History and the Humanities

The headline of a recent New York Times article spelled out a clear warning. "In Tough Times," it proclaimed, "the Humanities Must Justify their Worth." 1 Reporter Patricia Cohen wrote of colleges and universities canceling or postponing faculty searches in English, literature, philosophy, and religion. She cited statistics that showed how the percentage of humanities degrees conferred stubbornly remains half of what it had been when the fields had a renaissance during the 1960s. And she quoted Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University. "Although people in the humanities have always lamented the state of the field," he noted, "they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant." The concern was not that the humanities would disappear. Rather, it was that decisions about what to study in colleges and universities would reflect the prerogatives of class-that only the...