10/2/2023 0 Comments Medieval oath of loyaltyThey were remote from ordinary ways of thinking about the professoriate’s role and status then. If anything, his act has become more rather than less significant, because, paradoxically, the reasons he gave for his refusal were so peculiar, so out of touch. Looking back, this incident may seem trivial enough: just another display of Cold War paranoia, just another demonstration of supine conciliation on the part of university authorities.īut we shouldn’t let Kantorowicz’s firing fall out of institutional memory. He had already found a job at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. By then it didn’t matter much for Kantorowicz. As it turned out, California’s Supreme Court overturned the sackings. Across the UC system, another 36 tenured professors lost their jobs alongside him. Kantorowicz was by no means alone in his refusal to sign. The literature and cultural-studies scholar Simon During - author of many books including The Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993) and Modern Enchantments (Harvard, 2004) - has been long at work on a history of the humanities, a topic which he has addressed recently in “Are the Humanities Modern?” (included in the collection Latour and the Humanities, just out from Hopkins), as well as in a series of essays for The Chronicle Review: “Losing Faith in the Humanities,” “What Were the Humanities, Anyway?” and the essay you are reading now.ĭrawing on the history of ideas, the institutional history of the university, and the study of religion and secularity, the essays in this series are essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the peculiar situation of humanities scholarship now, at once ubiquitous and marginalized.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |