What would it take to restore the health and rightful place of the humanities in the university?

Two articles this morning each having to do with the state of the humanities, the sciences and education and society in general. The area in which the point of each dovetails bears some examination.

At The Weekly Standard, James Pierson and Naomi Schaefer Riley revisit a great trick that was played on the academy twenty years ago:

Twenty years ago, the academic journal Social Text published an article with the trendy title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Herme­neutics of Quantum Gravity." The article claimed that quantum gravity is nothing but a social and linguistic construct that physicists are trying to pass off as a genuine account of the universe around us. Theoretical physics, the article concluded, is just a bunch of meaningless words and symbols.

The actual meaningless words and symbols were those in the article itself, which consisted of high-flown gibberish. It was a postmodern spoof of postmodernism.

The article, author Alan Sokal would later write, was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense," all "structured around the silliest quotations" by postmodernist academics. He hoped by his hoax to make an important point: that humanities professors under the influence of postmodern doctrines had discarded basic standards of logic and proof and were prone to believe—even publish—utter silliness.

They say that the problem with Sokal's hoax was that it only dealt with the encroachment of postmodern gobbledy-gook on the hard-sciences realm - which, we must conclude, was a tacit giving of a pass to its infection of the humanities, where it originated.

And that metastasizing infection has widened and deepened the rift between the humanities classroom and the normal-people world:

Sokal's original hoax may have ridiculed "left-wing cant" but it did little to blunt the ascendancy of the left on campus. Fewer professors today would dare to take on the postmodernists in the manner Sokal did two decades ago. This should serve as a warning to those who think that professors in the hard sciences might act as a check on the absurdities committed by their colleagues in the humanities. Academe is now much more of an ideological monolith than it was two decades ago.

The general public has made no such movement to the left. Which means that over the decades, the gulf between academe and the taxpayers called upon to support it has widened. The tension between town and gown is growing, McClay points out, in part because highly ideological fields such as gender and race studies have broken out of the academic hothouse and into the mainstream of American life and politics.

As there is no longer any serious check on extremism from within the academic world, that check is going to have to come from the public at large as expressed through politics and elections. In this sense academia is no different from any other sector of American life: If it cannot regulate itself, it may eventually find itself regulated by others, and in ways not to its liking.

At NRO, Ian Tuttle responds to a piece that appeared on that site on Saturday by Varad Mehta, who had posited that  George Washington University had dropping its American-history requirement for its history majors was strictly a commercial calculation.

GWU is seeing fewer students signing up as history majors; the department’s funding is dependent on enrollment; ergo, it’s hoping this change and others make the GW history department more attractive to matriculating students. 

Fair enough.

Tuttle goes on to cite a passage from Mehta's piece in which he says that "we insisted they alter the requirements for history majors,"  and then quite rightly goes on to ask who Mehta presumes this "we" to be.

He takes us back to the 1980s, when conservatives began to take a serious look at the Leftist rot occurring within humanities fields. The most notable example of this was Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

The upshot of the conversation on the Right since then has tended toward a view that the humanities were beyond fixing, and that fact, combined with the changing world of work worldwide, meant that the humanities were probably best left to wither. Hence unfortunate pronouncements such as that of Marco Rubio that one ought to study welding and probably not philosophy.

Tuttle concludes:

 . . . if “philosophy” is understood as “much of what passes for philosophy in institutions of higher learning today,” the sentiment is perhaps less galling. A degree is expensive, and people have to make a living. They also should be sufficiently educated as to be up to the tasks of citizenship.

GW’s curriculum change suggests that its history department, like many other departments in many prestigious universities, has decided to pursue one of those goals at the expense of the other. How that came to pass is, I think, more complicated than Mehta suggests. For this critic, at least, it’s precisely because the humanities are so valuable that GW’s decision is unfortunate.

What all this says to me is that, like other realms such as economic policy, world affairs and religious freedom, there is no substitute for bringing to bear the courage and intellectual rigor  required to save what is good and true about the study of philosophy, literature, music and history.

A world inhabited by real human beings - who have depth, wisdom, humility and sharp powers of discernment - depends on it.