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The 2024 college entrance examination has just passed, and the "debate between liberal arts and science" has once again become a hot topic. Liberal arts students in colleges and universities seem to be experiencing some kind of general anxiety: the curriculum is unprofessional, the teaching content is out of date, and the employment prospects are unclear. Even many liberal arts students have to regard "test score guarantee", "graduate entrance examination" and "civil service examination" as their way out since entering college. What else can liberal arts students do today? Is liberal arts really just a "useless" subject?

In this graduation season, Zhu Guohua, Dean of the School of International Chinese Language and Culture at East China Normal University, chose "What is the role of liberal arts" as the theme of his speech at the school's graduation ceremony. He started with a statement by Zhang Xuefeng that was very popular at the time, "Liberal arts are all service industries," and discussed with the graduating students in the audience about the "meaning of liberal arts" in today's performance-oriented environment.

In mid-July, we met Zhu Guohua in a teahouse in Shanghai. He was admitted to the Chinese Department of East China Normal University in 1982, and later obtained a doctorate in literature and art from the Chinese Department of Nanjing University. He was the director of the Chinese Department of East China Normal University. After this graduation speech was spread online, it received a lot of discussion and also caused some controversy. Zhu Guohua believes that he has no intention of covering up the current reality of "difficult employment" for liberal arts students. But in the current social environment, liberal arts can be used as a weapon to resist performanceism and allow people to "extricate themselves from their accustomed daily lives and look at society, history and themselves from a different perspective."

We discussed with Zhu Guohua his understanding of the "liberal arts crisis". In fact, the "liberal arts crisis" in reality is not a new topic. In the past 100 years, the scale of liberal arts enrollment has been fluctuating in line with the economic cycle. But on the other hand, as a knowledge system and a way to understand society and oneself, the critical power demonstrated by "liberal arts" should never be absent.

Zhu Guohua believes that "respecting the humanities is respecting ourselves."

The following is a conversation between People and Zhu Guohua:

Text｜Wang Yuan

Editor:Chu Ming

Treating liberal arts as a last resort

Character: As a professor of liberal arts, why did you choose "What is the liberal arts" as the theme of your speech at this year's college graduation ceremony?

Zhu Guohua:I have actually been thinking about this question for a long time, but one thing gave me the opportunity to give this speech. In April this year, there was a news report that a young teacher committed suicide due to excessive pressure. He did not pass the school's first term assessment and faced tremendous pressure under the "promotion or leave" rule. This incident reflects that the society is now filled with an atmosphere of performance-oriented supremacy, and I am very dissatisfied with this phenomenon. The original intention of writing this speech was to say no to performance-orientedism.

Today, performanceism is prevalent, and it has actually reached a very depressing level. Our social evaluation system seems to focus on performance and data. With performanceism everywhere, every individual has "nowhere to escape from between heaven and earth", and it is difficult for anyone not to bear the pressure. At most, they will just lie down and say, "I don't want to play with you anymore."

So when I talk about “what is the role of liberal arts” in this context, I am actually treating liberal arts as a last resort, “knowing it is impossible but doing it anyway.” When I call on everyone to pay attention to liberal arts, I am not talking about discipline construction at the practical level, but focusing more on its ultimate significance.

Character: Can the liberal arts be a way to resist performanceism? What are its core values?

Zhu Guohua:I don’t think that liberal arts can directly resist the alienation of people by performanceism, but it can help us see our own situation. Liberal arts is first and foremost a knowledge system, but it is related to people and society. Its focus is on “people”, our society, life, history, tradition, life experience and other aspects. Some problems that science and technology cannot solve, or are not willing to solve, are being paid attention to and tried to be solved by humanities and social sciences.

The core of academic training in liberal arts is to cultivate people's critical thinking. To put it simply, critical thinking cultivates our ability to analyze complex texts, data or social facts, allowing us to question those concepts that we take for granted, and even include ourselves in the questioned objects, that is, it encourages self-reflection. It requires us to think from multiple perspectives, especially to pay attention to the ethical dimension of things. If you have a certain humanistic perspective, you will see problems with some things.

