Moderator:	Good afternoon and welcome. It's great to have so many of you with us, and it's a pleasure and honor to introduce Pulitzer Prize winning author Louis Menand.
	Menand, a graduate of Pomona and Columbia University, is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University where he has taught since 2003. He previously taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Virginia School of Law. He has been a contributing editor to The New Yorker since 1991 and became a staff writer in 2001.
	Menand was an associate editor at The New Republic from 1986-1987 and was a contributing editor at The New York Review of Books from 1994-2001. Menand is an author and editor of several books, including The Marketplace of Ideas, American Studies, The Metaphysical Club, and The Future of Academic Freedom.
	One of my favorite books on American intellectual history is Menand's book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th-century and 20th-century America, but I have to tell you I'm just one of the many fans of this book. The Metaphysical Club was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history as well as the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians.
	In recent years, Menand has been turning his considerable research and writing skills to the future as well as the history of American higher education. His well-respected book The Marketplace of Ideas analyzes how the structure of higher education has changed little since the 19th century despite the many changes in finance, technology, demographics, and scale. His analysis is penetrating and fresh but also frequently humorous in his metaphorical punches.
	One good example that is probably the favorite of every administrator and faculty member who reads his book is, and I quote, "The system is still a late 19th-century system put in place for late 19th-century reasons. The extraordinary series of transformations of higher education after 1945 have strained it to the extent that this system still determines the possibilities for producing and disseminating knowledge. Trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter or like riding a horse to the mall."
	The advisory committee for the Institute for the Liberal Arts reached an immediate and unanimous consensus, that being a very rare thing at Swarthmore, that Menand was the best possible speaker for a campus-wide event, the first of many, we hope, to begin to tackle the difficult issues around the future of higher education. Menand will talk today on the humanistic condition, the present, recent history, and possible features of the humanities discipline.
	Please welcome Louis Menand.
Louis:	Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.
	I was invited to speak about the condition of liberal education, but President Chopp kindly left the specific topic up to me and there are, unfortunately, many things to talk about these days about liberal education. I think it's fair to say that liberal education is a somewhat embattled place, although one could've said that at many points during the last 40 years because the liberal sector of American higher education has been shrinking relative to the whole higher education system since 1970.
	The present phase of feeling embattled dates from the recession of 2008 when the return on social investment and liberal education became an object of questions and criticisms, some of them ignorant but some of them reasonable and potentially productive. The questions themselves in 2008 were not new, and discussion proceeded in a fairly predictable way until about 12 months ago when what is being called the technological revolution in higher education happened or was officially acknowledged to be happening, the revolution known as "mook madness." Whether mooks are the pedagogical equivalent of the internal combustion engine or of the Segway remains to be seen.
	One thing that's noticeable in the debate over the value of liberal education is the common translation of the term "liberal education" to mean the liberal arts and for the phrase "the liberal arts" to mean the arts and humanities, disciplines that are customarily housed in their own academic division and that include philosophy, linguistics, classics, literature and language, art history, theater, cinema, music, and sometimes history. In fact, a liberal education is an education in the liberal arts and sciences. Every subject that you teach at Swarthmore, every subject that we teach at Harvard College, is taught liberally.
	Liberal education just means courses that are not designed with professional goals in mind and that are taught by people who pursue inquiry without regard to financial, political, or personal benefit. Liberal education is education in the spirit of knowledge for its own sake or "the love of learning" to use two venerable formulations. Liberal learning is disinterested learning, nonvocational, non-utilitarian. It includes theoretical physics as well as literary criticism.
	Critics outside the academy sometimes complain that they don't understand what literature professors are saying, also, though less frequently, what philosophy professors are saying. No one outside the academy says he or she doesn't understand what physics professors or mathematics professors are saying, even though almost nobody does. The value of physics departments and mathematics departments is taken for granted, but English departments and philosophy departments are continually asked to justify themselves. Arguments about the utility of liberal education are not confined to the humanities but the humanities make a convenient target, so the humanities is what I'm going to talk about today. Excuse me.
	For as long as I've been in the profession, the humanities have never not been in crisis, but I have also never seen as many active efforts as opposed to just intellectual exercises at retrenchment or reorganization. For a long time, the humanities suffered from what was mainly an intellectual problem, and today the intellectual problem hasn't really gone away but it's been exacerbated by material conditions. Colleges are scrambling to reorganize humanities offerings in an effort to reverse attrition in undergraduate enrollment. I'll give you some figures on that attrition in a moment.
	Yale and Princeton have instituted, and Harvard is currently planning to institute, a humanities major for undergraduates, essentially a giant spider web designed to entrap entering undergraduates so they'll end up taking more courses from us. I can't predict what the future of these efforts or of the humanities in general will be, because I'm an historian and I only predict the present. I try to connect the dots in such a way that present conditions are understood to be explicable outcomes of past events. My general view about the future is it's good to think of it as in our hands. We talk about our circumstances because we hope to shape the future as opposed to having the future shape us.
