Impactful Humanities Studies

Humanities fill the silence of unspoken progress, measuring the complexity of universal human issues in Indonesia.

Jakarta (ANTARA) - A while ago, a final-year student came to submit the final draft of her thesis. She mentioned that she did not want to graduate yet, but her scholarship would end this semester, and her parents could not afford the tuition fees (Uang Kuliah Tunggal). She reasoned that if she graduated quickly, what would she do after completing her studies?

Her voice was calm, but it created waves that broke through the academic coral reef I have been immersed in for nearly four decades. Where do graduates of history or humanities go after graduation?

The Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology (Kemdiktisaintek) has recently launched the “Impactful Campus” Programme. This is a new paradigm to be implemented by the academic community, including lecturers and graduates, that they must make real contributions to national issues.

The government currently sets eight national development priorities. These priorities include food and energy security, improving the quality of human resources (HR), strengthening the economy and villages, poverty alleviation, regionally based infrastructure development, and strengthening ideology and politics.

The core of this plan is how campuses focus on supporting the revival of science and technology-based industries. Therefore, all study programmes must direct their research and innovations based on these eight priorities, to produce outcomes that are directly felt by society.

Study programmes that are not directly relevant to the revival of science and technology-based industries will be evaluated and may be closed. One that may be closed is History, where I teach.

The implementation of the “Impactful Campus” paradigm should indeed be seen as a good intention and even a bold determination. However, for hundreds of history and humanities study programmes with tens of thousands of students and alumni, there is one question that needs to be openly raised in the entire “Impactful Campus” narrative.

Who defines what “impact” is? Is that definition broad enough to accommodate all “ways of knowledge working” in our various universities?

Blind Spot of Impactful Campus

The closure of study programmes assumed to be irrelevant to the revival of science and technology-based industries clearly has a blind spot. One of them is viewing how socio-humanities sciences work.

At least, there are three impacts produced from the knowledge space in Indonesian higher education. First, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programmes, and medicine, are “product impact” majors. Lecturers and graduates are expected to produce something that can be “held”, “sold”, or “patented”, such as vaccines, applications, machines, and so on.

Second, fields of study like social sciences, law, and economics that produce policy impacts. Sociologists, legal experts, and economists produce recommendations for regulations, development programme analyses, and the like to change how decisions are made and implemented.

Third, humanities, philosophy, and anthropology expertise that work in “understanding impact”. Historians, artists, philosophers, cultural experts, linguists, and others work by changing how society views itself and navigates its complexities. They contribute to interpreting conflicts in society, mapping culture as a national asset, or diagnosing development inequalities in society.

From these three ways knowledge works to impact society, humanities sciences from the start seem not to be included in the government’s calculations. This is certainly regrettable, because the state seems to treat the dictum “something that is not easily measured tends to be considered non-existent”.

Questions of Relevance

Questions about the relevance of humanities studies to the job market, their contribution to economic growth, or their ability to produce measurable innovations are not wrong. However, in addition to trying to convince the state of the considered correct answers, various critical and substantial questions should also be raised, especially for policy audiences and academics in these departments.

If we are honest about the relevance of these humanities studies, then the honest question is how our current industry and technology world solves human problems? Do application vendors, technology entrepreneurs, and industry CEOs know what problems their consumers face?

So, the question is no longer the relevance of humanities studies to industry needs. More substantial and subtle is to test whether advanced technology is relevant to human needs: justice, poverty, and peace.

Therefore, rather than the state through campus accreditation forms questioning the economic contribution of history, literature, teacher graduates, and so on. Accreditation forms always ask for affirmation of alumni value measures by how much their salary is in the first six months. It would be better if the contribution is seen in how much capacity alumni have to solve problems that take ten years to be solved by provincial officials?

In that condition, the innovation ecosystem on campus is important to accommodate humanities, but not to question its ability to survive in the circle of science and technology knowledge. On the contrary, in the ecosystem built on campus, should there not be those trained to ask about fair innovation technology, oriented to “who” not “what”, and ensuring no vulnerable victims; women and children?

Thus, the “Impactful Campus” concept provides space for the way humanities knowledge works, whose impact is not directly recorded in measurable sheets of one government policy cycle. Instead, humanities graduates will contribute