Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

One of our most common genres today is the epitaph for the humanities. A
few years ago, for example, Robert Weisbuch, the president of the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, declared:

Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities—it’s bad, it’s get-

ting worse, and no one is doing much about it—is supported by dismal

facts. The percentage of undergraduates majoring in humanities ¤elds

has been halved over the past three decades. Financing for faculty re-

search has decreased. The salary gap between full-time scholars in the

humanities and in other ¤elds has widened, and more and more hu-

manists are employed part time and paid ridiculously low salaries....

As doctoral programs in the humanities proliferate irresponsibly, turn-

ing out more and more graduates who cannot ¤nd jobs, the waste of

human talent becomes enormous, intolerable.

More broadly, the humanities, like the liberal arts generally, appear

far less surely at the center of higher education than they once did. We

have lost the respect of our colleagues in other ¤elds, as well as the

attention of an intelligent public. The action is elsewhere. We’re living

This essay was written for a 1999 symposium at the Stanford Humanities
Center on the question “ Have the Humanistic Disciplines Collapsed?” It was
subsequently published in the Boston Review and revised in 2003 in response
to more recent developments in the arts and humanities, especially the Inter-
net revolution.

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Crisis in the Humanities?

Reconfiguring Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century