	Starting from the belief that the future is in our hands, it's helpful to know how the conditions in which we find ourselves came to be. This is not so that we can respect the past, it's so that we can disrespect it, which is often the necessary first step towards constructive change.
	My plan in this talk is to begin by summarizing the present-day economic indicators in the field. This will be depressing. Some of this bad stuff is out of our control, but not all of it. Then I'll say something about the intellectual history of the humanities discipline since 1960. This will be somewhat selective. I'm an English professor, I tend to see things from that point of view. That part should be more encouraging, and then finally I will offer some thoughts about the sort of changes that humanists might contemplate. This part might be annoying, but I'll also hope encouraging.
	American tax spenders spend, American tax payers spend $118 billion a year to support higher education through government subsidies and grants, and individuals pay $122 billion a year in tuition. Total annual revenue at all colleges and universities including public, private, and for-profit from all sources including grants, gifts, and endowment income is $355 billion. Education's one of the top ten highest grossing industries in the United States.
	There are some 4,474 institutions of higher learning, and there are more than 20 million students. 6% of the American population is enrolled in college or a university. In Britain or France, that figure is 3%. American higher education is a very big system and the humanities are a very small piece of it, and, as I said, they belong to a sector, liberal arts and sciences, which is itself continually shrinking in proportion to the whole.
	Most Americans who attend college do not receive a liberal education. 22% of bachelor's degrees are awarded in business, 10% are awarded in education, 7% in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Only 4% of bachelor's degrees are awarded in English, only 2% are awarded in history.
	The more that higher education expands, the more the liberal arts sector shrinks in proportion to the whole. This has been true, in fact, since 1900. The liberal arts and sciences grew only in the period from 1955-1970 for unusual and obvious reasons having to do with the baby boom and the war in Vietnam, but otherwise they've been shrinking.
	Apart from a few disciplines mainly in the life sciences, almost all the growth in undergraduate education measured by bachelor's degree has been outside the liberal arts and sciences. This is partly because new student populations representing demographic groups that traditionally did not attend college tend to gravitate toward vocational or pre-professional fields of study, and partly because a lot of those non-liberal majors like parks, recreation, fitness, and leisure studies didn't exist 50 years ago.
	Even within the liberal education sector, the humanities have been shrinking relative to social sciences and the natural sciences. There has a been a precipitous decline in the percentage of students majoring in the humanities or taking courses in the humanities departments over the last 10 years.
	At Harvard, which does not count history as a humanities discipline, 21% of undergraduates majored in the humanities, far less than a third even though a third of the faculty teach in a humanities department. At Princeton, which does count history as a humanities discipline, only 18% of undergraduates major in the humanities. This represents over the past six years at Princeton a 20% drop.
	At Yale, which also counts history as a humanities discipline, total enrollments in humanities courses have dropped since 2001 by 24%. Enrollment in English courses at Yale have fallen by 20% in the past 10 years. Enrollment in history courses have fallen by 49%. This is in spite of the fact that Yale has among the most prestigious English and history departments in the world, and the college attracts more arts and humanities-minded applicants than a place like Harvard, but Yale students are fleeing from those departments. They're not just losing majors, they're losing enrollment.
	At Harvard, more than half of the freshmen who arrive at the college reporting an intention to major in the humanities end up majoring in something else. Since 2003, 57% of students who've declared a humanities major at Harvard switched to social science or natural science before they graduated.
	Interestingly, the humanities are thriving at the very small but important group of baccalaureate liberal arts colleges, particularly the highly selective so-called "medallion" institutions like Swarthmore, Williams, and Amherst. These colleges not only graduate many humanities majors, as you know, you are feeding doctoral programs in the humanities in highly disproportionate numbers.
	Far larger percentages of your graduating class goes on to PhD program than do students at research universities. This has been true since at least the 1960s. I think the figure at Swarthmore of graduates who go on to PhD programs is close to 20%. At Harvard, it's less than 10%. 60% of Harvard College graduates go to law school, business school, or medical school.
	The picture on the research side is not very pretty, either. Federal sources of funding for the humanists are pitiful. The amount spent to fund the humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities is 3% of the amount spent by the National Science Foundation to fund scientific research and one half of one percent of the amount spent by the National Institutes of Health to fund research in the natural and social sciences.
	As small as it is, the National Endowment for the Humanities budget adjusted for inflation is one-third of what it was in 1979, to the extent that the present administration, the Obama administration, is going to increase federal grants to higher education. It's clear that the money will go to the STEM fields and not to the humanities.
	Private foundations spending on the humanities mostly goes to museums and historical societies. Just over 2% of private foundations spending goes to the humanities and related social sciences in universities, and that percentage has also been falling. Salaries of humanities professors are lower than salaries of professors in other disciplines, and the gap is increasing. Acquisition budgets for libraries are shrinking with funds being allocated to serials rather than monographs. The university presses are cutting back on the number of monographs they publish, because their own subventions are being cut.
