This essay offers a new explanation of the challenges Arts and Humanities programs and, in particular, language and literature programs currently face in higher education. Rather than focusing on the bitter intellectual and ideological battles fought within departments in the last several decades, it considers, instead, some of the larger social and institutional contexts in which they have taken place, especially the rapidly changing status of the Humanities in American universities since WW II. Specifically, the argument is that while the ideas at stake in pedagogy, curriculum, and theory do matter, if we want to find the truth, we need to follow the money. I then close with some observations about the vital role that poetry can play—as it has always played—in our response to the intellectual trends that, if left unchallenged, will cripple our ability as humanists to resolve our own field’s crisis of confidence.
Author: David J. Rothman
David J. Rothman serves as Director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where he also directs the poetry concentration and the annual conference Writing the Rockies, along with editing Western’s national journal of poetry and criticism, THINK. His most recent book, co-edited with Jeffrey Villines, is Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2017). His most recent volumes of poetry, both from 2013, are The Book of Catapults (White Violet) and Part of the Darkness (Entasis). A book of essays about mountains and mountain towns, Living the Life (Conundrum), also appeared in 2013. His poems, essays and scholarly work have appeared widely, in journals including Academic Questions, Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New Criterion, Poetry, Threepenny Review and many more. He co-founded and served as first Executive Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival, was the founding Publisher and Editor of Conundrum Press (now an imprint of Bower House Books), and currently serves as Resident Poet for Colorado Public Radio and Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope (2017-’19). He has administered and helped to govern many nonprofits, including sitting on the board of ALSCW and directing its 15th annual conference in Denver in 2009. He lives in Crested Butte, Colorado.