Renascentes Musae: cui bono?

09 August, 2012

cui bono?

The AAUP just a few weeks ago issued a statement in defense of the humanities. To which, you might think, we at Ren Mus would gladly tip our hats. After all, in the face declining humanities enrollments disproportionately taught by adjunct faculty, a statement from a force as large and well-known as the AAUP should be welcome.

Mark Bauerlein doesn't think so. I encourage you to read all of his Brainstorm blog entry, "The Adverserial Humanities." Generally, his answer is that the humanities suffer--and the AAUP's defense of the humanities suffers--from the fact that the answer to cui bono is deficient. The humanities, understood by Bauerlein and Ren Mus, serve society and don't detract from it. The AAUP's defense seems to suggest that the humanities should be preserved to harbor the very advocates of destroying the society that makes humanistic education possible.

No comments:

Post a Comment

How you say 'dat?

Renascentes Musae (reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh). That's right. Reh-nah-SKEN-tays MOO-sigh. "The rebirth of the Muses," or, literally, "the Muses in the process of being re-born." That was Reformation-Era code for the kind of university reform that accompanied the Reformation, a revitalization of higher education that eschewed the scholasticism of the Late Medieval world for a bracing encounter with the classics, the literae humaniores, of both the pagan and Christian world, along with the intellectual tools needed for such study: the ancient languages (classical Greek, classical Latin, and Hebrew), rhetoric & dialectic. This blog is devoted to searching for and articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for Lutheran higher education on the basis of Wittenberg Christian Humanism and to imagining what renascentes Musae might look like in 21st-century North American confessional Lutheranism. Need we mention it? Opinions expressed by an individual author are not necessarily those of all authors. Not only that--if we can't vouch for one another's opinion--it goes without saying that authors also speak on their own behalf and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions that employ them.