	Finally, only one more of these, there's the problem of doctoral education. This issue is obviously more pressing in a personal way to people at research institutions than at four-year colleges, but colleges are just one step away in the food chain and they obviously have an interest in what's going on in the supply side for professors. As Harriet Zuckerman and Ronald Ehrenberg recently put it rather dryly, "The production of PhDs in the humanities seems not to be in line with conventional assumptions about labor markets." No kidding.
	Between 2001-2008, the number of first professional degrees awarded annually, that's JDs, MDs, and so on, between 2001-2008 the number awarded annually increased by 14%. The number of bachelor's degrees increased by 25%. The number of master's degrees increased by 33%. That's a very rapidly growing sector mostly under the radar in higher education. The number of PhDs increased by 42%, so the system keeps producing more PhDs, more professors potentially than it needs.
	According to the National Science Foundation, in 2008 there were approximately 4,700 PhDs awarded in the humanities. Two years later in 2010, less than half of those, about 2,200, had fuller part-time academic employment, 800 either had postdocs or were working in jobs outside the academy, and the rest, 1,700 PhDs, had "no definite part- or full-time employment."
	According to the MLA, there were 965 PhDs awarded in English in 2008, though there were only 925 tenure-track positions advertised. That was a drop from 1,244 positions advertised the year before, 2007. The following year, 2009, there were just 628 tenure-track positions advertised in English. In every year that job openings fall short of degrees conferred, the pool of people looking for jobs gets larger.
	On top of this, there is the time to degree problem. This is also something that appears to be a systemic dysfunction. In the 1960s, the time to degree in the humanities was about six years. The current median time to degree for the humanities PhD, that is, half take longer than this, is 9.5 years. The median age of degree recipients is 35, and this is what makes the job market story so inhumane. These are intelligent people who've invested a large portion of their lives acquiring a credential that entitles them to do basically one thing, teach college, and many of them will never get the chance. It's just a waste of human capital. Even keeping those people in school until they're 35 is a waste of human capital.
	The recession made the situation worse, but the situation far predates the recession. A study carried out at Berkeley 15 years ago called "The PhD Ten Years Later" surveyed just about 6,000 people in six fields who received PhDs between 1982-1985. By 1995, that is, 10 years after the last had gotten out of school, 53% in English had tenure, another 5% were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English PhDs were effectively out of the academic profession. Of those who did have tenure, less than a fifth, that is, 5% of all PhDs in English in this period have positions at the kind of research universities in which they had been trained.
	Between 1989-1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11%. In that period, the number of starting positions advertised in art and art history dropped 26%, in foreign languages 35%, yet every year during that period universities gave out more PhDs than they had the year before.
	There were some efforts after this to cut back on the size of doctoral programs with some positive effects on the job market, but those effects can now be regarded as temporary, and the time to degree numbers, the amount of time it takes people to get the degree, has not improved.
	Okay, that's the depressing stuff, now some encouraging stuff.
	There's a sense in which the humanities have always been kind of a scandal within the higher education system. It's a system, after all, that was designed to serve the practices and needs of sciences, not really fields like literature, philosophy, classics. In that respect, there's always a crisis in the humanities or a controversy about what goes on in the humanities, and that crisis gives work to humanists and it's actually a stimulation to the system.
	The most recent phase of institutional anxiety about the place of the humanities in the university dates from about 1990 when there started being conferences at humanities centers and institutes devoted to questions like, have the humanistic disciplines collapsed, and so on. This idea of a crisis was the consequence of a weird convergence between the loss of self-confidence induced by the cultural wars of the 1990s and a feeling that the field had run out of interesting theoretical paradigms. To some extent, we're still living through that episode, so it's worth reminding ourselves how we got to that point around 1990.
	The history of higher education in the United States since the Second World War can be divided into two periods. First period, from 1945-1975, was a time of expansion. The composition of the higher education system remained more or less the same, but the size of the system increased dramatically. This is the period known in the literature on American education as "the golden age."
	Second period, from 1975 to the present, was an equally dramatic time, not so much of expansion but of the change in the composition of the system, a period of diversification. After 1975, the size of the system grew but at a much more modest pace, and the composition of the system, who was being taught, who's doing the teaching, what they teach, was transformed. It was toward the end of the second phase, this period of diversification, that questions about the value of the humanities started being asked, but we can't understand what happened in that second phase unless we understand the first.
	In the golden age through 1945-1975, the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500%, the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900%. Those are unprecedented and almost certainly unrepeatable figures. The rate of growth was nearly fantastic. In the 1960s alone, undergraduate enrollments more than doubled, the number of doctorates awarded every year tripled, and more faculty were hired in the 1960s than had been hired in the entire 325 year history of higher education in the United States before 1960.
	At the height of the expansion between 1965-1972, new community college campuses were opening in the United States at the rate of one every week. Three factors accounted for this expansion. The first, of course, was the baby boom, second was the relatively high domestic economic growth rate after 1948, and the third was the Cold War, which drew the federal government for the first time into the business of funding academic research. Between 1940-1960, federal funding in higher education increased by a factor of 100.