The examples I gave in my speech were all examples of performanceism. In the first example I mentioned, the former vice president of a large company said, "When an employee broke up and asked to resign, I approved it immediately. Why should I consider the employee's family?" This makes us feel uncomfortable. An enterprise encourages wolfishness and emphasizes performance as king and profit as the leader. This is their corporate culture. If you don't like it, you just don't join their company. Can we think like this? In the subsequent apology statement, the former executive actually emphasized that his original intention was good, but his attitude was a bit anxious and his method was not quite right. She did not realize that any corporate culture must follow the principle of people-oriented. When she emphasized that "our relationship is just an employment relationship", in other words, when she regarded each living person as an abstract labor force, the values ​​she held in her heart were actually not far from the bourgeois values ​​of the 19th century during the primitive accumulation of capitalism. These concepts have long been deeply criticized by philosophers such as Marx.

The prevalence of performanceism should be synchronized with the rise of capitalism, which can be said to be one of the many aspects of modernity. The many drawbacks of modernity have also spawned its opponents, which we sometimes call cultural modernity or aesthetic modernity. It criticizes the abuse of reason, the oppression of people, and pays attention to the various social problems brought about by industrialization, among which the most prominent social problem is the objectification of people.

The criticism of performanceism is only one side of the humanities. I just use this example to illustrate the practical use of the humanities. In a sense, the humanities can allow us to step out of our daily lives and look at society, history and ourselves from a different perspective. It is on this basis that the humanities gain their legitimacy and legality. In other words, respecting the humanities is respecting ourselves.

Character: What impact does performanceism have on our lives today?

Zhu Guohua:The development of science and technology has brought about material abundance, but it often cannot solve the problems of the human soul. Today, our sense of happiness seems to be declining instead of rising, and our spiritual anxiety has greatly increased. Many people are not anxious about food and clothing now, but because of many other problems, such as having to own famous bags and watches, driving luxury cars and living in luxury houses, and their children cannot lose at the starting line in elementary school. It seems that every industry in our country has fallen into a state of involution. People are competing in every stage of their lives. Every social class seems to be unwilling to relax. Everyone, well, it’s a bit exaggerated to say this, many, many people, are complaining. Chinese traditional culture emphasizes being free and optimistic, but many of us contemporary people feel that we are suffering and living a very tiring life.

Character: As you said, many people are facing a mental crisis and are so nervous. Why do you think this is happening?

Zhu Guohua:This is a very big question, and I don't have the ability to answer it. Every era may have its own unique spiritual crisis, and each has its own specific social conditions. I believe that everyone will have different answers from different perspectives. I will still talk about it from the perspective of the humanities.

In our era, liberal arts and even literature and art are being marginalized worldwide. I think that both humanities knowledge and literature and art encourage diversified interpretation. Anna, as described by Tolstoy, did cheat. From the perspective of traditional morality, her suffering was her own fault. But Tolstoy aroused our sympathy for her. What's going on? This shows that good literature will tell us about the complexity of life, and sometimes it is difficult for us to make simple binary choices of black and white. But in today's network society, everyone can speak up online. People are impatient to listen to your slow and measured reasoning and like to express their opinions directly. Of course, the clearer the opinions, the better. So now is the era of short videos. Rigorous arguments are annoying, even pedantic and ridiculous. In this way, the humanities can't find any important position in the online world. Basically, the promotion of humanities papers is still mainly self-produced and self-sold by humanities scholars for their own entertainment, and the traffic cannot be increased. In other words, the diversified understanding and in-depth understanding of society and individuals advocated by humanities or literature and art are not in line with the fast pace of the times.

However, whether it is the various self-media or the topic discussions in various WeChat groups, whether it is motivated by the pursuit of traffic or for the stimulation or intensity of expression, they tend to simplify complex issues, thereby exaggerating the differences in opinions and constantly deepening and reinforcing the gap between each other's existing concepts and even emotions. We can't listen to other people's voices. If we can accept multiple different interpretations of the same fact and admit that other people's arguments are also reasonable, we will not be so paranoid and can also get rid of some hostility.

I want to make it clear that we cannot say that the marginalization of the humanities has led to today's spiritual crisis, but there is no doubt that if we had more respect and recognition for the humanities, perhaps our social atmosphere today would be a little more peaceful.

Character: The anxiety I feel right now, in addition to the pursuit of material things, is also an anxiety about certainty. The uncertainty of both the micro-environment and the macro-environment is so great that as an individual, I don’t know how to avoid being left behind, or how else to pursue the anchor of life, except for "involution"?

