I find it depressing that so many responding to this article, despite apparently believing that they were the last people to receive real exposure to humanistic knowledge, have such a sour, parsimonious and uncharitable view of the proper character and disposition of the humanities. Not to mention the knee-jerk agitation about identity politics and theory in response to an article which is about other trends and developments. At the very least, someone who cares about humanistic knowledge should be able to respond to the issues at hand in a manner that opens up dialogue and works with the text provided rather than a canned, reflexive response about various red herrings.
Timothy Burke from Swarthmore, responding to a November 16th article in the New York Times’ “Humanities 2.0″ series. If one can stomach it, reading the various comments that this series has inspired is quite an experience. It is a rare and powerful monster that can make the right-wingers think it’s just another iteration of all that is wrong with higher education, and the left-wingers that it is destroying the liberal arts, and the intellectuals that it is scientism, and the social scientists that it’s just the same thing they’ve been doing for 15 (or 20, 30, 40 or 50, depending on the outraged commentator) years.
Which I suppose is some kind of accomplishment.