tering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons
and groups.Do the arts and humanities foster diversity? I know of no evidence for this
proposition. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are generally held to be clas-
sics of twentieth-century philosophy and literature. They aim to de¤ne the
poet’s unique genius, but the last thing they foster is “respect for the diverse
beliefs and values of all persons and groups.”
But if the NEH’s claims for the humanities are dubious, they are also quite
typical. At Stanford University, for example, the of¤cial Bulletin contains this
description:
The School of Humanities and Sciences, with over 40 departments and
interdepartmental degree programs, is the primary locus for the supe-
rior liberal arts education offered by Stanford University. Through ex-
posure to the humanities, undergraduates study the ethical, aesthetic,
and intellectual dimensions of the human experience, past and present,
and so are prepared to make thoughtful and imaginative contributions
to the culture of the future.The language used here is revealing. Whereas the social sciences (accord-
ing to the Bulletin) teach “theories and techniques for the analysis of spe-
ci¤c societal issues,” and the “hard” sciences prepare students to become the
“leaders” in our increasingly technological society, the humanities “expose”
students to the “ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual dimensions of the human
experience.” Exposure is nice enough—but also perfectly dispensable when
leadership and expertise are at stake. Indeed, the humanities, as now under-
stood and taught in our universities, no longer possess what Pierre Bourdieu
calls “symbolic capital”: an “accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or
honour” founded on the “dialectic of knowledge (connaissance) and recog-
nition (reconnaissance).”^4 In the capitalist and multicultural democracy of
late-twentieth-century America, based as it is on money rather than on social
class, “exposure” to the “intellectual dimensions of the human experience”
is no longer a sine qua non of success or even of the Good Life. Our recent
presidents, from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to the two George Bushes
and even the Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, are a case in point.
Consider the controversy about the NEH’s invitation to Bill Clinton to
deliver the 2000 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, an invitation Clinton
declined in response to strong protest from the scholarly community. The
annual Jefferson Lecture, inaugurated in 1972 by Lionel Trilling, has been
4Chapter 1