The New Renaissance is Coming

So, are the humanities on the cusp of a renaissance? This may seem like an impossible, even ludicrous question to entertain right now given the state of the humanities because within the academy and outside of it, the humanities that is the studies of literature, art and culture, philosophy are embattled on all sides. But in this video, I want to discuss how they got in this position, where they should go from here, and why the humanities might actually see a renaissance very soon. First, let's give a fair assessment of why the humanities are in decline, especially in the universities in the US.

Both the political right and the political left are partly to blame here. U the political right and left have done much to weaken the academic study of the humanities over the past four decades, maybe longer. Uh from the right, conservatives and neoliberals have pushed universities toward a business model, a vocationalism by seeing education as job training. Tuition at US universities began to rise significantly in the 1970s and especially throughout the 1980s.

And while college costs had been increasingly uh modest since the 1950s, mainly tracking inflation, uh the rates of increase accelerated dramatically after the late 1970s. So this is the beginning of what many historians would call the tuition spiral that's continued ever since. So what what contributed to this? It's mostly the direct cause was was a decline in federal and state funding for higher education.

After the 1960s, when public universities were heavily subsidized to make college more affordable, states began to reduce appropriations per student. So in response, universities compensated by raising the tuition. And this only got worse under Reagan. um his era 1980s largely is often seen as the period when these trends became entrenched ideologically.

So before his presidency the as governor of California uh Reagan pioneered the model of cutting public funding to higher education and he had reduced tuition to what had previously been a nearly free state university. So several universities were in fact free. many of the state ones were until his his time. Uh he criticized the University of California system for being too free uh for harboring leftist activists and his policies began the long-term transformation of public universities uh from the public goods to a consumer commodity.

So Reagan's administration embraced free market anti-government intervention policies which ...