Zhu Guohua:I agree with this statement, but we have no way to deal with this matter. How do we solve the uncertainty in life? There is no way. Don't say we have no way, Trump has no way either. If a bullet is fired at him, can he control it? Among Chinese literati, why is Su Dongpo so popular? He just "follows fate" and doesn't worry about the future. Even if he encountered some bad luck and was demoted to Hainan, he still tried every means to live a fulfilling life. Of course, I am talking about spiritual life. He still did not give up his writing, playing chess, poetry and painting, and also brought Hainan's education cause to fly.

If uncertainty is something we cannot change, then we can only adapt to it. Our Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism all talk about self-cultivation of the mind, and I think many aspects are still useful to people today. If you learn the essence of it, you can keep your mind from wandering, and the essence will remain unchanged. When something happens, you can deal with it. It is meaningless to worry and be anxious in advance. By the way, my graduation speech last year, "The Benevolent Do Not Worry", was specifically about how to seek certainty in an uncertain era.

Discussions about the "crisis of liberal arts" began a hundred years ago.

Character: The "liberal arts crisis" is a topic that everyone is concerned about now. Some time ago, Zhang Xuefeng said that "liberal arts are the service industry", which inspired many people to discuss the situation of liberal arts. You also mentioned this in your speech.

Zhu Guohua:I want to make a positive response here. Because many people on the Internet think that Zhang Xuefeng is right and that I am just talking nonsense when I emphasize the value of liberal arts. I think there are two points to clarify here. First, liberal arts is not an industry, it is a knowledge system. Some content of liberal arts can be transformed into professional skills, but liberal arts cannot be equal to vocational training. It has its own independence. Second, Zhang Xuefeng's statement has an unhealthy humiliation in it and lacks respect for the service industry. I think all professions are equal, but the division of labor is different. Of course, unfortunately, such a sense of equality is often ignored in our society.

Character: Zhang Xuefeng's statement was very rude, but the fact that his words sparked so much discussion shows that they touched the pain points of many people. Many liberal arts college students do feel some disadvantages in employment, or feel that what they learned in school does not match the needs of the job market.

Zhu Guohua:There is a tendency nowadays to believe that university education must be tied to employment. However, the scope of responsibility of university education should mainly be to provide students with a learning environment and conditions for professional knowledge. Providing personnel training for social positions is a social matter, not the obligation of universities. However, popular opinion sometimes confuses the two. Now when we evaluate universities, employment rate is a very important aspect. In fact, this is turning the logic of business into the logic of education, which is problematic.

Generally speaking, there are two types of higher education. One is close to professional training. Once you learn this skill, you can directly use it. The other is actually training you as a person, cultivating your overall quality. For example, there are many normal school students in East China Normal University who go to middle schools to teach after graduation. When I was the director of the Chinese Department, I went to middle schools to conduct research to understand how our students performed. A Chinese teacher told me bluntly that his skills were not good, his blackboard writing was crooked, and the PPTs he made for lectures were not sophisticated. I was a little frustrated after hearing this. But he went on to say that we still prefer to recruit students from East China Normal University because technical things can be trained, but students from East China Normal University have higher basic qualities, which is the decisive thing. You have cultivated relatively high literacy and ability through academic training, and then you can transfer this ability to other fields.

If we only talk about the employment of fresh graduates, compared with science and engineering, liberal arts is definitely at a disadvantage. I don't want to deny this fact. Because its ability to "cash in" is relatively weak, there needs to be a transformation. This is also related to the fact that the current enrollment scale of liberal arts majors is too large. Because it is relatively easy to run liberal arts in universities, because there is less reliance on research funds, experimental equipment and other expensive things, and it can be run by recruiting a few liberal arts professors, but many majors are not necessary. In fact, the same is true for science and engineering. Every year, many majors appear on the list of being eliminated, but they may be better than liberal arts. This is a common situation worldwide. The proportion of people studying liberal arts in Europe seems to be higher than that in China. I wonder if it is more difficult for European liberal arts students to find jobs than Chinese students.

Character: Not only in China, but also around the world, we are facing a certain degree of "liberal arts crisis". How do you understand this situation?

