I'm sympathetic, but I think the university system itself might be to blame. Once everybody needed a degree, and English was the easiest to get, we ended up with more Shakespeare scholars than there are words in the first folio, all required to publish or perish. It was perfectly impossible that they could all find rational original avenues of research, so once those were exhausted, they had to turn to the irrational avenues, and when they were exhausted, they had to find other people to apply the same irrational avenues of research too.
And then, in search of new fields to conquer, they decided that they should teach writing rather than reading and thus created the MFA. Literature, to that point, had been created by hacks and sea captains and journalists and old soldiers and glove-makers' sons. Now it was supposed to be made by a hoard of MFA graduates with no life experience of anything but the university.
This contributed to a hollowing out of literature, where what I call "serious popular fiction" disappeared and the market divided into genre fiction on one hand and an effete "literary" fiction on the other.
As Joseph Bottom has pointed out so cogently in The Decline of the Novel, it was about this time that literature ceased to matter as a way for society to explain itself. Not since Bonfire of the Vanities, he claims, has there been a novel that you would be ashamed to show up for a cocktail party not having read.
And once literature ceased to matter, the universities became a vacuum that sucked in all the leftist philistines because there was no longer any cause to resist their influx. It was not as if any of those degrees actually mattered to anyone; they were merely a trial valued for the diligence and application they demonstrated. And now they don't demonstrate diligence or application anymore, they are ceasing to matter at all.
In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon.
I really like this comment. And your last paragraph:
"In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon."
may very well be true.
It occurs to me that, back in the day, they didn't study English literature in university. They studied classics. And for that, you needed to learn Greek and Latin. That in and of itself would keep you busy for quite some time. Just learning enough Greek and Latin to be able to sit down with some Plato or Virgil and enjoy the content in the original would surely merit a degree! (Even if you had nothing "original" to say about Plato/Virgil.) But English literature (or more to the point: literature in the students' native language) has a low barrier to entry, which raises the question of what exactly students should be learning in such a degree program. Wouldn't informal or semi-formal book clubs do the job just fine? I suppose a degree program could just be "read many more books than normal people." And the exams are what, just content knowledge ("who did what to whom in name-your-book"), with a bit about historical background and stylistics? As soon as you require people to say something "original" about the books that they read, you run into the exact problem that you described: too many people are doing it, everything productive has already been said, so now what?
ETA: Though y'know, requiring English majors to properly learn Anglo-Saxon might cut down on the number of majors and fix some of the problems. But no, it wouldn't fix the PhD overproduction issue, at least not if those PhD's are supposed to survive in publish-or-perish world, meaning they publish nonsense just to avoid perishing.
My father was a professor of English, and he said that he spent most of his time teaching the history behind the literature his students were studying because otherwise, they would not understand half the references nor any of the moral and social assumptions of the characters. In other words, he taught context.
And, of course, that's what the classics teachers were doing, too, with the additional matter of language as part of the context.
And yes, annotated editions and Google searches can do most of that context-setting for those who need it. And Substack can provide the venue for those kinds of discussions that in my day we called Caffeteria 101.
The problem with English as a degree program, though, is what do you examine people on? You teach them to read better. That fine. The classics provide the fullness of artistic experience to those with the context to receive them. But how do you measure and grade that?
That's when you decide they can't just read and enjoy. They have to analyse. That's when you have them start to take the thing to pieces and look for evidence that the author was a closet homosexual or sleeping with his sister. And all of that is fatally destructive of the kind of complete artistic experience you were supposed to foster. What should have been a fine romance becomes instead an autopsey. Students are not taught to love but to dissect. No wonder most of them never pick up another novel after college.
Thank you for your comment. I wonder if it might make sense to teach literature as a part of a history major (rather than as a major in its own right). Because it's precisely as your father said: literature teaching becomes most informative when it discusses the historical context. Otherwise, you might as well just read the book for enjoyment and leave it at that.
Yes, I know, there's also stylistics and sometimes philosophy. But how much is there really when it comes to stylistics? As for philosophy, well, you could also teach some literary fiction in a philosophy program.