	The expansion of the system received a late and unintentional boost from the military draft, which provided a deferment for college students until 1970. The result was that by 1968 more than 63% of male high school graduates were going on to college, that's almost as high as it is today, and they did not drop out because they wanted to keep their draft deferment. This is the period when all those community college campuses were springing up out of the ground. Among other things, they were government subsidized draft havens.
	Then after 1970, the golden age came to a rather sudden halt. Student deferment was abolished and then eventually the draft. A few years later the Vietnam War ended, college age population leveled off, the baby boom tapered off, country went into a recession, the Nixon recession, and the economic value of a college degree began to fall. That is the differential between the income a person could expect to make with a college degree and the income a person with just a high school diploma could expect.
	Percentage of people going to college therefore began to drop back down again, and the system that had really quintupled in size in the span of a single generation suddenly found itself with empty dormitory beds and a huge tenured faculty, so this was the beginning of the longterm job crisis for PhDs. The system had gotten too big, they couldn't absorb more people. It's also when, in an effort to maintain selectivity because there was much less demand, almost every all-male college in the United States became coed.
	American higher education did continue to grow after 1970 but much more slowly. It changed in a different way, it diversified. 1947, right after the war, 71% of college students in America were male. Today, 42% are male. Come on, guys, you can do better. 1965, 94% of college students were classified as white. Today, the figure for non-Hispanic whites is 66% in higher education.
	Much of this diversification happened after 1970. A single statistic makes the point. All the growth in American higher education between 1984-1994, when total enrollment increased by 2 million, came from nonwhites, women, and foreign students. A number of white American men in higher education actually declined during those 10 years.
	Faculty demographics changed in the same way. In 1998, American faculty who were hired before 1985 were 28% female, about 11% nonwhite or Hispanic. Full-time faculty hired after 1985, this is for the most part people who entered graduate school after 1970, were half, again, as female, 40% female, and more than half, again, as nonwhite, 18% nonwhite.
	By 1997, there were 45,000 doctoral degrees conferred in the United States. 40% of the recipients were women. That's radically different from 20 years earlier. In the arts and humanities, just under 50% PhD recipients were women and only 63% were classified as white American citizens. The other 37% were nonwhite Americans or non-nationals.
	The demographic mix in higher education, both students and faculty, changed dramatically in a span of about 20 years, and this change just happens to have coincided with a period beginning around 1987 when higher education came under intense public criticism for radicalism and elitism, the period of the cultural wars.
	The intellectual changes in many of the academic disciplines, particularly in the humanities, have the same etiology. This does not mean the changes in the humanistic disciplines were triggered by changes in demographics, although this was often asserted because of the changing population, that we have different ways of teaching material and the canon wars and so on. What happened was that the factors leading to the new demographic makeup of higher education were the same as those leading to the present condition of the humanities disciplines. The two phenomena are both fallout from the golden age.
	The strategic rationale for postwar expansion in American higher education was technological and geopolitical, but the social policy rationale was meritocratic. The belief was that if the United States sought to maximize its talent pool in the name of greater national security or greater economic productivity or both, it would not wish to limit entrance to that pool on the basis of consideration extraneous to aptitude such as gender or family income or skin color.
	Postwar liberals also believed that inherited privilege leads to class resentments and that class resentment leads to conditions in which illiberal political movements can grow. The big change in college admissions after 1945 was the introduction of the meritocratic system. That's when the SAT became the standard measure for aptitude. The meritocratic philosophy was accompanied by two other postwar developments. One was the importance of general education in undergraduate teaching. The other was the dominance of a scientific model in academic research.
	In practice, most colleges only paid lip service to general education. Relatively few actually created independent general education curricula, but most educators subscribed to the belief that the major works of the Western tradition are accessible to all students in more or less the same way, that those works constitute a more or less coherent body of thought or at least a coherent debate, and that they conserve as a kind of benign cultural ideology in a pluralist nation whose citizens are generally wary of anything overtly ideological.
	That was the great books idea prominent in the golden age. The other key golden age development was the adoption of a self-consciously scientific model of research. This, too, reflected the anti-ideological temper of postwar American life, a temper epitomized by the phrase first used in conferences of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom and later given wider circulation by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell, "The End of Ideology."
	To some extent, this antipathy to ideology or to politically motivated research in teaching was a response to global political history between 1914-1945, but to some extent, as the historian Thomas Bender has suggested, it was a response to all that federal money that began pouring into universities after the war. Scholars eschewed political implications of their research because they wished not to offend their granting agencies.
	The idea that academics, particularly in the social sciences, could provide the state with neutral research results on which pragmatic public policies could be based was an animating idea in the Cold War university. In the natural and social sciences, it helped to establish what Talcott Parsons called "the ethos of cognitive rationality." In literature, even when the temperament was anti-science as in the case of the new criticism or structuralism, the methods were scientistic, boundaries were respected, methodologies were codified in the Cold War university, discipline reigned in the disciplines. Scholars in the 1950s who look back on their prewar educations tended to be appalled by what they now regarded as a lack of rigor and focus.
