What's Happened to the Humanities?

This volume of specially commissioned essays presents the thoughts of some of the most distinguished American academic commentators on the fundamental changes that have taken place in the humanities in the latter part of the 20th century. In the transformation of American higher education from the university to the "demoversity", the humanities have become a less and less important part of education, a matter established by a statistical appendix and elaborated on in several of the essays. The individual essays offer close observations into how the humanities have been affected by declining academic status, by demographic shifts, by reductions in financial support, and by changing communication technology. They also explore the effect of these forces on books, libraries and the phenomenology of reading in the age of images. The volume concludes with studies of the new social arrangements that have developed in the humanities in recent years: the attack on professionalism and the effort to transform the humanities into the social conscience of academia and even of the nation as a whole.