Wish I could like this comment repeatedly! Everything you said rings very true. I’ve personally been seriously contemplating going back to school for an MA in literature purely for the pleasure of studying the Great Books, but perhaps taking classes from places like House of Humane Letters would be a better use of my time.
Yep, we are definitely headed into a technologically enabled dark ages. The dark ages were, among other things, an illiterate era where the majority of people not just lost the ability to read and write but also thought more in images and symbolism (all that religious art). Thinking in and using language is the muscle of intelligence. It needs to be flexed.
Agreed directionally, but disagree that the existing university system can be salvaged to teach the humanities as you suggest. How about a startup two year immersive humanities program? It could be done cheaply, with salaries for instructors virtually the only cost. Any room with chairs and a whiteboard would work, if it were done in person. Classic books are virtually free. The need is there but the existing university mechanism is a shambling zombie. It would interfere with the mission and add nothing except the fading prestige of a name, if even that. Step back, and reimagine how this type of education could be delivered if that were the sole mission, and the existing system did not exist. Imagine it from scratch.
Good one, LIza. I would only take issue with the last paragraph. I would say, rather than saving the universities, we should be reforming them. Or, maybe they are (many of them) beyond saving, and must be shut down and re-planned, rebuilt and restaffed. The universities must be purged of communist and sex-phreak works of propaganda. There are a few traditional universities. They should be in the majority, not the minority. Parents must be educated as to what their children will be forced fed in so-called universities.
As far as the 'Federal' Department of Education is concerned. Yes, I believe it should be shut down. We don't need or want a top-down, one-size-fits-all education system. Let the States build and run their own departments. After all, we are the United State(s) of America, not the United State of America. People will have to vote with their feet, something we did for 200 years.
Good morning, Liza, such a great article that couldn't be more timely or insightful! Back in the 19th Century, the great Matthew Arnold in his famous book Culture and Anarchy laid the foundations for liberal arts education in the United States based on the legendary classical education system of the Ancient Greeks, one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. But that very same liberal arts education and humanistic tradition that began with Arnold and the Ancient Greeks, is today under attack and in danger of going away altogether. The left has declared the western literary cannon racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic, and every other ist and phobia in the book and denigrated reading altogether in favor of news and media literacy. Forget about William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Bram Stroker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Fydor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells, you'll learn about the English language and writing through song lyrics from hack contemporary "musical" artists like Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Charli XCX, Iggy Azalea, and Justin Bieber. On a side note, that is NOT music! That's autotuned, overly processed garbage with lyrics so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. Real music is brought to us by masters of the craft like Johann Sebastien Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Guiseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Frederic Chopin, Pytor Ilych Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, James Brown, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder. That is real genuine music made with instruments and sung by someone with actual God-given talent! But I digress returning to the main subject of this article, the right's answer to this problem isn't any better than the problem the left created in the first place. They urge young people to spurn college in favor of vocational education and to abandon the humanities altogether and replace writing with generative AI technology as Elon Musk advocates for. Neither of these roads are the one we should take. Conservatives must take up the cause of defending a liberal arts education and the western literary tradition. I would also add that sane liberals, moderates, libertarians, and everyone else should join them in this noble cause! We must all across the political spectrum unite and do whatever we can to preserve, protect and defend the western humanistic tradition and the classical liberal arts education against the rise of AI technology and the march of the PC police and the woke inquisitors. Republican AND Democratic legislators alike must take action today to stand up for the great grift Matthew Arnold bestowed upon the western world, one hundred fifty-six years ago! I would agree with Mr. Musk and Liza, that getting rid of DEI at least in its current form, is a good thing. But Mr. Musk's remedy for the disease would be no better than the aliment itself. I'm no Luddite nor an opponent of technological progress, but it is not always a good thing. I'm sorry, but is Musk so daft as to think a robot could write a more poignant, intriguing, insightful, or valuable work than the likes of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Theodor Geisel, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, Kinglsey Amis, Ezra Pound, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Roald Dahl, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Anne Sexton, or Joseph Conrad could? Keep dreamin' pal! We've got to bring up literacy rates for our young people! They also need to read REAL books not song lyrics! I want my future son or daughter to learn how to read from works like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch That Stole Christmas, The Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Horton Hears A Who, The Flea, Macbeth, A Midsummer's Night Dream, King Lear, A Streetcar Called Desire, Oliver Twist, Beowulf, The Bell Jar, and Around the World in 80 Days not from something written by a cyborg or Dua Lipa, Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, or Trey Songz. We've got to preserve the cultural and intellectual heritage of our civilization at all costs! So, let's start today and not waste any more time! Boycotting the university system and eliminating the Department of Education (while both could use reform) is not the answer.
