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The 'End' of Higher Education in Twenty-First Century America

Book Review: The Humanities and Public Life

The Humanities and Public LifeThe Humanities and Public Life edited by Peter Brooks with Hilary Jewett (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2014).

My rating: 3 of 5 stars.


There is no question but that the humanities are under fire. Budgets are being cut, sometimes whole departments. How then to justify the humanities within the university, without accepting “instrumentalization”, a term thrown around much in this book, which means roughly, being able to demonstrate some “deliverable” or bottom line worth.

Peter Brooks, the editor of the book,and organizer of the symposium from which the articles and discussion in this book was drawn, starts with the “Torture Memos”, a series of Justice Department documents from the second Bush administration that justified waterboarding and other forms of torture against detainees deemed to be “dangerous” to national security. Brooks believes this to be the result of poor and unethical reading by those who formulated these memos (an assumption I question), and something that the humanities fundamentally address. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Humanities and Public Life

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