The Dehumanities

Essay by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro at Inside Higher Education.

"Go to Inside Higher Ed, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, or read reports from Harvard University and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and you will discover that the humanities are in decline. Enrollments and majors continue to plummet.

"But humanities professors themselves, like a delicatessen owner selling spoiled meat and blaming business failure on the vulgarization of consumer taste, fault their students. 'All they care about is money,' they complain. 'Twitter has reduced their attention span to that of a pithed frog.'

We tell a different story. For decades, literature professors have argued that there is no such thing as 'great literature' but only things called great literature because hegemonic forces of oppression have mystified us into believing in objective greatness."