	Because public money was being pumped into the system at the high end, that is, into the large research universities, the effect of the golden age was to make the research professor the type of the professor generally. For the first time in the history of American education, research rather than teaching or service defined the paradigm of the professor, not only in the doctoral institutions but all the way down the institutional ladder. This strengthened the grip of the disciplines on scholarly and pedagogical practice. Professors identified with their disciplines, a discipline constituting a national community first, with their institutions second, so the Cold War homogenized the academic profession.
	It now seems obvious that the dispensation put into place in the first two years, first two decades, of the Cold War was just waiting for the tiniest spark to blow sky high, and the spark when it came wasn't so tiny. The war in Vietnam exposed almost every weakness in the system that the Cold War generation of educational leaders had constructed, from the dangers inherent in the university's financial dependence on the state to the way its social role was configured in national security policy and to the degree in factitiousness in the value-neutral standard of research.
	Then after 1970, as new populations began to arrive in large numbers in American universities, the meritocratic rationale was exploited as well, because it turned out that cultural differences were not only not so easy to bracket as educational leaders had imagined, those difference began seeming a lot more interesting than the similarities.
	The trend was made irreversible by Justice Lewis Powell's decision in Bakke handed down in 1978. Powell argued that college admissions officers, this is the affirmative action case, as you know, at University of California, Davis, Powell argued that college admissions offices had always given preference to various types of candidates whose grades and standardized test scores were below average. They did so because they had other institutional needs besides putting scholars in the classroom.
	Racial diversity, Powell concluded, is just another institutional need. What the Bakke decision basically said to universities was, stop talking about quotas and about redressing the effects of past discrimination and start talking about the educational benefits of a mixed-race student body, and you'll be on the safe side of the Constitution. It preserved the practice by changing the rationale.
	Powell's opinion not only changed the language of college admissions, it blew a hole in meritocratic theory. "Diversity" is the very word that Powell used in the Bakke decision. There are probably very few college websites in the United States today in which the word "diversity" does not appear. As the homogeneity of the student body broke down after 1970, as the homogeneity of the faculty broke down along with it, the humanities disciplines underwent a series of transformations.
	These shifts became visible at the level of the undergraduate curriculum in an emphasis on multiculturalism, which meant exposure to specifically ethnic perspectives and traditions, an emphasis on values, that is, the attention to the ethical implications of knowledge. It renewed interest in service, this was manifested in the emergence of internships, off-campus social service programs and so on, and the idea of community in education for citizenship and revival of the Deweyite conception of teaching as a collaborative process of learning and inquiry. The landmark study identifying this shift is called "Scholarship Reconsidered" by Ernest Boyer, who was president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, published in 1990.
	This transformation was clearly a reaction against the model created by the golden age, the model of disinterested research and the great books or Western Civ. The vocabulary of disinterestedness, objectivity, reason, knowledge, talk about things like the scientific method or the canon or the fact/value distinction, that all began to be superseded particularly in the humanities by attention to interpretations rather than facts, perspectives rather than objectivity, understanding rather than reason or analysis.
	An emphasis on universalism or greatness was replaced by an emphasis on diversity and difference. The scientistic norms that once prevailed in many of the soft disciplines began to be viewed with skepticism, although a very rigorous skepticism. Context and contingency were continually appealed to. Attention to objects gave way to attention to representation. This trend was fundamentally a backlash against the excessive respect for disciplinarity of the golden age university.
	It should not be attributed to demographic diversification, I believe, because its first theorists were white men and because the seeds of the undoing of the old disciplinary models were already present within those models themselves. Like any exclusionary paradigm, which is to say like any paradigm, they carried within them the seeds of their own undoing. The artificiality of golden age disciplinary formations made their implosion inevitable.
	As a consequence, the academic humanities went through two revolutions. We can recount those in the language of myth. The narrative would be something like this. On or about October 1966, the [assieme 00:38:47] formalist regime all of a sudden died, and for the next 20 years giants of anti-foundationalism strode the earth, Kuhn, Derrida, Foucault, Hayden White, Paul de Man, Clifford Geertz, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty. Their footsteps caused academic halls to tremble as far away as the law school.
	A lot of people hated the message being delivered by these giants. A lot of people resisted it, but everybody was obliged to confront it. The message in a nutshell was, it's interpretation all the way down. This was alarming news in the Cold War knowledge factory and it made for exciting times for humanists, because interpretation, after all, is our business, so we had struck an institutional nerve.
	The anti-foundationalists were soon followed by a new race of superhumans. Let us call these "the giants of difference." From 1978-1990, they turn research paradigms inside out, Edward Said, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Henry Louis Gates, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha. Their impact was more local, more within disciplines, but they tore through the canon, they rebuilt the disciplines, and they gave careers to a fresh cohort of disciples.
	They made some inroads, not great, in fields like history, philosophy, political science, anthropology. Most important, though, they got the attention of the administrators. They put diversity and difference on higher education's institutional agenda. Then after 1990, the sands seemed somehow to have run out. Anti-foundationalism and multiculturalism were caricatured in the media as moral relativism and political correctness. It's probably also the case that the message had penetrated about as deeply into the academy as it was going to penetrate.
	Within humanities departments, resistance to the new paradigms, which is part of what made it exciting, largely evaporated or took early retirement, and new courses were added to accommodate new approaches. In 1997, The New York Times reported that courses on sexual identity could be found in every liberal arts college catalog in the country, or virtually. Traditionalists had all been co-opted and so, in a way, had the iconoclasts. They awakened to find that history in its cunning had made them rulers of the towns they had once set out to burn down.
	The universe started feeling smaller for humanists after 1990, some professors still baring the scars of institutional and cultural wars a little bit the way Samuel Beckett said it would be in the afterlife. "In the afterlife," Beckett said, "we'll sit around talking about the good old days when we wish that we were dead."
	One response from the senior tier of the profession after 1990 or so, many of these professors were veterans of the age of giants, was to propose consolidation or retrenchment, a return to the old virtues of close reading and good writing. Having had their rides on the shoulders of giants, they now advise fresh entrance to their fields. As exciting as it all was, the air was actually a little thin up there.
	Also, it seems that poststructuralism and queer theory had not brought about an end to capitalism. This was a nasty surprise. There was talk of return to the literary, to the canon, to subjects like aesthetics, all the things that the race of giants had rescued the profession from 20 years before.
	There was a younger professional cohort after 1990 which called itself the post-theory generation. People my generation looked at the post-theory people, we recognized them immediately. They were the theory people. Their attitude was not "you got it all wrong," their attitude was "stop repeating yourself, we know this stuff better than you do."
	This is when the ideas of the humanities had run out of gas, that humanistic disciplines had collapsed and so on, began to surface a little after 1990. As my former colleague Daniel Richter put it, summing up the situation in a phrase, "Once I built a railroad, now it's done. Buddy, can you paradigm?" David Richter said that.
	The point is that the postwar academic humanities made a huge difference to intellectual, literary, and artistic culture and academic culture. They broadened the scope of inquiry, they produced new tools for interpretation and analysis, they deflated a lot of pieties. They welcomed new voices and fresh perspectives in their fields, as little material leverage as we have today, and what material leverage did they have? Humanists should not feel that we could not make that kind of difference again.
	Now the annoying part, somewhat annoying, and this is just speculation on what might be the future of the disciplines without in any way claiming to make a prediction, which I'm really bad at.
	Economic administrators sometimes say with respect to the recession and the impact on budgets that every crisis is an opportunity. Well, maybe so, but the question is opportunity for whom. They usually mean an opportunity for them, the administrators, to have a hand in academic arrangements, but faculty must govern their own affairs. That's what academic freedom is all about.
	Although what faculties do is necessarily a function of what they have money to do, they should never be in a position of reconceiving their academic mission in response to changes in the financial outlook. If we made adjustments to the mission of our disciplines, we should make them from intellectual commitment, not from economic pressure. I don't see how we could have so much self-respect otherwise.
	I think there are really two legitimate questions before humanists today. First is, are there good intellectual reasons to rethink the academic mission of humanities departments? The second is, whatever we decide about that, whether we want to change our mission or not, are we serving our constituents well? Are we disseminating our product in the most effective way possible?
	Part of the answer to that second question does reach the issue of institutional legitimacy. We do have to justify the return on investment in our disciplines, every discipline does. That there have always been English departments is not a justification for English departments. We have to explain to people outside the humanities why the humanities matter. I'm just talking about people within the academic community, I'm not talking about people at The Wall Street Journal.
	One place people have wanted to start thinking about the problem is disciplinarity. Taken together, the academic disciplines constitute a semiotic field. Each discipline defines itself in relation to the others. Literature is not philosophy or history. Anthropology is not sociology or political science. A professor can practice her own discipline professionally without demonstrating competence in or even knowing anything about any other discipline.
	Each discipline is a world unto itself with its own professional organization, its own professional journals, its own theoretical methodological schools, its own star system. Disciplines are autarchic. The academic system produces specialists and it rewards specialization. Everything else professors do is essentially pro bono.
	If we decided that the best move in our present somewhat threatened position is to retreat to our core disciplinary missions, that might not merely be a safe move but it might also be the strong move, because it plays upon difference within the system which is precisely what the system encourages.
	Still, at the end of the day, aren't the differences supposed to be generative? Academic labor is organized according to the theory of the division of labor. By allowing professors to specialize, we enhance expertise. The whole purpose of dividing intellectual labor up in this way, though, is to get a better picture of the whole, and this is something that's never realized in practice.
	At the end of an automobile assembly line, organized according to the principle of the division of labor in which somebody puts the brakes on and somebody puts the muffler on and somebody puts the GPS in, there's a car. In the university, there's no place within the system where the work that gets done in the different disciplines is brought together where a final product is revealed. Students are required to put the pieces together for themselves, and so for that matter are the professors.
