Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Real Men Study Law and Engineering, while Ideas and Values are for Sissies.


From one of the most distinguished and celebrated intellectuals of our day, literary scholar and philosopher Terry Eagleton:

The Death of Universities
Academia has become a servant of the status quo.
Its malaise runs so much deeper than tuition fees

Terry Eagleton
guardian.co.uk,
Friday 17 December 2010

Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question is absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear from pubs, or egoism from Hollywood. Just as there cannot be a pub without alcohol, so there cannot be a university without the humanities. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Neither, however, can there be a university in the full sense of the word when the humanities exist in isolation from other disciplines. The quickest way of devaluing these subjects – short of disposing of them altogether – is to reduce them to an agreeable bonus. Real men study law and engineering, while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name. The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.


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