A brief response by our author to this NY Times Op-Ed piece:
“Graduate education in the humanities may have its problems, but don’t try to tar science with the same brush.”
and:
“The humanities aren’t sciences, they don’t solve problems like sciences, and they shouldn’t try to be sciences.”
Is the public lens currently being focused on the problem in a way that does justice to neither the humanities nor the sciences? There has been some successful modeling of some scientific rigor in the past.
There are still a few rigorous teachers of the canon, but they’ve often been replaced by a more fractured group of interests, continental leftists, and semi-politicized groups in many a liberal arts program (and it’s important as ever as a discipline in my opinion). I think this helps explain the corner some people in our culture have painted themselves into; clutching at the remnants of moral relativism with an all too earnest scientism (the people who need climate science to be true for various reasons other than scientific ones), multi-culturalism and a sadly politicized set of goals for higher ed. Clearly, there’s been a lot of change, and little discussion of the reasons behind the change.
On This Site: From Bloggingheads: Shakespeare and The Second Law Of Thermodynamics…Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’,,
Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
See the comments Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’
Did Strauss have it entirely right? Harry Jaffa At The Claremont Institute: ‘Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy’…Some Tuesday Quotations From Leo Strauss…
