Thomas Lindsay On Why the Humanities Are Really in Trouble

There's been no end of hand-wringing and effusive public angst recently in the wake of budget cuts at public universities that may significantly trim back funding of humanities departments. What will higher education become without the courses that take us beyond the shallow vocationalism that undergraduate curricula increasingly pander to? Over at Phi Beta Cons, former NEH deputy chairman and longtime NAS member Thomas Lindsay explains that the humanities long ago sold out to ideology and "critical thinking," and haven't been worth the money for some time. If you'd like to get a sense of what study in the humanities might have been at one time, he recommends our recent report, The Vanishing West.