The Humanities Were Never Neutral

The Plot Against the Humanities In the March issue, Tyler Austin Harper considered what the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is doing to higher education.Thank you to Tyler Austin Harper. Though certainly critical of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, his story hit upon a deeper problem facing the humanities: our culture’s insistence on things of immediate “worth,” and the Faustian bargain the humanities made in an attempt to prove that they were one of those things.Lane Sunwall Mequon, Wis.Tyler Austin Harper suggests that the Mellon Foundation has yoked arts and letters to the wagon of social justice, subordinating pure inquiry to political fashion. But there never was a “golden age” in which scholarship floated above the turbulence of history. Universities were built alongside empires and on the backs of the working class. Libraries were endowed by industrial fortunes and the robber barons. Canons of literature were curated by gatekeepers who mistook their vantage point for universality. The “neutrality” that Harper mourns was not the absence of politics; it was the comfort of an unexamined center.To ask who was excluded from that center is not to corrupt the humanities; it is to practice them. Harper treats “social justice” as though it were a contaminant, a solvent dissolving rigor into activism. Yet what is literature if not a sustained inquiry into injustice and freedom? What is philosophy if not a struggle with power and responsibility? What is history if not the patient excavation of conflict, suffering, aspiration, and revolt? Frederick Douglass did not separate moral clarity from intellectual seriousness. Albert Camus did not believe that lucidity required indifference. Both understood that describing the human condition honestly is a first step in confronting injustice. Scholarship that refuses this confrontation is not neutral—it is evasive. The anxiety that expanding representation will displace Lincoln or Washington betrays a curious fragility. Greatness does