One of the most damaging moments in Republican politics in the last ten years was when Marco Rubio said in a debate in 2015, “We need more welders, not more philosophers,” setting up a bleak zero-sum picture of the world that divided American society among educational lines. I’ll admit, as a young right-winger at the time (in college), I liked that line and I think my reaction to it had negative ramifications for the later trajectory of my life. Traveling in rightist circles for years, I’ve encountered this reverse-snobbery often, and eventually I came to something of the opposite conclusion. Not that we don’t need welders but that we need liberal arts education which sets up as its explicit goal that it is not trying to help anyone get a job.
Fortunately, there have always been a few conservative professors holding out against the mob, and there are some storied institutions which have long been dedicated to preserving the classic. What is conservatism for if not to protect the good things which have been passed down to us and defend them against time and fate and the vagaries of culture? Admittedly, I don’t think the Department of Education has any role in that - it’s been a goal of the conservative movement to abolish the DOE since Reagan.
Point of clarity: Musk isn’t really that right-wing. He’s mainly just anti-left. The right has such a low bar for what makes someone a right-winger these days that it’s sad.
I agree a lot. Personally, I would advocate more academic institutions emphasizing cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities instead of “research.” St. John’s College does this.
I think that the present administration is so convinced of the evil of their opponents that they are mostly trying to reform the arts through censorship, which I think will either be ineffective or very bad. Cultivating expansive aesthetic sensibilities requires an ability to see beyond current political narratives and interests.
Conservative or liberal, communist or capitalist, shit-on-a-stickist—whatever your stance, there’s no excuse for not defending the liberal arts. You must be a full-blown consumerist drone to argue against their value. No, a liberal arts curriculum doesn’t train people for a specific career—it prepares us to be human.
And with the number of contact hours in a university course, there’s plenty of time to learn a trade. Or better yet, you can take it a step further and use your cultivated creativity to carve out a way to survive within the system you find yourself in. Every era brings its own challenges, which is precisely why we should lean on what has endured.
Right now, AI is a hot topic—and rightfully so. But as readers and writers, we should welcome this development. After all, these are just large language models, and we’ve been engaging with language our entire lives. If we approach AI with rhetoric, logic, and critical thinking, it can become a powerful tool—a research assistant, a proofreader, or whatever else we can imagine.
But that imagination must first be nurtured. And that happens through the enduring foundation of the liberal arts. To be part of the Great Conversation, you must first interact with the Canon.
It's a use it or lose it scenario, i.e. 'use' the humanities to grow as a people or continue to lose our humanity to technological capture. The choice is ours.
Agree. The rational center is surely the answer here. Extremes on both sides. But, the coming "AI revolution" does feel inevitable, and it mostly makes me sad. It will be great for some things, like annoying emails and reviews of things online, etc. But when it comes to literature (and art in general), I'm deeply worried. The Tech Gods seem to be winning, and that feels historically inevitable. Like the advent of the tractor replacing horse-pulled plows. I don't see any realistic way out of that, unless big populations of readers and writers create "safe spaces" which prevent the use of AI. I'd be game for that...but how many others would truly be on board?
I'm sympathetic, but I think the university system itself might be to blame. Once everybody needed a degree, and English was the easiest to get, we ended up with more Shakespeare scholars than there are words in the first folio, all required to publish or perish. It was perfectly impossible that they could all find rational original avenues of research, so once those were exhausted, they had to turn to the irrational avenues, and when they were exhausted, they had to find other people to apply the same irrational avenues of research too.
