Oh, the Humanities

(WSJ illustration by Loris Lara)

American poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch advises:

Stop Worrying About the ‘Death’ of the Humanities.

These worries apparently "stem" from the decline in the number of humanities majors and the concomitant rise in enrollment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

Mr. Kirsch's argument is that the university is the wrong place to gauge the health of, and interest in, the humanities.

The real action takes place outside the classroom, in theaters, concert halls, art galleries and libraries, or simply in the living rooms where people read and think. Being a successful literature or history or art major requires different skills than the ones needed to make these things a part of one’s actual inner life. Students are judged by what they can readily articulate, but in life, it is what we don’t know how to express that draws us to read, think, listen to music or look at art.

When the university comes to be seen as the sole custodian of the humanities, both the humanities and the university suffer. Most scholarship in the humanities is directed solely to other scholars and has little or no effect on the culture at large...

Certainly there is a hunger in the U.S. for engagement with ideas and culture that isn’t mediated by universities. The Center for Fiction recently opened a beautiful new headquarters in Brooklyn, where it houses readings, workshops and a massive library; the Poetry Foundation does the same for verse in its home in Chicago. The NEA’s Big Read program, which encourages cities and communities to read and discuss a chosen book, has attracted almost five million people to its events since its launch in 2005. And the past decade has seen the emergence of several important intellectual journals, from Jacobin on the left to American Affairs on the right, which keep alive the tradition of the independent “little magazine.”

But the habit of seeing universities as the main or even sole custodians of humanistic culture isn’t just inaccurate; it is bad for universities themselves. When we consider the university the only place where society can explicitly formulate its visions of truth, beauty and justice, it’s no wonder that campuses become fierce ideological battlegrounds—for students, faculty and outside observers alike.

The History and Political Thought reading
list hasn't changed much (click to enlarge)

When humanities courses are not "ideological battlegrounds", they can make for a rewarding educational experience.

Your humble blogger, a social sciences major, regards his freshman acceptance into a coordinated humanities program to be the best decision he made in college. Philosophy, Art, History, and Literature had parallel curricula, all starting with the ancient Greeks and ending in the 19th century (e.g, Nietzsche, Impressionism, Metternich--Literature was the exception because the professor insisted on covering Waiting for Godot).

Being in a rush to graduate in less than four years, I exited the program in favor of courses that imparted more useful knowledge.

Only later did I come to understand that what is useful is not necessarily important.