"A New Deal for the Humanities”
Guest Writer: Patrick Fadely

Monday, September 23, 2013

posted under , by Unit for Criticism
[On September 18, 2013, the University of Illinois sponsored a one-day conference, New Deal for the Humanities, organized by Gordon Hutner and Feisal Mohamed and co-sponsored by several campus units including the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory. Below, guest-writer Patrick Fadely, describes the event. In the near future Kritik will also publish a written version of Lauren Goodlad's response during the closing panel]

“A New Deal for the Humanities”
Written by: Patrick Fadely (English)

Last May, faculty at Harvard University published a report, which included data pointing to declining numbers of students in humanities majors. Days later, the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences issued its report on humanities education, which warned of declining public support for the liberal arts, and mounted a defense of the economic and civic value of humanities scholarship. Since then, there has been no shortage of articles, op-eds, and blog posts about the crisis in the humanities.

What was new about Wednesday’s conference, “A New Deal for the Humanities,” was its emphasis on the status of humanities programs at public research universities. As conference organizers Gordon Hutner and Feisal Mohamed pointed out in their recent piece in The New Republic, this aspect of the humanities crisis has been somewhat overlooked in recent discussions. To fill this lacuna, the conference brought together a diverse group of scholars to diagnose the current state of the humanities at public institutions of higher learning, and to share their visions of a robust and sustainable future for liberal arts education.
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