And then, in search of new fields to conquer, they decided that they should teach writing rather than reading and thus created the MFA. Literature, to that point, had been created by hacks and sea captains and journalists and old soldiers and glove-makers' sons. Now it was supposed to be made by a hoard of MFA graduates with no life experience of anything but the university.
This contributed to a hollowing out of literature, where what I call "serious popular fiction" disappeared and the market divided into genre fiction on one hand and an effete "literary" fiction on the other.
As Joseph Bottom has pointed out so cogently in The Decline of the Novel, it was about this time that literature ceased to matter as a way for society to explain itself. Not since Bonfire of the Vanities, he claims, has there been a novel that you would be ashamed to show up for a cocktail party not having read.
And once literature ceased to matter, the universities became a vacuum that sucked in all the leftist philistines because there was no longer any cause to resist their influx. It was not as if any of those degrees actually mattered to anyone; they were merely a trial valued for the diligence and application they demonstrated. And now they don't demonstrate diligence or application anymore, they are ceasing to matter at all.
In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon.
I really like this comment. And your last paragraph:
"In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon."
may very well be true.
It occurs to me that, back in the day, they didn't study English literature in university. They studied classics. And for that, you needed to learn Greek and Latin. That in and of itself would keep you busy for quite some time. Just learning enough Greek and Latin to be able to sit down with some Plato or Virgil and enjoy the content in the original would surely merit a degree! (Even if you had nothing "original" to say about Plato/Virgil.) But English literature (or more to the point: literature in the students' native language) has a low barrier to entry, which raises the question of what exactly students should be learning in such a degree program. Wouldn't informal or semi-formal book clubs do the job just fine? I suppose a degree program could just be "read many more books than normal people." And the exams are what, just content knowledge ("who did what to whom in name-your-book"), with a bit about historical background and stylistics? As soon as you require people to say something "original" about the books that they read, you run into the exact problem that you described: too many people are doing it, everything productive has already been said, so now what?
ETA: Though y'know, requiring English majors to properly learn Anglo-Saxon might cut down on the number of majors and fix some of the problems. But no, it wouldn't fix the PhD overproduction issue, at least not if those PhD's are supposed to survive in publish-or-perish world, meaning they publish nonsense just to avoid perishing.
My father was a professor of English, and he said that he spent most of his time teaching the history behind the literature his students were studying because otherwise, they would not understand half the references nor any of the moral and social assumptions of the characters. In other words, he taught context.
And, of course, that's what the classics teachers were doing, too, with the additional matter of language as part of the context.
And yes, annotated editions and Google searches can do most of that context-setting for those who need it. And Substack can provide the venue for those kinds of discussions that in my day we called Caffeteria 101.
The problem with English as a degree program, though, is what do you examine people on? You teach them to read better. That fine. The classics provide the fullness of artistic experience to those with the context to receive them. But how do you measure and grade that?
That's when you decide they can't just read and enjoy. They have to analyse. That's when you have them start to take the thing to pieces and look for evidence that the author was a closet homosexual or sleeping with his sister. And all of that is fatally destructive of the kind of complete artistic experience you were supposed to foster. What should have been a fine romance becomes instead an autopsey. Students are not taught to love but to dissect. No wonder most of them never pick up another novel after college.
Thank you for your comment. I wonder if it might make sense to teach literature as a part of a history major (rather than as a major in its own right). Because it's precisely as your father said: literature teaching becomes most informative when it discusses the historical context. Otherwise, you might as well just read the book for enjoyment and leave it at that.
Yes, I know, there's also stylistics and sometimes philosophy. But how much is there really when it comes to stylistics? As for philosophy, well, you could also teach some literary fiction in a philosophy program.
Wish I could like this comment repeatedly! Everything you said rings very true. I’ve personally been seriously contemplating going back to school for an MA in literature purely for the pleasure of studying the Great Books, but perhaps taking classes from places like House of Humane Letters would be a better use of my time.
