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Acad. Quest. (2011) 24:8795 DOI 10.1007/s12129-010-9207-6
REVIEW ESSAY
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by M a r t h a C . N u s s b a u m . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 158 pages, $22.95 hardbound.
Gain the World and Lose Our Souls?
Daniel E. Ritchie
Published online: 1 February 2011# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Scan the website of nearly any college in the U.S., however small, and you will find testimony of how its changing American students into global citizens. Start in the Northeast and youll hear that Colby College is international, and [its] students develop a mature curiosity and an appetite for engaged global citizenship. Stop in the middle of Lincoln country at Knox College, and youll find a Center for Global Studies. You can finish up at
Jack Kemps alma mater in Los Angeles, Occidental, where global citizenship anchors the last of the four college values. Widen your scope to include universities, and the global institutes multiply.
Despite the drop in humanities majors by nearly 50 percent since 1970,1 global education is one huge growth area in higher education spending. And yet the thesis of Martha Nussbaums Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities is that educational institutions (here and abroad) arent doing enough to encourage students to become citizens of the world. Si monumentum requiris, Prof. Nussbaum, circumspice.
Not for Profit is a manifesto for the humanities from elementary school through higher education. Starting in crisis mode, it ends by warning of genocide if Nussbaums ideas arent followed. Since the humanities are always in crisisthis journal is the result of one such momentwe can depend on a perennial crop of analyses and improvement schemes. So why are the humanities in crisis? And what is their purpose?
Daniel E. Ritchie is professor of English and founding director of the humanities program at Bethel University, St. Paul, MN 55112-6999; [email protected]. He is the author of The Fullness of Knowing: Modernity and Postmodernity from Defoe to Gadamer (Baylor, 2010), Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke (Eerdmans, 1996), and the editor of two collections on Edmund Burke: Further Reflections on the Revolution in France...