In 1987, political philosophy professor Allan Bloom published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. Over a million copies were printed.
The book "hit the scene at a time when universities were embroiled in the so-called canon wars, in which traditionalists in favor of centering the curriculum on classic works of literature faced off against multiculturalists who wanted to include more works by women and members of minorities," Rachel Donadio wrote in the New York Times in 2007. As she put it, he argued "that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the 'relativism' that had replaced it had 'extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life'; that rock music 'ruins the imagination of young people'; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers." These claims were controversial among academics, who had to contend with a "zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped," and in a context of the relative newness of American literature, which has barely had generations enough to form any canon at all, let alone one formed against a background of social inclusion of race and gender for writers and readers. For Bloom, the zero-sum game had a time constraint, too, since an American's years in college "are civilization's only chance to get to him."
Donadio quoted Mark Lilla, professor of political philosophy and religion, as saying that Americans seek "self-recognition" in literature and tend to find obscure, foreign texts to be "alienating" in comparison. She explained that philosophy professor John Searle remarked on the irony that texts which had been traditionally believed to teach critical thinking were now being criticized themselves. Searle wrote: "The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."
Canon or no canon, acquiring skills of critical inquiry is central to the humanities. Prof T. Kari Kitao wrote in 1999:
“Professionalism may prepare us for a career but liberal arts education prepares us for a resourceful life. In short, liberal arts education liberates us.
I don’t just mean that it makes a knowledgeable person, a person who can recite a Shakespeare sonnet, a person who, watching a ballet, can recognize a grand jeté pas de chat, or a person who can debate medieval thinkers, Boethius vs. Anselm. I mean a certain predisposition that urges a person to be inquisitive, widely interested in a variety of subjects, old and new, those in fashion and out of fashion, those of different cultures, including your own. I mean developing a multilayered personality, a person who is infinitely interesting.”
Then there is the perspective that literature and philosophy does not only teach us how to think, but it also affords us an opportunity to feel deeply, which is another way of understanding our condition and our place in the world.
Lee Siegel wrote in 2013 that "the humanities" as institutionalized in academia can be its own worst enemy. Not only is the classroom setting an ill-equipped place to understand literature that is subversive or charged with dissent, but it is also typically the wrong place to enjoy its beauty. For every great teacher of literature, "there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist's chair." People can read literature without majoring in it, and he suggests that it is probably not true that "large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall." It is a "sentimental fantasy" that the absence of formal education in literature leads to "the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness."
"Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart."
Before the end of the 19th century, he said, literature was "part of the leisure of everyday life," not part of formal education, and "it was only after World War II that the study of literature as a type of wisdom, relevant to actual, contemporary life, put down widespread institutional roots," when returning American soldiers had the opportunity to go to school under the GI Bill and "yearned to make sense of their lives after the carnage they had witnessed and survived." Of the classics, he says: "They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive."
Context Collapse
"One of the buzzy phrases to describe What’s Wrong With The Internet is 'context collapse,' that something can be easily stripped of its context to gain levels of unintended or non-existent meaning. When I look at this kind of thing, I feel like there’s something analogous going on, a kind of inability to distinguish among situations, in which every conflict or negative interaction needs a judge to decide who is right or not."
"On having a little self-respect," BDM, Substack, Aug 19, 2022
To rise into the uncompromising energy of spirit is a hard task. Many people—in the sixties particularly—wanted to have the swan life right away during their twenties. I certainly did. I wanted the ascent before I had ever got down on my knees to eat acorns or had agreed to any form of sacrifice. It’s possible we used our parents’ sacrifices instead of our own as fuel. Now so many forms of personal sacrifice—the scholarship in cold rooms, the learning of Latin and Greek, the voluntary renunciation of multiple delights—have since the sixties virtually disappeared. We have a pop culture now, not a culture of swans.
Robert Bly, in Robert Bly and Marion Woodman. The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998. pp. 103-104.
November 19, 2024: It has come to my attention that Boston University, a school of which I'm an alum, has decided to stop admitting PhD students in the humanities and social sciences.
"Public education has been for sale for decades. Cultural theorist Henry Giroux was among the first to see how public universities were being remade as vocational feeders for private markets. Academic departments now have to justify themselves in the language of revenue, “deliverables,” and “learning outcomes.” CSU’s new partnership with OpenAI is the latest turn of that screw.
Others have traced the same drift. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades called it academic capitalism: knowledge refashioned as commodity and students as consumers. In Unmaking the Public University, Christopher Newfield showed how privatization actually impoverishes public universities, turning them into debt-financed shells of themselves. Benjamin Ginsberg chronicled the rise of the “all-administrative campus,” where managerial layers and administrative blight multiplied even as faculty shrink. And Martha Nussbaum warned what’s lost when the humanities—those spaces for imagination and civic reflection—are treated as expendable in a democracy. Together they describe a university that no longer asks what education is for, only what it can earn.
— Ronald Purser, AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education. Current Affairs, 1 Dec 2025.
Also:
"Repeatedly, the arts and humanities are treated as a luxury and a privilege. This belittles their role in our lives and frames them as wasteful, irrelevant, and excessive. But if the arts and humanities are indeed a luxury, it is because their lessons have been systematically hoarded by the wealthiest elites in the world."
— Roland Betancourt, Humanities Hoarding: Why tech elites want to make you think the Liberal Arts are irrelevant: Do we acknowledge the necessity of the Humanities—history, art, literature, and all those things that make us human—or, do we fall prey to their erasure by those who benefit the most from them? Oct 13, 2026
More
To read: Fobazi Ettarh, Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves, In the Library With the Lead Pipe: An open access, open peer reviewed journal, 10 Jan 2018
Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities: Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year, Anna Bawden and Sally Weale, The Guardian, 14 July 2026
Sources
"Revisiting the Canon Wars," by Rachel Donadio, New York Times, Sept. 16, 2007.
“The Usefulness of Uselessness,” Prof. T. Kari Kitao, 1999. Swarthmore pamphlet.
"Who Ruined the Humanities?" by Lee Siegel, in the Saturday Essay for The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2013.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.
