Humanism’s sisyphean task: curricular reform at Brown University during the Second World War

Abstract

In the midst of a curricular debate at Brown University during the Second World War, the faculty’s humanists seized the opportunity to pen their views on the nature and purpose of higher education. This investigation reveals humanism as a fragmented force, at once principal and peripheral to the American academy. The central argument of this study is that humanists united when they stood against mainstream academe and fragmented when they tried to acculturate their ideas to prevailing currents of thought. This article further contends that humanists endured as a major if subsidiary constituency within academe because they offered the American university an elevated rationale for its existence without issuing a substantive challenge to its prevailing power structures.