Humanism vs. Humanitarianism

This chapter surveys Irving Babbitt’s writings in defense of the classical and modern humanities. It demonstrates that Babbitt’s critique of the American research university and its philosophical underpinnings provides a more satisfying intellectual foundation for the humanities than do typical contemporary defenses. The chapter demonstrates that Babbitt offered a radical critique of professionalized American higher education and the attractively romantic—but ultimately problematic—conception of human nature that informs it. It shows that Babbitt fundamentally recast the humanistic tradition to fit the needs of the contemporary world. Importantly, the chapter argues that Babbitt avoided the skills-based rationales for Latin and ancient Greek that had proved so underwhelming during the Battle of the Classics. In their place, Babbitt underscored the unique role that specific humanities content must play in American higher learning in order for the nation to flourish.

Skills Are the New Canon

This chapter examines recent defenses of the humanities, demonstrating that most of them present a portrait of the humanities strikingly bereft of content. Instead of stressing the need for students to encounter and contemplate particular works associated with the modern humanities, these defenses typically vouch for the humanities’ value on the basis of their purported ability to inculcate various skills in students. Such arguments, it is shown, possess intrinsic disadvantages and vulnerabilities. Many apologists, for example, highlight the notion that the humanities supply students with the skill of “critical thinking.” But they cannot claim that the humanities alone are conduits for this nebulous aptitude.

Darwin Meets the Curriculum

This chapter analyses the 1885 curricular debate between President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and President James McCosh of Princeton over the comparative merits of prescription and election in the undergraduate course. It contends that Eliot’s laissez-faire approach to higher learning possessed shortcomings, but that McCosh failed to unearth and expound on many of them. Wedded to a skills-based-education rationale based on the principles of faculty psychology, McCosh delivered a rebuke to Eliot that relied too much on mockery and innuendo. The chapter also stresses that McCosh’s defense of required Greek centered on outdated theological concerns The 1885 Eliot-McCosh debate thus amounted to a lost opportunity for supporters of the classical humanities. McCosh’s contentless apologetics for the ancient languages have much to teach proponents of the contemporary humanities in America.

A College Fetich?

For part of Harvard’s graduation ceremony of 1883, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., delivered a fiery address lambasting the college for its continued insistence on ancient Greek as part of its admission examinations. This chapter analyses Adams’s speech and the spirited reactions it engendered. It probes the arguments proponents of the classical humanities made for their subject during this consequential debate over the shape and purpose of the nation’s higher education. The chapter demonstrates that skills-based arguments dominated the appeals offered by supporters of collegiate requirements in ancient Greek. Almost entirely failing to invoke the tenets of humanism, such supporters anchored their apologetics in the concept of “mental discipline.” Their opponents, sensing the weaknesses of these appeals, ably countered this defense. At a crucial point in time for the classical humanities in American higher learning, skills-based rationales proved a dismal failure.

Toward a Truly Ecumenical Wisdom

This concluding chapter uses Irving Babbitt’s educational philosophy as a starting point for an intellectually and ethically sound approach to the contemporary humanities. Although Babbitt did not present a defense of the humanities completely appropriate for our day and age, his ecumenical and comparatively broadminded approach can help ground a contemporary rationale that is both novel and satisfying. The chapter argues that contemporary humanists must vouch for the central importance of their subjects in part by expressing the ways in which masterworks of culture (from all intellectual traditions, not just Western ones) help contribute to the creation of better human beings.

From the Studia Humanitatis to the Modern Humanities

This chapter provides a history of the humanities, from their origins as the studia humanitatis in Roman antiquity to the modern humanities we think of today. By charting this path, it offers a sense of the humanistic tradition in its entirety and explains what is at stake in its prospective downfall. The chapter focuses particular attention on the history of the humanities in American higher education, especially during the run-up to the Battle of the Classics. This introduces the reader to much of the historical and intellectual background for future chapters. Part of this chapter also highlights a crucial shift in the definition of the humanities that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This shift, from what one might call the classical to the modern humanities, makes it extraordinarily difficult to defend the hodgepodge of subjects we associate with the contemporary humanities.

Introduction

The introduction examines the sorry state of the humanities in American higher education. Especially after the 2008 global financial meltdown, the contemporary humanities are increasingly embattled; downsizing and even program closures have become the norm. In such an environment, humanities professors and their supporters have written many defenses of the modern humanistic disciplines, eager to stave off their downfall. Unfortunately, these works tend to ignore the long history of the humanities and offer unsatisfying apologias for the modern humanities. For this reason, it seems valuable to examine the so-called Battle of the Classics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when educators hotly debated the role of the classical humanities in US higher education. Such an examination will allow educators to provide a satisfying contemporary case for the humanities.