In the Atlantic, Jeffrey Selingo writes about the push to attract humanities majors at American universities. It’s an interesting piece, but it also shows that many colleges have only a very narrow idea of how to do this.
The president of Macalester College, Brian Rosenberg, says, for example, that “The typical English major is designed to get students to go to graduate school.” That’s true, and it shouldn’t be that way. But then he says this: “We need to rethink the curriculum so that it’s more focused on what employers will immediately find attractive.” How English is taught and organized at a lot of schools should probably be changed, but making it into some sort of vocational major (“what employers will immediately find attractive”) is not the way to change it—nor will it attract more students. If you’re trying to sell more oranges in a banana market, you shouldn’t just decide to call your oranges bananas. You should try to get people interested in oranges and sell the best oranges at the best price.
The Dean of the School of Humanities at Stanford, Debra Satz, says that introductory humanities courses should be focused on “big ideas” like … justice and the environment. Well, humanities courses should certainly have something to say about justice—that is a big idea in literature—but a quick look at the humanities courses that students can take at Stanford to fulfill the general education requirement shows that what Dean Satz means by “big ideas” is, mostly, fashionable political ideas. Humanities programs have been replacing poetry with politics for nearly 50 years, and it has failed miserably. What both Rosenberg and Satz are proposing is a bait and switch. Want a job? Study English! Want to become a political activist? Study English! Students aren’t dumb, and that may be why—as the piece also notes—that many of them who start university interested in the humanities go on to major in something else.
Also in the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf writes about scholars who are trying to avoid citing experts who have been accused of sexual harassment. “One implication of this argument is that scholarly recognition should hinge not only on a scholar’s contribution to advancing human knowledge, or his utility to present and future scholars, but on his character.”
John Wilson writes a wonderful whirlwind tour of 100 years of crime fiction in FORMA.
Smoking saves Ron Liddle’s life in New Hampshire.
In Standpoint, an agnostic recommends a novel about faith: “Lucy Beckett’s novel begins and ends with Jamila. It takes you on a remarkable journey through memory, politics and faith. Novels which explore and describe the seeds and nature of Catholicism today are rare, and although I am an agnostic/atheist, this one moved me considerably. Read it: it will open your eyes to what is happening in the Middle East, and make you think again about faith.”
What do letters to six generations of the Murray family show? “Some things in the relations between authors and publishers never change.”
Essay of the Day:
In the New Criterion, Nigel Spivey writes about the enigma of Rome—one of the great ancient cities that seems to always be in the “flux of regeneration”:
“Freud famously likened Rome to a palimpsest, a text overwritten and annotated time and again. This may have suited as an analogy for the multiple layers of the human psyche when subject to psychoanalysis; it does not, however, reflect the archaeological evidence of urban development, which points rather to a past process of continuous ‘upcycling.’ The process was shameless, and one does not have to be a specialist to notice it—for example, in the distribution of certain rocks around town. Once there was a quarry in the eastern deserts of Egypt which the Romans began to exploit early in the first century A.D.: they called it Mons Porphyrites, and it appears to be the only source of that dense purple stone known as porphyry. Whatever pagan extravagance was served by porphyry in imperial Rome, that was evidently no obstacle to its recruitment for the most sacrosanct structures and symbols of Christianity. Everyone who steps across the threshold of St. Peter’s Basilica should know that the keys of heaven embedded there were by material once property of an emperor such as Nero. “Pre-loved” is our new euphemism for used or secondhand, and it works well enough here.
“Archaeologists working in Rome need no reminding that there is scarcely any excavation that does not feature the frustrating phenomenon of the “robber trench”—the intrusion of subterranean raiders in search of metal, marble, and more. Yet archaeologists can also testify that this is a city in which very little gets truly “lost”—despite the recurrent appeals to a ‘lost Rome’ (Roma sparita, or Roma perduta). By senatorial decree, Nero Claudius Caesar should have been completely erased from the record: absolute oblivion was the intent of damnatio memoriae. Almost the opposite has happened. The tourists driven like brutes through the Vatican museums are shown a huge porphyry basin that is (if preposterously) claimed as ‘Nero’s bath.’ The more selective minority who gain access to the cavernous ruins of Nero’s Golden House are given a truly astonishing three-dimensional experience of how that palace once appeared. No doubt its marble revetments, stripped to embellish first the Baths of Titus, then those of Trajan, are now lodged in several of Rome’s sixteenth-century churches: in any case, their original effect has been digitally retrieved. ‘What a maker [artifex] dies with me!’ were reportedly Nero’s last words. It is in the nature of Rome that the emperor’s own epitaph resonates, even through the dense meters of humus that lie upon his Golden House.
“Such obduracy creates a challenge for the historian. When one epoch elides so substantially with another, how does an ‘epoch’ stand? In this flux of regeneration, does anything essentially change?”
Photo: Lake Louise
Poems: Anonymous Greek lyrics and folk songs (translated by Christopher Childers)
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