	At a minimum, conceding that we will never see the car, the edges of the disciplines are supposed to rub up against one another. University is supposed to be like an urban neighborhood, not like a town of gated communities or a row of silos on a hillside. Professors want their lights to shine in each other's windows. I think the worst thing that we could say about the humanities today is that we seem to have stopped producing books that colleagues in other disciplines feel they need to read. Those books today are being produced by people in cognitive science, not by us.
	Can the humanities get back in the game? This wouldn't mean playing by other rules. To some extent, the humanities are in an oppositional relation to much of the understanding of what counts as knowledge and other divisions of the university. Humanists reject the idea that measurement can do the work of interpretation. They have questions about the assumptions made in the science disciplines and they want to be sure that their colleagues in those disciplines hear them.
	Humanists think that fields in which much of the work is based on accounts of human nature, fields such as economics and psychology, would be enriched by a fuller recognition of the mediating role that culture plays in the behaviors that they study. The piece that humanities contribute is indispensable to the whole. Human beings are culture bearers. You cannot understand very much else that matters about them if you ignore that.
	It's also surely the case that for any kind of inquiry it's important to know what the right questions to ask are. All that money devoted to the STEM fields is not going to produce much that is worthwhile unless we have first thought about what we want to spend it on and why. What are the goods that this research is imagined to enable us to achieve? It's not that humanists know the answer to these questions. What we know is the history of the efforts that human beings have made to answer them. We don't have wisdom, but we do have knowledge.
	One thing that's preventing humanities departments from bringing their message to the rest of the university is their own structural position. They sit within an academic division that may fairly be described as Balkanized. Literatures are divided by nationality, arts are divided by medium, and philosophy in most places is the cheese that stands alone.
	This disciplinary regime is the inheritance of a time in the 19th and early 20th centuries when literature was understood to be the expression of a nation's character and when the arts were understood as each exploring the possibilities of its own medium. At the time the research university arose in the second half of the 19th century, nationalism was a powerful category of analysis, and national difference was treated as virtually essentialist, often as racial differences.
	Humanities disciplines took their contemporary shape over the first half of the 20th century when modernist ideas about literature and the arts were in the ascendancy. Those ideas promoted an essentialist view of artistic media. Painting was about painting, poetry was about poetry.
	After the 1960s, many humanists began discarding these premises but the departmental structure persists. That structure no longer reflects the assumptions typical of 21st-century scholarship, in much of which cultures are understood to be mobile and transnational, the linguistic boundaries to be highly permeable. Translations which most academics were trained to regard as "in for a dig" have always been central to cultural life. Translations from one language to another is how cultures circulate, and circulation is how cultures change.
	The literature, arts, and philosophy of any historical period are interrelated and mutually informing expressions of meaning. Artists, writers, and philosophers have historically thought of them that way. For all these reasons, and there are many more, it's retrograde to hive off philosophy from literature or literature from the visual arts or French art from Russian art and so on.
	Maybe humanists should not stop there. The production and reception of literature, art, and ideas are shaped by virtually everything the rest of the university studies from brain science to copyright law. For the most part, departments leave their students to acquire information about those other subjects by taking courses in the departments in which they're taught. They outsource instruction in nonhumanistic material. This is an inefficient way to bring relevant knowledge into one's own discipline.
	Many of these departments don't need to retrench. They might on the contrary try to colonize. Humanists keep saying that they want more interdisciplinarity. They're right, interdisciplinarity is good, but interdisciplinarity per se, after all, is only the institutional ratification of disciplinarity. It's premised precisely on the belief that the disciplines represent discrete programs of inquiry or perspectives and there's nothing remotely disruptive about it. You get a psychologist and a music professor or a sociologist and a literature professor on the platform together teaching, and the mere meeting of the twain accounts for a lot of the thrill.
	I had a friend who used to tell, it's a long time ago, a story about his kids. He had these little kids, and they got up early every Saturday morning to watch their two favorite shows on television which were Mr. Rogers followed by Captain Kangaroo. One morning, the kids came running into their parents' bedroom with huge excitement. "Daddy, daddy," they cried, "Mr. Rogers is on Captain Kangaroo." That's interdisciplinary.
	What humanities departments should want is not interdisciplinarity as traditionally conceived or post-disciplinarity, which is probably just eclecticism. It should definitely not want the natural scientist consilience. What they need to do is to hunt down those disciplines whose subject matter they covet and to bring them into their own realm, not only into our scholarship where this is in a very ad hoc way already happening, but humanities undergraduates should be exposed to the sociology and economics and evolutionary psychology and cognitive science as they inform the study of ideas and art.
	This may seem a minor curricular point, but it goes to the fear that academics have that their fields would be dumbed down if they stray from traditional boundaries or from their training. Maybe it's the boundaries themselves that are dumbing us down. I'm not going to go into this subject today, I've already alluded to it, but it is a regrettable development in postwar scholarship that philosophy departments have separated themselves from most of the other disciplines in the humanities, with the exception of linguistics.