Zhu Guohua:From the Renaissance to the 20th century, humanities have always been a dominant subject in universities. In the 1930s, half of the students in British universities studied in liberal arts departments; in Oxford and Cambridge, this proportion was as high as 80% and 70% respectively. Natural science courses did not appear on the Cambridge curriculum until 1850. Even now, in the long-established universities in Europe and the United States, liberal arts colleges still occupy the best locations in the school. The two educational thinkers who laid the foundation for the concept of modern universities, Humboldt of Prussia and Newman of Britain, both advocated the non-utilitarian or pure nature of education. They both believed that the essence of education lies in cultivating perfect individuals, and knowledge itself is the purpose. In fact, the number of people who received university education at that time was relatively limited, and they were all social elites. After graduation, these people did not have to worry about their livelihoods.

However, since the second half of the 20th century, universities have been established more and more, and have begun to become popular. In this way, the school-running model will certainly be more easily shaped by utilitarianism, that is, it needs to adapt to the expectations of industrialized society. The scale of humanities colleges in universities has experienced several fluctuations. Some Western scholars have done statistics. In terms of enrollment, in 1955, the proportion of students majoring in humanities in comprehensive universities was about 17%. It dropped to 8% from the 1970s to 1985. After that, this number rose again, reaching a peak of about 10% in the mid-1990s, and then declined again. By the 2008 economic crisis, it had dropped to 6%.

Last year, an influential article, "The End of the English Major," pointed out that in the past decade, the overall enrollment rate of humanities majors in the United States has dropped by 17%. Although the average proportion of humanities students in the United States has hovered around 15% for decades. Basically, there is such a rule: when the economy is booming, the enrollment scale of liberal arts is expanded, and when the economy is bad, the liberal arts are the first to suffer. A 2022 survey found that only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from 20% in 2012 and nearly 30% in the 1970s. This may be related to the general environment of our global economic winter.

I think we should acknowledge this rule and respect the market. If a large number of liberal arts students cannot find jobs, it means that too many liberal arts students are recruited, so we might as well reduce the number of liberal arts students. But I am still optimistic that after the economy recovers, the demand for liberal arts students will increase again. It will rise again. On the one hand, the practical skills cultivated by liberal arts students still constitute a clear need in government departments, companies and other fields, including education, publishing, media, advertising, secretarial industries (which are actually too numerous to mention); on the other hand, as a knowledge system oriented to people themselves, it is indispensable in any modern country.

Character: In what aspects does the "liberal arts crisis" we are facing today manifest itself?

Zhu Guohua:Around the world, the number of students enrolled in liberal arts is shrinking, and there will be a reduction in teaching positions and research funding in the humanities. At present, this situation is not very obvious in China. The liberal arts crisis in China is clearly manifested in the increasingly rampant "liberal arts are useless" theory. The education that has lasted for more than 2,000 years in China is actually liberal arts education, and there is no place for science and engineering, but in the past century, the situation has completely reversed, and it has become a systematic discrimination against liberal arts in the whole society. People are indifferent to liberal arts.

I once taught at the Faculty of Arts of a famous science and engineering university, where I taught more than a dozen different courses by myself, including modern literary history, ancient literary history, foreign literary history, ancient Chinese, and even Western cultural history. I had no systematic knowledge training in many fields. At that time, the school did not provide me with the opportunity to study as an undergraduate, so I could only learn by myself. After reading the materials here, I went to teach the students there. Now I think about it and feel really sorry for the students at that time. Once when I was in a university Chinese class, I asked how many people liked literature. In a classroom with more than 100 people, only three people raised their hands. I had to change the way I asked and asked how many people did not like literature. One third of the people raised their hands. Generally speaking, many science and engineering students, even professors, do not have a very high level of humanistic literacy. The more so, the less I think humanistic literacy is an internal need.

Secondly, universities are becoming more and more commercialized, and they will consider how to turn students into a workforce that meets the needs of the times. In the past, universities were elite education, focusing on cultivating leaders for society, so their educational content and methods did not require them to be fully connected to various professional positions. Of course, the humanities play a decisive role here. But now universities are popular, and the entire modern society is organized by the economy, so employment issues have become a decisive indicator. Therefore, humanities that have no direct interest in society are understood as "dragon-slaying skills" and are severely marginalized.

Third, in fact, within the humanities, there have been various "end" theories for many years, such as the end of philosophy, the end of literature, and the end of art. In fact, the crisis of the humanities at this level only means that a certain traditional theoretical system has reached the moment of transformation. But I think the most serious problem is that China's humanities - I mean the humanities in the modern sense - have never been fully developed. But this point is a bit off the topic we are discussing now, so I don't want to expand on it.

