What Is the Mellon Foundation Doing to Higher Education?

"In 1964, an influential report identified a disquieting trend in academia. "Increasingly during the past few years," it began, "concern has been expressed about the condition, in this country, of those fields of intellectual activity generally called the humanities." Reading the commission's findings six decades later, one could reasonably conclude that what today gets called the "crisis of the humanities" is not so much a discrete 21st-century emergency as the latest expression of an educational catastrophe long in the making."

""For the very reason that the humanities are concerned with quality, with values, with emotions, and with the goals of living, they must remain free," the report proclaimed. "To control them is to dictate opinion and to subject all men to the tyranny of a controlling authority in the most intimate and sacred concerns of our existence as human beings.""

In 1964 a national commission identified severe, long-standing problems in the humanities, including meager funding, insufficient graduate support, and too few faculty positions. The commission noted an education system that glamorizes science and math and dense academic writing that alienates the public. The commission warned that the humanities’ troubles threatened universities' ability to fulfill their foundational purposes. The commission also cautioned that remedies centered on greater public funding and institutional backing carried risks of control. Because the humanities are tied to values, emotions, and the goals of living, they must remain free to avoid external domination.

Read at The Atlantic