When was the last time people actually went to college because they thought reading old books was its own reward? If the humanities have indeed expired, it was a rather protracted death. Heller dates the start of the enrollment plunge to around 2012; two years earlier, Martha Nussbaum warned that the arts and humanities, as well as “the humanistic aspects of science and social science,” were “losing ground” worldwide. Two years before that, the former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz made waves with a viral essay, the impetus for his later book Excellent Sheep, that bemoaned the eclipse of “the humanistic ideal in American colleges.” In 1987, Allan Bloom claimed in The Closing of the American Mind that students had by then “lost the practice of and the taste for reading,” a development he argued had begun—along with a new spirit of intolerance toward free thought on campus—by the late Sixties. In 1956, the journalist William H. Whyte complained, in his best-selling jeremiad The Organization Man, that engineering- and business-education boosters were striving self-consciously to marginalize the humanities, despite the latter’s already “dismal” enrollment numbers. Whyte attributed the rise of the organization man’s ethos in part on the influence of the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and William James. But in 1903, in the infancy of the American research university, James had himself warned of the dangers of the “Ph.D. Octopus,” which threatened, he thought, to strangle the spirit of humanistic inquiry and “substance” with the tentacles of “vanity and sham.”
Of all these prophets, James, a philosophy and psychology professor at Harvard during the Gilded Age and the son of a wealthy Northeastern theologian, had perhaps the greatest claim to actually having witnessed humanistic education in its antediluvian era. Its mission was to mold men of his social station. In the late nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie that emerged triumphant from the Civil War—the WASP elite, as it would later be known—consolidated around a standard educational sequence for its scions. They would start off at a private boarding school, then head to an elite college, preferably Yale, Princeton, or Harvard. Along the way, they’d study the liberal arts: subjects such as the Greek and Roman classics, philosophy, literature, mathematics, natural history, and astronomy. The purpose of this curriculum, wrote The Nation’s founding editor, Edwin L. Godkin, was to enable the youngest members of the elite to “start on their careers with a common stock of traditions, tastes and associations.” Such education also prepared young American aristocrats to rule by equipping them with discipline and character. There was a solid economic logic to such notions. Until the early twentieth century, the expansion of industrial capitalism depended on the continual reinvestment of profit—which in turn required a firm sense of duty and purpose, to ward against the temptation to squander fortunes on idle luxuries.