Character: If an ordinary high school student is faced with the choice of a major, what advice would you give him/her?

Zhu Guohua:My biggest advice is to know yourself, know who you are, what you like and what you can do, and then choose your major based on these aspects. Of course, your life design may not be perfect in one step, and you need to constantly correct mistakes. Even if you choose a major that you later find you don’t like, there is still room for adjustment, such as you can ask to change your department. You can also use the opportunity of postgraduate entrance examination to choose your true love. I am very lucky. I know that I like literature and have some ability to study literature. I also feel very happy to be a literature teacher in university. I basically didn’t take too many detours. Some of my middle school classmates are good at both liberal arts and science, but they prefer liberal arts. They were forced by their parents to study science. As a result, none of these classmates actually conducted academic research in science and engineering. Some became leaders or started businesses, and some experienced some setbacks. I often think that if they had chosen liberal arts, some of them might have a more fulfilling life.

As for your similar abilities and interests in arts and science, I suggest you study science because it is easier to find a job. I don't want to hide this fact. I also wonder if it is more difficult to switch back to science after studying arts. But if you really like arts, I still suggest you don't force yourself to choose science. The process of studying in college is often a painful and happy process. If you don't like science, you will only feel pain and no happiness. I think you should be nicer to yourself. Life is short.

Teaching liberal arts students not to be bound by ready-made answers is a difficult task.

Character: You come into contact with new undergraduate students every year. Do you think there are any significant differences between today's students and when you were in college?

Zhu Guohua:They have a different mental outlook than I did when I was in college. When I was in college, I felt liberated, free, and free. Sometimes I even skipped classes and went to the library to read what I liked. I was free to read, discuss, and write, and the teachers didn't really care.

But I think today's children have become "utilitarian" very early. They have to consider their GPA, have a single interest, and the top priority is to get into graduate school. I think they are not very adventurous, they are too rule-abiding and too obedient. They have come all the way from the exam-oriented education, and the first thing we have to do is to "brainwash" them, that is, to erase the mindset of high school learning, give up the rote learning mode, teach them not to be bound by ready-made answers, and encourage them to doubt and think critically. This sounds easy, isn't doubt and criticism simple? But meaningful doubt and criticism require sufficient reasons. So this is actually a very arduous task.

Our current guarantee for admission to graduate school is mainly based on GPA, which is the GPA of all courses. If only one or two courses are particularly good, and the other courses are not so good, then the final GPA will not go up. The logic here is actually the same as that of the college entrance examination, that is, the so-called partiality is not allowed. But in our era, there are not so many opportunities for great people who are good at everything like encyclopedias. People who have good grades in every subject may not necessarily have better scientific research performance than those who are so-called partial. I think partiality to a certain extent is important. After all, we live in an era where the division of labor in society is becoming more and more detailed. But our environment today is not conducive to personalized training. It is easy to cultivate high-level mediocrity, that is, people who do everything very carefully and meticulously but have no creativity and imagination. Of course, the GPA system mainly considers the principle of fairness and justice, so this system is also difficult to change, because if it is not evaluated by GPA, power rent-seeking will come into play.

We have a "preliminary tutor" system for undergraduates at East China Normal University. In a sense, undergraduates enjoy the treatment of graduate students. We teachers lead a group of undergraduates to have a small-scale reading discussion. I also serve as a "preliminary guide" from time to time, so that I can have a close contact with them. I found that they don't like to discuss. Every time a classmate gives a lecture, other students are mostly indifferent and have no reaction, which makes me feel very frustrated. I think an important reason is that they are very busy, with a lot of classes, and many of them are public classes, not professional classes, so that they have no time to read and think in class. I don't know whether the training method in middle school has a huge destructive impact on their curiosity, unfamiliarity and imagination.

Character: What about the master's and doctoral stages? When they start to enter the academic research stage, what common confusions do they have?

Zhu Guohua:In fact, if you have any confusion about master's and doctoral students, you should ask them. I didn't study for a master's degree myself. I was already quite old when I studied for a doctorate. I must have had some worries at that time, but I can't remember them at all now. If I observe from the perspective of a supervisor, I think the pressure on master's students is relatively less, while doctoral students are more anxious. The requirements for master's thesis are relatively not very high. After all, a master's degree is a transitional degree. It is not difficult for master's students to find jobs here, except for the idea of ​​taking the civil service exam.

