Higher education is going to be different when the Covid-19 pandemic ends, and I can see multiple forces at play that will collectively diminish fields like Asian Studies and Asian History.
The first comes from those fields themselves. In the 1990s, in response to globalization, there was a push in Asian Studies/History to be more transnational in focus. Three decades later, this approach is still being promoted through initiatives like the Social Science Research Council’s InterAsia Program, a program that supports transnational scholarship on “connectivities.”
This is a logical and timely scholarly approach, and it has produced insightful scholarship over the past three decades.
This intellectual push for transnational scholarship, however, is now being mirrored by an administrative push that is less benevolent. In particular, some universities have sought to do away with traditional general education courses and to create a curriculum that offers multidisciplinary Humanities, STEM and Social Science subjects so that students can understand the connections between these fields and thereby somehow enhance their “employability.”
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, for instance, has announced that it is establishing a new core curriculum that will require students to take multidisciplinary courses. I have heard that the National University of Singapore is heading in the same direction. Further, this is an approach that new and innovative universities like NYU’s global campuses, Duke Kunshan and Yale-NUS have already adopted.
Meanwhile this is all taking place in an age when many universities are becoming obsessed with rankings.
Will these developments affect the Humanities, and fields like Asian Studies and Asian History? Definitely.
Because in this new world, universities just need a few Humanities scholars who specialize on connectivities, who can co-teach multidisciplary courses that enhance student employability, and who can co-publish articles with colleagues in Social Science and STEM fields to boost the university’s rankings.
As for everyone else. . .
Content Asian Studies 