"The Philistines Are on the March"

"The culture wars over the humanities that dominated discussion of higher education in the 1980s and 1990s had enduring historical significance. Shouting matches about academia reverberated beyond the ivory tower to lay bare a crisis of national faith. Was America a good nation? Could the nation be good—could its people be free—without foundations? Were such foundations best provided by a classic liberal education in the humanities, which Matthew Arnold described as 'the best that has been thought and said'? Was the 'best' philosophy and literature synonymous with the canon of Western Civilization? Or was the Western canon racist and sexist? Was the 'best' even a valid category for thinking about texts? Debates over these abstract questions rocked the nation's institutions of higher education, demonstrating that the culture wars did not boil down to any one specific issue or even a set of issues. Rather, the culture wars often hinged on a more epistemological question about national identity: How should Americans think?
"But in our current age of austerity, Americans are not asked to think about such questions at all."


Andrew Hartman in In These Times argues that conservatives "have abandoned the humanities entirely."