Kind of ironic that the next proverbial “dark age” could be caused by an overload of information (the digital world).
Yes. But information is not knowledge, wisdom or understanding.
Yep, we are definitely headed into a technologically enabled dark ages. The dark ages were, among other things, an illiterate era where the majority of people not just lost the ability to read and write but also thought more in images and symbolism (all that religious art). Thinking in and using language is the muscle of intelligence. It needs to be flexed.
Agreed directionally, but disagree that the existing university system can be salvaged to teach the humanities as you suggest. How about a startup two year immersive humanities program? It could be done cheaply, with salaries for instructors virtually the only cost. Any room with chairs and a whiteboard would work, if it were done in person. Classic books are virtually free. The need is there but the existing university mechanism is a shambling zombie. It would interfere with the mission and add nothing except the fading prestige of a name, if even that. Step back, and reimagine how this type of education could be delivered if that were the sole mission, and the existing system did not exist. Imagine it from scratch.
Good one, LIza. I would only take issue with the last paragraph. I would say, rather than saving the universities, we should be reforming them. Or, maybe they are (many of them) beyond saving, and must be shut down and re-planned, rebuilt and restaffed. The universities must be purged of communist and sex-phreak works of propaganda. There are a few traditional universities. They should be in the majority, not the minority. Parents must be educated as to what their children will be forced fed in so-called universities.
As far as the 'Federal' Department of Education is concerned. Yes, I believe it should be shut down. We don't need or want a top-down, one-size-fits-all education system. Let the States build and run their own departments. After all, we are the United State(s) of America, not the United State of America. People will have to vote with their feet, something we did for 200 years.
Good morning, Liza, such a great article that couldn't be more timely or insightful! Back in the 19th Century, the great Matthew Arnold in his famous book Culture and Anarchy laid the foundations for liberal arts education in the United States based on the legendary classical education system of the Ancient Greeks, one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. But that very same liberal arts education and humanistic tradition that began with Arnold and the Ancient Greeks, is today under attack and in danger of going away altogether. The left has declared the western literary cannon racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic, and every other ist and phobia in the book and denigrated reading altogether in favor of news and media literacy. Forget about William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Bram Stroker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Fydor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.G. Wells, you'll learn about the English language and writing through song lyrics from hack contemporary "musical" artists like Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Charli XCX, Iggy Azalea, and Justin Bieber. On a side note, that is NOT music! That's autotuned, overly processed garbage with lyrics so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. Real music is brought to us by masters of the craft like Johann Sebastien Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Guiseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Frederic Chopin, Pytor Ilych Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, James Brown, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder. That is real genuine music made with instruments and sung by someone with actual God-given talent! But I digress returning to the main subject of this article, the right's answer to this problem isn't any better than the problem the left created in the first place. They urge young people to spurn college in favor of vocational education and to abandon the humanities altogether and replace writing with generative AI technology as Elon Musk advocates for. Neither of these roads are the one we should take. Conservatives must take up the cause of defending a liberal arts education and the western literary tradition. I would also add that sane liberals, moderates, libertarians, and everyone else should join them in this noble cause! We must all across the political spectrum unite and do whatever we can to preserve, protect and defend the western humanistic tradition and the classical liberal arts education against the rise of AI technology and the march of the PC police and the woke inquisitors. Republican AND Democratic legislators alike must take action today to stand up for the great grift Matthew Arnold bestowed upon the western world, one hundred fifty-six years ago! I would agree with Mr. Musk and Liza, that getting rid of DEI at least in its current form, is a good thing. But Mr. Musk's remedy for the disease would be no better than the aliment itself. I'm no Luddite nor an opponent of technological progress, but it is not always a good thing. I'm sorry, but is Musk so daft as to think a robot could write a more poignant, intriguing, insightful, or valuable work than the likes of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Theodor Geisel, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, Kinglsey Amis, Ezra Pound, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Roald Dahl, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Anne Sexton, or Joseph Conrad could? Keep dreamin' pal! We've got to bring up literacy rates for our young people! They also need to read REAL books not song lyrics! I want my future son or daughter to learn how to read from works like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Pride and Prejudice, The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch That Stole Christmas, The Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness, Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Horton Hears A Who, The Flea, Macbeth, A Midsummer's Night Dream, King Lear, A Streetcar Called Desire, Oliver Twist, Beowulf, The Bell Jar, and Around the World in 80 Days not from something written by a cyborg or Dua Lipa, Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, or Trey Songz. We've got to preserve the cultural and intellectual heritage of our civilization at all costs! So, let's start today and not waste any more time! Boycotting the university system and eliminating the Department of Education (while both could use reform) is not the answer.
