Why Culture Matters

Admittedly Richard Pells is a professor of history (UT Austin) while I am just a former PhD candidate. So when he says that his fellow members of the academy are ignoring the role of the arts in influencing history, his opinion should matter more than mine. The fault, in his opinion, are social historians who stress social movements and the marginalized.

Starting in the 1970s, it became unfashionable for historians to write or teach about America as a community of shared beliefs and values, defined by its artists and intellectuals. The new scholarship concentrated instead on the divisive repercussions of race, class, gender and ethnicity.

We have learned a lot from these revisionist interpretations of American history. We know more today about the inequities in the nation's past. Yet the fixation with social history has led to a severe case of tunnel vision among American historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with the exploited and victimized, along with an oppressive orthodoxy about what kinds of courses should be taught and who should be hired at universities.

As a result, Pells, argues, "Universities are turning out students who can tell you about midwives, sharecroppers and blue-collar workers but not about architects, poets or symphony conductors."

Pells is absolutely right that high culture matters. And I LOVED using visual art, music, literature, and film as tools for understanding the world I was studying. My faculty advisor, Richard Stites, has been a master at this. However, I don't see it as either-or. Nor do I think that's what it happening in the university today. Not in the courses I took. Both the midwife and the poet brought respected voices to the table. Maybe I was naive - maybe I was missing a whole bunch. But I certainly hope not.