Sunday, March 16, 2025

The humanities- both essential and vulnerable

 [It is] a precarious moment in America — a moment of transformative technologies, escalating climate crises and global instability. It's a moment that demands more from universities, not less. "The core mission of the humanities is more important than ever," Robin Kelsey, a former dean of arts and humanities at Harvard, told me. As he explained, the humanities as we know them emerged in response to the violence of the two world wars, precisely because those conflicts revealed that scientific progress does not guarantee moral progress. A humanist education teaches us to question dominant narratives, to recognize how certain ways of thinking rise to prominence while others fade from view.

Dr. Kelsey warned against abandoning the humanities precisely when their lessons are most needed. "One of the contradictions at the heart of the humanities," he said, "is that they are supposed to practice the same skepticism, open inquiry and refusal of dogma that science is known for — while also addressing questions about meaning, virtue and ethics, which had long been the domain of religion." That contradiction has made the humanities both essential and vulnerable, open to attack from those who see them as frivolous or politically suspect. But what is now more clear than ever is that Mr. Rufo and other Trump-aligned ideologues actually know how important the humanities, and the civic and aesthetic values they explore, are. That is precisely why so much effort is being spent on trying to impose a set of nostalgic, premodern views at the heart of the university…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/university-defunding-trump-rufo.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude

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