For all those in the university who suffer less than we do from the current crisis, it is tempting to believe that the humanities can be painlessly sacrificed to the good of the university as a whole. Once the humanities are gone, the survivors will discover that there is nothing left to hold research and teaching together, no universitas. The debate about the curriculum has always seemed to me vitiated by a rather cowardly desire to accommodate noisy pressure groups. Therefore, the history of Europe is crucial for our understanding of the present world. I am sympathetic, therefore, to some proposals to enlarge the scope of the curriculum, to embrace also the history of other civilizations, provided a strict hierarchy of choice is preserved, for otherwise by spreading thin the university we would favor superficiality instead of knowledge.
Humanists have no reason to be timid in their claims to pursue the search for truth.
As to intellectuals possessed by a desire for political activity, their poor record in this century should make them less self-righteous. But we took a wrong turn. There was a fork in the road and we, American academic criticism and American academic learning, took the wrong turn, making ourselves and our organizations the laughing stock of the generally sensible and literate public. We had embarked on our own journey to Laputa. At a time when fewer and fewer people were interested in humanistic learning, when our best undergraduates were flocking to the professions, to the hard sciences, and even to the burgeoning field of economics, that is, when society was quite eager to discount and demote the humanities, we seemed zealous to confirm their judgments, to show indeed that what we did was worthless, of no human or earthly value or significance.