Uploads from Adam Walker - Close Reading Poetry

Currently Playing: Universities are Killing the Humanities

What happens when the humanities are devalued by the universities that support them? Works Mentioned and Referenced: Eric Adler's "They're Killing the Humanities on Purpose" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-killing-the-humanities-on-purpose?sra=true) Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (2010), James Engell’s and Anthony Dangerfield’s Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2004), John Ellis’s Literature Lost (1997), and Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins (1996) Coleridge’s “clerisy” included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.” See Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 53. If you’d like to study poetry with me and a community of readers, check out Versed~ Community, my online school where we run live classes, discussions, and share members-only courses: https://versedcommunity.mn.co/