To put it simply, you’re right!
Yes, my bias is that literacy is like a muscle that can be used in any setting but must be strengthened continuously…
One of the most damaging moments in Republican politics in the last ten years was when Marco Rubio said in a debate in 2015, “We need more welders, not more philosophers,” setting up a bleak zero-sum picture of the world that divided American society among educational lines. I’ll admit, as a young right-winger at the time (in college), I liked that line and I think my reaction to it had negative ramifications for the later trajectory of my life. Traveling in rightist circles for years, I’ve encountered this reverse-snobbery often, and eventually I came to something of the opposite conclusion. Not that we don’t need welders but that we need liberal arts education which sets up as its explicit goal that it is not trying to help anyone get a job.
Fortunately, there have always been a few conservative professors holding out against the mob, and there are some storied institutions which have long been dedicated to preserving the classic. What is conservatism for if not to protect the good things which have been passed down to us and defend them against time and fate and the vagaries of culture? Admittedly, I don’t think the Department of Education has any role in that - it’s been a goal of the conservative movement to abolish the DOE since Reagan.
Point of clarity: Musk isn’t really that right-wing. He’s mainly just anti-left. The right has such a low bar for what makes someone a right-winger these days that it’s sad.
I agree a lot. Personally, I would advocate more academic institutions emphasizing cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities instead of “research.” St. John’s College does this.
I think that the present administration is so convinced of the evil of their opponents that they are mostly trying to reform the arts through censorship, which I think will either be ineffective or very bad. Cultivating expansive aesthetic sensibilities requires an ability to see beyond current political narratives and interests.
Conservative or liberal, communist or capitalist, shit-on-a-stickist—whatever your stance, there’s no excuse for not defending the liberal arts. You must be a full-blown consumerist drone to argue against their value. No, a liberal arts curriculum doesn’t train people for a specific career—it prepares us to be human.
And with the number of contact hours in a university course, there’s plenty of time to learn a trade. Or better yet, you can take it a step further and use your cultivated creativity to carve out a way to survive within the system you find yourself in. Every era brings its own challenges, which is precisely why we should lean on what has endured.
Right now, AI is a hot topic—and rightfully so. But as readers and writers, we should welcome this development. After all, these are just large language models, and we’ve been engaging with language our entire lives. If we approach AI with rhetoric, logic, and critical thinking, it can become a powerful tool—a research assistant, a proofreader, or whatever else we can imagine.
But that imagination must first be nurtured. And that happens through the enduring foundation of the liberal arts. To be part of the Great Conversation, you must first interact with the Canon.
It's a use it or lose it scenario, i.e. 'use' the humanities to grow as a people or continue to lose our humanity to technological capture. The choice is ours.
Here then, perhaps, is an alterative liberal arts canon:
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-favorite-books-2015-10
I'd be favour of Douglas Adams :)
LIBERAL arts? No way. Shut it all down.
Agree. The rational center is surely the answer here. Extremes on both sides. But, the coming "AI revolution" does feel inevitable, and it mostly makes me sad. It will be great for some things, like annoying emails and reviews of things online, etc. But when it comes to literature (and art in general), I'm deeply worried. The Tech Gods seem to be winning, and that feels historically inevitable. Like the advent of the tractor replacing horse-pulled plows. I don't see any realistic way out of that, unless big populations of readers and writers create "safe spaces" which prevent the use of AI. I'd be game for that...but how many others would truly be on board?