As for the doctoral stage, basically many of these people want to teach in universities. However, there are too many doctors, and universities can only offer very few positions, and the requirements are very high. This inevitably leads to the problem of internal circulation. Many doctoral students worry about publishing papers in CSSCI journals. Many schools have specific publication requirements, and they will not issue degree certificates if they cannot meet them. Even if there are no requirements when studying in college, many universities have more stringent entry barriers for paper publication when recruiting young teachers. However, it is not easy to publish papers in CSSCI journals. When doctoral students graduate, they are usually around 30 years old. At this time, they will also face emotional problems and the problem of starting a family. If they find a teaching position in a big city in the future, there will be huge financial pressure and they will need to consider the issue of taking out a loan to buy a house. These very realistic problems will cause hidden or obvious interference to the healthy development of academic studies.

Some doctoral students also face the problem that their academic ability cannot keep up with the academic requirements of their dissertations. Many doctoral students are considered top students in terms of academic performance. However, those who are good at taking exams may not be good at doing research. Exams can test knowledge questions that have approximate answers, but academic research requires some originality. You need to give your answer where there is no answer, or give a better answer when there is an answer. Many doctoral students cannot face such challenges. In fact, many people who are not suitable for conducting difficult academic research have flooded into Chinese universities.

Why do these people with average academic savvy still work so hard to do research? Maybe they went to the wrong place, or maybe China's education system is more able to embody the principle of fairness than other departments, that is, it is less dependent on social capital or economic and political capital than other fields, that is, less dependent on connections, money and power. In any case, the level of your research is still relatively transparent. In this way, many people think that this is an opportunity to achieve cross-class promotion, and will try every means to squeeze into colleges and universities, regardless of how much higher their academic research talents are than others.

Character: With the current subdivision of university disciplines, will young humanities scholars have increasingly limited horizons after entering the research field? Is this different from our traditional impression of the training of generalist humanities scholars?

Zhu Guohua: Since the reform and opening up, we have rebuilt the degree system. For example, in the Chinese language discipline, which I am more familiar with, we have divided it into many secondary disciplines to train master's and doctoral students. I think the classification between disciplines is sometimes difficult to understand. For example, linguistics and literature are combined into a first-level discipline such as "Chinese Language and Literature", which is very awkward. Of course, literature is a language art, but there is only a small overlap between literary research and language research, and their research methods are very different. We who do literary research sometimes don't understand linguistics or philology papers. But on the other hand, the secondary disciplines such as ancient literature, modern literature, literary theory and foreign literature or comparative literature have each established a teaching and research department, independently organized thesis defenses, and held meetings within the secondary disciplines. The differences between them are increasingly emphasized, and the academic barriers are becoming more and more strict, which has led to a smaller and smaller research pattern. The teaching and research department system and the degree system should be the unconscious invisible pushers of this trend. As disciplines become more and more subdivided and divided, academic research becomes more and more trivial and boring, and literary historical materials become more and more developed - because these historical facts seem to be more certain and reliable than literary judgments, but I guess these literary historical materials, in the eyes of experts in the field of history, are questionable as to whether they have important historical value. In my opinion, good academic research will never be about specific issues, but should be aimed at universality.

One of my more radical proposals is to abolish secondary disciplines. The concept of secondary disciplines is not heard of anywhere in the world, and in fact, there is no such thing in universities in the Republic of China. Of course, my idea is unlikely to be supported, because secondary disciplines have existed for decades after all. As for the cultivation of generalists, I feel that the role of the education system is limited, and the key lies in the individual. For example, when a person does academic research and reaches the extreme, he must break through his own field of expertise, which will inevitably lead to the formation of interdisciplinary tendencies. There are many things that the humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences can learn from each other. Of course, there will always be some disciplinary boundaries in colleges and universities, but for individuals, how to use the resources of the school and cross these boundaries in research is a matter for scholars to exercise their subjective initiative.

How do liberal arts serve?

Character: The theme of "What is the role of liberal arts" ultimately comes back to "role". At the end of your speech, you also called on students to "join the battle". So what should liberal arts students do nowadays?

