The survival of the humanities: reflecting on its multiple challenges. From the editorial: 

In the midst of such an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive? At first glance, it might seem that the contentious philosophical and ideological debates that forged conservative and liberal ideas of higher education have little to offer us now. Yet we believe not only that those debates remain relevant, but also that the challenges brought on by the pandemic make them essential to being able to imagine any kind of future for humanistic thinking….

Looking back, [Allan] Bloom got some things right. He accurately foresaw the fate awaiting humanities departments that neglected the fundamental questions: Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? What is a good society? How should I live? These were the questions that had always attracted the best students to humanities departments. What did professors expect to happen when they informed those students that the texts humanists had pored over for millenniums were nothing more than vectors of ideology and oppression? Who could blame these students for transferring into economics or computer science — as so many now have?…

Bloom often spoke about the “four years of freedom” enjoyed by his elite students, a “charmed” period that fell “between the intellectual wasteland” of the student’s family life and the “inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” This, rather than Bloom’s defense of the Great Books or his concern about relativism, represents the dark side of his elitism about the humanities….

Yet it is striking how many of Bloom’s liberal critics, even as they profess their faith in the university’s democratic function, simultaneously reinforce his vision of an ignorant and benighted populace looming outside the campus gates. Today’s progressive professors may be unlikely to speak in Bloom’s reverent terms about the university’s responsibility to tutor the masses, but they are very likely to casually dismiss the political and religious beliefs of large swaths of the country, to habitually “correct” what they declare to be the ideological delusions of their students and to conspicuously conflate their own research interests with the common good. 

h/t Rob Townsend (@rbthisted)

For related issues, see here.

Baskin and Berg are editors of The Point.