Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem

[Chris]

Check humanities out in graph below, does great. As I managed for many years, I laugh at opinions on liberal arts and the finger pointing the right wing does in America. It is as if they are afraid that a liberal education will make you think and they can't have that. You must follow and believe. Finger pointing is that a degree topic for the right?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/...better-leader/


"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." Alex Carey

Your criticism is hogwash. The OP article was written by a left-leaning liberal arts profession not by the rightwing bogey you create as strawman to knock down..

And your citation is off-topic: "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." Alex Carey

But let's address it by say democracy created the corporatocracy where corporation rules by rent-seeking favor from the democratic government.

It's the same theme as the OP: Liberalism undermining itself.

[donttread]

A brief history of how the humanities have made themselves irrelevant. It's written by a liberal-leaning professor. It's referenced in half a dozen articles I've read lately. I figured I'd post the source.

Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem

Humanities have their place.

[Chris]

Humanities have their place.

Should, indeed, as the conservation of culture handed down through the ages.

The problem elucidated in the OP essay, the undermining of liberal arts by the liberal intelligentsia, is only half the story. Capitalism, too, has made education into a job preparation industry: The cost of education is too high to spend it on learning the classics, you need to learn a profession to get a job to pay for that education and to join the upper or at least upper middle class.

[Chris]

Reed Students Say Humanities 110 Should Not Include White or European Authors

Reedies Against Racism, a student group at Reed College, is demanding that the school's Humanities 110 course remove all European texts and replace them with non-European reading materials as "reparations for Humanities 110's history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people."

Whitewashed curricula are worth fighting. But the Oregon college will repeat the error in the opposite direction if it decides that European and Mediterranean authors have nothing to contribute by virtue of their whiteness.

The activists already lobbied successfully for the Hum 110 (as it is called) curriculum to be altered, through a series of protests in early April. These entailed interruptions of classes and thus clashes with other students and professors, at least one of whom understandably disagreed with the idea that the course represented "white supremacy."

The class, which is required for first-year students, will now have four different modules. The first two will still be centered around Athens and the ancient Mediterranean, while the third and fourth will focus on Mexico City from the 15th to 20th centuries and Harlem during the first half of the 20th century.

Now Reedies Against Racism want the first and second modules to be changed to Jerusalem and Cairo. They also claim that important texts will be cut from the course—including the Epic of Gilgamesh and Egyptian love poems, which were initially in the Mediterranean modules—to make room for the Mexico City and Harlem units, undermining the diversity the students sought in the first place.

...

Postmodernism is rife with contradictions. Postmodernism embrace contradiction. This is an inherent they take from Hegelian Dialectic:

Within Hegelianism, dialectic acquires a specialised meaning of a contradiction of ideas that serves as the determining factor in their interaction; comprising three stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis

Marx made much of this dialectic.