"...has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were needed more?"

NOVEMBER 2013

What Dido did, Satan saw & O’Keeffe painted

by Mark Bauerlein

How the humanities can come out on top in the education debate

It was a fatal choice, this turn from canonical work to interpretative act, with damaging effects continuing today. We witnessed its disabling impact in a revealing episode last summer when the humanities became once more a topic of national conversation. Starting in June, a flurry of reports and commentaries appeared projecting a dim present and dark future for the fields. A report by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, a formation of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, showed the humanities losing funding, enrollment, and appreciation from politicians and business leaders, “a pattern that will have grave, long-term consequences for the nation.” One week earlier, Harvard issued a like warning under the banner “The Teaching of Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future,” which examined enrollments on campus and found that, since the mid-twentieth century, degrees in the fields have plummeted from 36 percent of graduates to 20 percent, while entering students who aim to major in a humanities field have shifted to other areas at disproportionate rates. A June 22 statement in The New York Times by Vernon Klinkenborg bore the title “The Decline and Fall of the English Major,” while Leon Wieseltier’s 2013 Commencement Address at Brandeis opened, “Has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were cherished less, and has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were needed more?”