An Inside Job

Responding to an Associated Press article on the decline of the humanities “amid tight budgets,” former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Thomas K. Lindsay identifies "The Humanities' Real Enemies" (National Review Online, December 16) from within the family.

Lindsay recounts the historical trajectory of the American university in the second half of the 20th century, offering his Ph.D. in the humanities in support of his claim that the corruption of the humane arts has been an inside job: “The humanities are indeed in mortal peril, if not dead already. But neither our governors nor our state legislators are the assassins. Our humanities professors are.”

Following the remarks of “FDR brain-truster” Adolph Berle, Lindsay believes that universities have failed to teach “how we’re supposed to live,” squandering the essential humanities core of a university education. Berle was concerned a half-century ago, and Lindsay—citing Academically Adrift and related NAS research—concludes that today the general public is growing restless, if not resentful. Effectively, Lindsay argues that the humanities have been denounced by their own scorn, undone by their own devices.

[After the professors’] decades-long assault on the humanities, our universities are surprised to find that students and state governments have finally learned their lesson of contempt, and are responding in perfectly logical fashion by declaring, “No need to spend much time and money studying this stuff.” My only surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner.