Abstract
The economic collapse in the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated the problems caused by a generation of funding cuts to institutions of higher education and, with these cuts, the increasing costs for students and their families. The current problems raise anew the questions of what public good is created both by programs in the Humanities and by all forms of higher education. They are not new questions, but the responses often bring out the importance of humane education to a free society. Courses in the Humanities develop more than the skills in communication and critical thinking that employers say they value. Such courses contribute to the personal development, character formation, and emotional intelligence that create a healthy and productive society. The benefits of such education are considerable, but cannot be measured in a strictly business model of higher education such as is often used by institutions balancing budgets, as well as by the overseers to which they report, including regents, politicians, and community affiliates.
Highlights
The economic collapse in the U.S during the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated the problems caused by a generation of funding cuts to institutions of higher education and, with these cuts, the increasing costs for students and their families
As I write, all the op-eds about higher education concern the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19
There are further questions that American institutions have been asking for years, most urgently, “How can we survive in the current economy?” Over the past forty years, taxpayer dollars have decreased by one-half for public institutions, while tuition fees have increased at more than twice the overall inflation rate and wages for working adults have stagnated
Summary
Discussion of culture war or wars has evolved considerably over the last century. The English term was first used in the late nineteenth century in articles about the conflict between church and state in countries where the separation was not written into a Constitution or another founding document. Because they perform well for their herders, but the first two letters of “excellent” are crossed out with a big X on the dust jacket, as if to prepare for the book’s emphasis on the students’ “miseducation.” When they graduate and take their places in the business and social elite, these students have the kind of “cultural literacy” that others saw lacking among many Americans in the late twentieth century (e.g., Hirsch 1987; see Bloom 1990). Professor Northrop Frye, at one time the most frequently quoted humanist writing in the English language, liked to extend the social contract to what he called “the educational contract.” By this he understood “the area of free discussion in a society where the authority is not a social authority, or any kind of externally imposed authority, but the authority of the logical argument, the established fact, the repeatable experiment, and the compelling imagination” It was his genuine attempt to overcome the implicit power relationship in the college classroom between the professor who assigns the grade and the student who needs to earn it
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