Zhu Guohua:I gave this speech to the graduating students, but I think there are still very few people who can really listen to it. The so-called "fighting" means to combine the theories you have learned with reality. Through our research, through our reading, through the certain understandings we have reached, we try to put them into reality as much as possible. Discourse activities themselves are a kind of practice. Of course, sometimes it is inevitable that the practice of discourse will conflict with society. At this time, you have to be brave. This is what I call a fighting consciousness. For example, the recent report on the tanker truck is a great thing done by journalists. Whether it is journalists or lawyers, if there are no such people, people will be at ease with those improper and illegal things, thinking that things should be like this. Here, people in the humanities show the power of criticism.

I wrote an article in 2020 titled "Loyalty to the Truth". I said that if you are forced to lie by external pressure, even if you choose to remain silent, this is also a kind of courage. I am not asking them to be selfless fighters and sacrifice themselves. We should allow everyone the right not to be a hero. But between being a hero and being a cynic, there is still a lot of room for self-selection. In any case, we must not only live, but also live with dignity.

Character: For you personally, what is the most important thing you have gained from conducting literary research?

Zhu Guohua:In a word, I gain new understanding. Whether it is the study of literary works, literary events or literary theory, I strive to understand such facts related to literature as they are. I generally carry out this intellectual adventure under the control of curiosity, so writing is a process that is both dangerous, painful, exciting and pleasurable for me. Literary works can certainly be understood as mirrors and lamps of life, but they can also be understood as some kind of buoys, slices, crystals and fragments of dreams. Through these works, we can appreciate the truth in history or the ocean of people's hearts. The most exciting moment when reading or thinking is the joy of Tao Yuanming's so-called "every time I understand something, I forget to eat happily", that is, "there are such people and things", "this work can be interpreted in this way", "I finally found the best way to explain it" and so on. Through literature, I understand the various possibilities of life and society more and more deeply and widely. Such understanding can be directly communicated with students, relatives and friends and even strangers, and deepen the connection between us. In this process, I feel that my self-worth has been realized and I feel happy.

Character: From the perspective of social development and industry changes, the rapid development of industries such as real estate, the Internet, and finance over the past 20 years has given liberal arts graduates the opportunity to participate in the dividends of the times. However, emerging and rapidly developing industries, such as artificial intelligence, seem to be more technical, and some "liberal arts positions" such as translation may even be replaced first. Do you think that under such a trend, liberal arts students still have the opportunity to directly participate in the productivity transformation of the times?

Zhu Guohua:The development of science and technology and its widespread application will lead to some changes in the existing social order, social structure and social outlook, and this change often affects the whole body. For example, with the emergence of driverless technology, the taxi industry may undergo systemic changes. Many drivers will lose their jobs. How should they solve this problem? What about their families? This systemic change still requires the attention of humanities and social sciences. Whether it is the Internet, AI, or biomedicine, in what sense is the application of these technologies to society reasonable? In what sense, for example, some gene editing operations are anti-human? How can certain technical means be widely promoted or locally restricted to help us move towards a more harmonious society? How can we conduct effective overall management? In these aspects, the humanities can still play its advantages.

One of my early Chinese major students now teaches at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. She once took on a government project to design housing allocation for the homeless. Her colleagues were responsible for providing technical means, while she was responsible for providing directional opinions on "what is a fair and reasonable algorithm." In fact, the more advanced AI technology is, the stronger society's desire for humanities will be.

In the AI ​​era, no matter what major you study, if a person lacks imagination and originality, he or she may be more replaceable in the future. This will of course bring about profound social changes. It is difficult to predict and avoid where such changes will go. We cannot adopt an ostrich-like attitude towards the prospects of technological change. I think we should still face it head-on. Imitating Xunzi's words "control the destiny and use it", our attitude towards science should be "control technology and use it". Let me give you an example. Not long ago, our School of Design at East China Normal University held a graduation exhibition, and they made full use of AI technology to complete many amazing graduation designs. AI will of course generate some content, but we need to feed it after all, that is, to come up with ideas and let AI realize them. Therefore, creative things are still based on people.

AI cannot replace everything. Even for translation, some relatively standardized and public texts, that is, highly formalized texts, translation software is already very good. But the profession of translation cannot be completely eliminated, because it involves more complex situations, or more alternative expressions, emotional language or puns, that is, some situations where it is impossible to directly find equivalent words in cross-context states, and translation software may not be able to work in all of them.

As a form of knowledge, liberal arts is an ally of science and technology; as a discipline that focuses on people, society, and values, it exists on the other side of science and technology. It will provide humane advice and suggestions for the changes caused by productivity. It will never disappear. If it disappears, it will mean the decline of the world.