Introduction
On December 2, 2020, the University of Vermont announced that it would be eliminating the geology, religion, and classics departments, and also cutting majors in Asian Studies, German, and Italian. Programs with fewer than 25 students enrolled or fewer than five graduates per year were targeted.
Academic Social Media (at least its humanities sector) predictably exploded. Anger at neoliberal corporatism, sarcasm at American anti-intellectualism, and bile at the devaluation of the liberal arts flooded from the feeds. Those attempting to defend the value of religion and classics majors insisted that the humanities foster critical thinking, form a vital part of general education, and offer traditions too important to abandon.
As Eric Adler explains in The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today, these points are far from new. With at times amazing exactness they echo arguments made more than a century ago during fierce debates about the place of the classics and the humanities in American higher education. From Cicero to Charles William Eliot, from 19th-century reformers to our present moment, Adler demonstrates how the “battle for the classics” has always been a battle for the humanities themselves.
About the Guest
Eric Adler is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. His scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities.
For Further Investigation
Eric Adler, The Battle for the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., A College Fetich (1884)
Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (1908; repr. 1986)
Charles W. Eliot, A Turning Point in Higher Education (1869 inaugural address; repr. 1969)
Roger L. Geiger, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II (2015)
Listen & Discuss
What do you think: are we still fighting the same battle over the humanities that educators were fighting more than a century ago? Share your thoughts in the comments — and pass this conversation along to someone who still believes in the liberal arts.
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