	Humanists in literature and the arts are familiar with work in political and ethical philosophy, partly because that work builds on texts that are in every humanist canon. Logic, philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology, even most of philosophy of mind are beyond the grasp of most professors in the other disciplines. The problem is aggravated by the fact that the theoretical paradigms in those other disciplines like literature, not just different, it's antagonistic to the dominant paradigm in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. This situation, obviously, is not helped by the silo problem, but I'm not going to get into that.
	The only way to address this, I think, is to change the nature of doctoral education. In other words, it can't be done efficiently after the fact. Right now we're training people for nine-plus years in a subfield within a traditional discipline, a silo inside a silo, then when they emerge expecting them to be interdisciplinary, teach nonspecialists, and to write for colleagues in other disciplines. If we want professors to do those things, then we should train them differently. Interdisciplinarity begins at home.
	Humanities is the study of life in its cultural dimension, which happens to be the dimension in which every human being actually operates. You can study life in its biological and its social-scientific dimension, that is, you can look at the genetic causes of behavior or the methods by which individuals calculate their political and economic interests only if you hold culture constant.
	Culture is not an add-on. It's the biological and sociological condition of existence, it's constitutive of species identity. Culture is the medium in which we act, and it is from a purely rational point of view always a distorting medium. Culture is why paradigms of social and scientific theory never work perfectly, why people tend not to do what social theory predicts they will do. Kant once said that humanity is a crooked timber from which nothing straight can be cut. That's what humanists study, we study the warp.
	The version of the humanities that would make many nonhumanists most comfortable today is the version which art and literature are ornaments on or neat illustrations of empirical accounts of human life. Art and literature are not epiphenomenal to the rest of human behavior, they are themselves accounts of human life. A painting or a novel is a report on experience. There's a huge temptation which is heavily reinforced by the general culture to universalize these reports that we see in paintings or read in novels, to imagine them as uniquely valid accounts of permanent human nature, but this is a position on the road to ornamentalism.
	19th-century novels are a report on life in the 19th century, it's not an advice manual for life on the 21st-century street. The 19th-century novel belongs to the record of human possibility, and developing tools for understanding the 19th-century novel we're at the same time developing tools for understanding ourselves. Those tools are part of the substance of humanistic knowledge. They're a part of what humanists know, and as they apply to understanding of novels they apply to understanding of everything in the world of human values.
	That understanding leads humanists very naturally to be skeptical of claims of transparency, to objectivity, to value neutrality, not because they think that such ideals are not worthy of respect, but because they are alive to the fact of situatedness, to use a more loaded term, "ethnocentrism," and to the risks of self-deception. Skepticism about empirical forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge. Empirical knowledge is worth nothing without it. The extent that humanists are infiltrating other fields of inquiry, they should keep on infiltrating and they should take no hostages.
	There's no question that cultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s damaged the public reputation of academic humanists. The attacks from the Right were predictable enough, part of the price of change, but academic humanists also alienated liberal writers and intellectuals outside the academy. If you remember the sneering obituary of Jacques Derrida in The New York Times a few years ago, it was a rather shocking reminder of the resantìmān that's out there.
	One response to this hostility in the press and the public it serves has been to call for more public intellectuals, academics who can write for a general audience. We think, if we could just explain clearly what we're doing then people outside the academy in the public would understand and appreciate it. It's all a question of communication. This argument is mistaken. People know perfectly well what academic humanists are saying. The reason they aren't hearing is because they don't want to hear it. Saying things more clearly is not going to help.
	The last premise academic humanists should be accepting is the premise that the value of their views is measured by their correspondence to the views of common sense and the common culture. Being an intellectual and thinking theoretically just is thinking outside the parameters of a common culture and common sense, whether it's string theory or deconstruction.
	What Derrida believed about how language works is not what the average newspaper reporter believes about how language works. Why is that a scandal? What are philosophers for? For that matter, what are universities for? It cannot be that universities exist to flatter the world's self-image. That work of flattery is being carried on by powers a million times greater than ours all the time.
	Intellectual culture today is in danger of being dominated by a blind faith in two things. One is the idea that human behavior is ultimately understandable in biological terms, the other is the vocabulary of classical liberal economic theory, the theory of markets. The reason these paradigms exert such a powerful appeal to undergraduates, but not just undergraduates, is that they appear to provide all the tools necessary for the prediction and control of the human world and to transcend the limits of ethnocentrism.
	Criticisms of ethnocentrism are precisely what humanists are offering, and that's one of the reasons nobody wants to listen to them. What many people want to hear from humanists is the cultural past read as a ratification of the political present. Self-justification and self-deception are just part of human life, we can never entirely be rid of them, but there does seem to be an unusual amount of self-justification and self-deception around these days and in forms that are a danger to others and to ourselves.
	Ignorance has almost become an entitlement. We're living in a country in which it's considered good politics to say nothing that will offend the superstitions of the uneducated. As always, the invitation to academic humanists is to assist in the construction of the intellectual armature of the status quo. This is an invitation we should decline without regret. Thank you.