6.11 Christopher O. Tollefsen – The Humanities and American Higher Education

I argue that the role and understanding of the humanities in American higher education has been deformed by its relationship to modern science. This deformation tracks three features of contemporary science: its rigor and characteristic method; its turn towards the technological; and the claims made by some of its practitioners and defenders to self-sufficiency and unlimited authority in all matters of knowledge. Contemporary defenses of the value of the humanities often go wrong by seeking to make the humanities either too much like science, or by asserting on behalf of the humanities the same claims to supremacy made on behalf of the sciences. I conclude by making some claims both about the intrinsic goodness of education in the humanities and about the role that study of the arts should play in a humanities education.