Stephanie Rocke, ‘The Misery of Measurement’, Eras Edition 15, March 2014 – http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/eras/ Page 1 The Misery of Measurement: Humanities and the Loss of Mystery Stephanie Rocke (Monash University, Australia) Abstract: Drawing for inspiration on Raymond Gaita’s article “To civilise the city” published in Meanjin in 2013, this paper is a work – or a thought – in progress. 1 In particular, it bounces tangentially off Gaita’s ideas to explore the idea that the decline in the prestige of the Humanities in Western societies is a result of an increasing fixation with measurement arising from the almost complete departure of mystery from everyday life. Gaita argues that academics must engage with wider society from a position of “unworldliness” if they are to contribute a “new voice” to public debate and thereby regain their relevance. Reiterating his call for universities to become havens of “difference” from the mainstream, I argue that this is not, however, possible until Western society re-embraces mystery. Measurement As human beings we are fixated on measurement. At the practical level it is a mechanism that orders everyday life; at the primal level it reflects our acknowledgement of finiteness – particularly our own finiteness – and the need not to squander the time and resources at our disposal, but to use them wisely. Drawing on the cultural preferences of the societies within which they operate, universities currently allocate funding based upon how useful any particular discipline is perceived to be to that society because that is the rationale underlying Western societies’ decisions regarding the funding of universities themselves, through government tax distributions and private sector philanthropy. Problems arise when what we are measuring cannot immediately be reduced to numbers but relies instead upon subjective appraisal. In such cases, the fixation with quantitative measurement requires a methodology to be developed and accepted that does reduce the problem to numbers, for then we can feel in control of our resource allocation once again. This we call qualitative measurement. It 1 Raymond Gaita, "To civilise the city," Meanjin 2 (2013), http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/to-civilise-the- city/ (accessed 11 March 2014).