adam Smith thought the joint stock corporation was a huge mistake and should be limited. Joseph Schumpeter thought modern corporations were a kind of socialism, not capitalism. Showing students this complexity helps break down the all-or-nothing thinking.
Jay Akridge: Let’s drill down on that. Conservative critics focus on what they view as left-leaning programs—gender studies, critical race theory, social justice—and some state governments have begun to ban discussions on these issues. How do you characterize that criticism? Is it deserved or overblown?
Chris Yeomans: There is a kernel of truth there regarding the demographic imbalance of political perspectives. That is well-documented and can be an issue in some fields. Higher ed can do a better job of keeping track of that in hiring and promotion.
On the other hand, many people who call themselves liberals or leftists disagree on a wide range of issues. And really, there is nobody more conservative in the world than faculty members. They are against any change at all. If anyone has imbibed Edmund Burke’s motto that “if it’s not necessary to change, it’s necessary not to change,” it’s academic faculty.
Most characterizations of these fields are caricatures. You can certainly find people with flimsy views, but for every one of those, I can show you a dozen papers by people in their own field criticizing them. Take Critical Race Theory; it’s often characterized as the claim that race explains everything in American history. But if you look at the philosophy of race, views are all over the place. My colleague Leonard Harris has an “actuarial theory of race,” where racial descriptions are just characterizations of variations in health outcomes—they are what get explained, they don’t do the explaining. That’s hard to square with the caricature.
Furthermore, faculty—certainly at Purdue, but even at elite universities—are generally not radicalizers of their students. At elite universities, faculty are often being pulled in a radical direction by their students who come in radicalized from their backgrounds. At a place like Purdue, there’s a disconnect between the idea that we are indoctrinating students and our actual experience of pleading with students just to read the syllabus or ask a single question. After 25 years of teaching, I am convinced we do not have the power to brainwash anyone.
David Hummels: I second that. I can’t get anybody to read a syllabus. What is your vision or strategic plan to help the broader public understand the value of humanities research?
Chris Yeomans: As I said, the problem is form, not content. We need more public engagement: thousand-word op-eds, YouTube videos, Substacks, and podcasts. We need research dissemination that doesn’t require reading a 25-page paper.
I’m also interested in multimodal approaches. In the College of Liberal Arts, we have humanities, social sciences, design, art, and performance. We can engage people aesthetically—put on a play, a dance concert, or create visual art about a topic. These are languages that speak to people without requiring specialized vocabularies or statistical competencies.
We also need to speak to the issues of the day that people are already interested in. When I say this, people worry about staying out of politics. Individual faculty don’t have to stay out of politics in their private speech, but many issues of common concern are not fundamentally political.
Take the damage technology has done to our ability to focus and form in-person relationships. I remember when classrooms were so noisy I had to yell to get people to shut up; now, they are often quiet because everyone is on their phone. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation was a bestseller because people are concerned about this. It’s an issue of common concern.
We’re starting a learning community for first-year students called “The Art of Attention”. We’ll combine cornerstone classes with theater and art appreciation. We’ll tell them to “put your phone down and stare at a painting for 20 minutes” or “get on stage and deliver these words in character”. We’re also giving them “bricks”—tabs you tap your phone on to kill social media notifications—and asking them to figure out how to use them best to form better relationships. We’ll have theater performances and scholars in cognitive science talking about immersion. We want to hit it from all angles in a public forum.
Finally, we must maintain a culture of vigorous disagreement. The best thing ever said about economists is that if you get ten of them in a room, you have eleven opinions. I hope the same is true for the humanities. When people see us disagreeing publicly, they realize the caricature of the “indoctrinating academy” is inaccurate.
Jay Akridge: Chris, I really appreciate that focus on public engagement. As the new Dean, leave us with one reason why we should be excited about the future of humanities research.
Chris Yeomans: This will sound paradoxical, but Immanuel Kant had a great line: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”. That is our hope. Human life is not going to get any less complex. Human beings are not going to get any less funny, tragic, foolish, or inspiring. Both the follies and the greatness will continue, giving us new perspectives and new things to study. We’re only scratching the surface.
Jay Akridge: That’s a great reason to end on. Thanks very much for joining us, Chris, and we wish you all the success in your new role.
Chris Yeomans: Thank you, I need it! And thanks for doing the Substack and the podcast; it’s a vital part of this public engagement.
Jay Akridge: That’s all for this Finding Equilibrium podcast. Thanks for joining us today.
Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.
