I just had a fantastic discussion with Phillip Adams at Late Night Live, in Australia. If you don't know the show, you should check it out here.
We were discussing the value of the humanities and the sense of perpetual crisis that grips them. I've recently written about this at The New Republic .
I can't stress these three takeaways strongly enough. 1) Humanities scholars need to fight the cuts to state-supported education that threaten to make the liberal arts, and the pleasures that they bring, the preserve of the rich. 2) In order to do so, humanities scholars need to make sure we're actually engaging a broader public rather than perpetuating our own forms of elitism by writing only highly specialized books for ever narrower audiences. 3) As long as the liberal arts doing their fundamental job by critiquing society and imagining better ways to live, they will be under siege and in crisis by people who want to perpetuate the status quo. We should welcome the debate!
