I found this report at an estate sale a while ago. It was published seventy years ago by the University of Missouri (where I may or may not work, who’s to say). It’s a report from a three-year series of conferences on humanities teaching funded by the university and by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
In the back, there’s an appendix written by Professor Charles Hudson of the University of Missouri English Department. It’s about a new course in “general humanities” that he’d been developing with a colleague. They’d spent a year traveling the country, studying humanities programs at other universities. In the appendix, he lays out his rationale for the course.
The above is part of his rationale for teaching in the “humanistic disciplines.” It is a very mid-1950s statement, from the default male pronoun to the talk of values and a “philosophy of life.” As the passage itself says of this last phrase, though, its triteness should not blind us to its importance. Further, this importance, it insists, must be understood as being about, in his words, not a ready-made system of values but rather free and enlightened choice among values.
Today there were two developments in the long, ongoing war on the humanities, and they made me think of that war in the light of this report. The first development was Chris Rufo, Mark Bauerlein, and the rest of the trustees Ron DeSantis put in charge of New College voting to shutter their gender studies program. Rufo tweeted:
Incoherence aside (Rufo is not a strong writer or thinker, and that second sentence is especially good evidence), this tweet is an example of what Professor Hudson warned against seventy years ago: thinking that the humanities are about teaching a ready-made system of values. The board’s express aim of turning New College into another Hillsdale College, one that it has pursued ruthlessly, firing Pat Okker, the college president, and pushing scores of faculty to the exits, has nothing to do with a free and enlightened choice of values.
Today’s other development happened at West Virginia University, which looks like it’s being stripped for parts under serial school-colored bowtie adopter Gordon Gee, ostensibly to deal with a financial crisis. It was reported today that the Department of World Languages is being recommended for closing, with all programs being shut down and total reduction of faculty. This development is an example of another front in the war on the humanities. I cannot remember, among all the announcements of closures and reductions in recent years, there being any mention of STEM departments and programs. Foreign language departments are threatened routinely, usually under the logic that they can’t support themselves, a logic that only appears to make sense in a non-profit institution that as a matter of course subsidizes all kinds of activities and programs its stewards decide are worthy.
To decide that the study of foreign languages is not important enough to support is to decide that the humanities don’t matter. To decide that gender studies has no place in higher education is to decide that the values that the humanities disciplines consider shouldn’t be chosen freely but rather that the institution, in some cases the state, should choose them ahead of time. Whatever these people think universities are for–to provide culture war battlegrounds or neckwear color schemes–the result of their decisions is that it is harder for their schools to produce graduates who can think critically about values. It’s hard not to think that what those who make these decisions really want is to reduce the chances that their schools might produce broadly educated future employees, voters, parents, citizens, people who can choose their values for themselves. As the man who is somehow still the leader of Rufo’s party once said he loves the poorly educated, so do the people in charge of these schools seem to love the unfreely, uncuriously, narrowly educated. The philosophy of life that Professor Hudson thought study of the humanities could allow students to form for themselves has no place in this impoverished vision of higher education, a vision based on a system of values that is itself impoverished. Anger and frustration on behalf of colleagues close to these situations aside, it is the persistence of this impoverished vision of the world that keeps me up at night, writing blog posts into the wee hours, wishing things were different.
Samuel Cohen 