"In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth"

This New York Times article has been getting some attention in the blogosphere, especially (predictably) among academics in the humanities. (This post offers a really fine answer.)

The article is an interesting if predictable read, but there are a few unsupported or just stupid claims. For instance, towards the end, someone points to students not being able to enroll in humanities classes as a sign of their decline. Ummm...couldn't it be seen as exactly the opposite? A sign that they are in demand?

You also gotta love the obligatory-academic-Obama-love (I'd like to copyright this phrase) that finds its way into the article:

To Mr. Delbanco of Columbia, the person who has done the best job of articulating the benefits is President Obama. “He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

(For the record, I think this statement about the President is true and one of my favorite things about him.)

For the record, I side with Anthony T. Kronman. Here's his take on the "crisis":

“[T]he need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

The article ends with a bit of gloom and doom:

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy. That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

I hope this isn't true, but as I work on my 4Cs paper for this year, I do find myself wondering how we can continue to emphasize the importance of the humanities to students who aren't wealthy. Stay tuned for more about that after 4Cs.