Humanities at the crossroads: false choices and new avenues. From the editorial:

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

This is not a dead belief in the humanities; I know many professors, most of them political liberals, for whom it is essential. But it is a contested belief, which is why the other key essays in the Chronicle package stage an argument on exactly this subject — with Michael Clune of Case Western insisting that the humanities must offer “judgment” on what is worth reading, and G. Gabrielle Starr and Kevin Dettmar of Pomona answering that no, humanists can only really “teach disciplinary procedures and habits of mind … we model a style of engagement, of critical thought: we don’t transmit value.”

The Starr-Dettmar belief was my alma mater’s philosophy when I was an undergraduate; back then our so-called “core” curriculum promised to teach us “approaches to knowledge” rather than the thing itself. It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds; no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance.

For a recent commentary addressed by Douthat, see here

For other posts on the humanities’s value, see here