In the 1980s and 1990s, debates over the human­i­ties were a major com­po­nent of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal dis­course. On the one side were con­ser­v­a­tive tra­di­tion­al­ists who believed that all Amer­i­can col­lege stu­dents should read the West­ern Canon — the great­est books of the West­ern mind since Aris­to­tle — as a foun­da­tion for demo­c­ra­t­ic liv­ing. On the oth­er side were aca­d­e­m­ic mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ists who believed that a human­i­ties edu­ca­tion should be more com­pre­hen­sive and should thus include texts authored by minor­i­ty, female, and non-west­ern writers.

Few people are nostalgic for those culture wars because they were a fight between implacable foes. But in retrospect, perhaps we would do well to remember a time when all sides of a national debate believed that a humanities-based education was crucial to the survival of a democracy.

Those debates of the ​‘80s and ​‘90s were heat­ed. Indeed, they were a major front in what came to be known as ​“cul­ture wars” between mer­ci­less foes. Yet all sides in these cul­ture wars believed a human­i­ties edu­ca­tion — his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, lan­guages, phi­los­o­phy — was inher­ent­ly impor­tant in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety. In short, the human­i­ties were tak­en for grant­ed. In our cur­rent age of aus­ter­i­ty, this is no longer the case. Many Amer­i­cans no longer think the human­i­ties wor­thy of pub­lic sup­port. This is espe­cial­ly true of con­ser­v­a­tives, who in their quest to cut off state sup­port to high­er edu­ca­tion have aban­doned the human­i­ties entirely.

Take the state of Wis­con­sin, for exam­ple. In ear­ly Feb­ru­ary, Gov­er­nor and Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Scott Walk­er draft­ed a dra­con­ian state bud­get that pro­posed to decrease the state’s con­tri­bu­tion to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin sys­tem by over $300 mil­lion over the next two years. Beyond sim­ply slash­ing spend­ing, Walk­er was also attempt­ing to alter the lan­guage that has guid­ed the core mis­sion of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin over the last 100 years or more, known as the ​“Wis­con­sin Idea.” Appar­ent­ly Walker’s ide­al uni­ver­si­ty would no longer ​“extend knowl­edge and its appli­ca­tion beyond the bound­aries of its cam­pus­es” and would thus cease its ​“search for truth” and its efforts to ​“improve the human con­di­tion,” as his pro­posed lan­guage changes scrapped these ideas entire­ly; the governor’s scaled-back objec­tive was for the uni­ver­si­ty to mere­ly ​“meet the state’s work­force needs.”

When a draft of Walker’s pro­posed revi­sions to the Wis­con­sin Idea sur­faced, out­raged Wis­con­sinites (includ­ing some con­ser­v­a­tives) com­pelled the gov­er­nor to back­track. Yet Walker’s actions are con­sis­tent with recent trends in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. Repub­li­cans today are on the warpath against edu­ca­tion — par­tic­u­lar­ly against the human­i­ties, those aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines where the quaint pur­suit of knowl­edge about ​“the human con­di­tion” persists.

In 2012, Flori­da Gov­er­nor Rick Scott pro­posed a law mak­ing it more expen­sive for stu­dents enrolled at Florida’s pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties to obtain degrees in the human­i­ties. As Scott and his sup­port­ers argued, in aus­tere times, they need­ed ​“to lash high­er edu­ca­tion to the real­i­ties and oppor­tu­ni­ties of the econ­o­my,” as Flori­da Repub­li­can and State Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Don Gaetz put it. In oth­er words, a human­i­ties degree, unlike a busi­ness degree, was a lux­u­ry good. Even Pres­i­dent Oba­ma joined this cho­rus when he half-joked recent­ly that stu­dents with voca­tion­al train­ing are bound to make more mon­ey than art his­to­ry majors.

Such anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism, a strong ani­mus against the idea that learn­ing about human­i­ty is a wor­thy pur­suit regard­less of its lack of obvi­ous labor mar­ket applic­a­bil­i­ty, has deep roots in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Pres­i­dent Theodore Roo­sevelt advised that ​“we of the Unit­ed States must devel­op a sys­tem under which each indi­vid­ual cit­i­zen shall be trained so as to be effec­tive indi­vid­u­al­ly as an eco­nom­ic unit, and fit to be orga­nized with his fel­lows so that he and they can work in effi­cient fash­ion togeth­er.” Con­tem­po­rary con­ser­v­a­tives are thus mere­ly fol­low­ing the crude util­i­tar­i­an log­ic that has informed many politi­cians and edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers since the nation’s first com­mon schools.

But it was not always thus. Dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s, promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tives like William Ben­nett, who served in the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion as chair of the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties and then as Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion, argued that every Amer­i­can should have an edu­ca­tion ground­ed in the human­i­ties. This sur­pris­ing recent his­to­ry is large­ly for­got­ten, and not only because most con­ser­v­a­tives now dis­miss the val­ue of the human­i­ties. It is for­got­ten because the argu­ments for­ward­ed by Ben­nett and his ilk came in the con­text of the trau­mat­ic cul­ture wars, when left and right angri­ly bat­tled over rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent visions of a human­i­ties education.

Few peo­ple are nos­tal­gic for those cul­ture wars because they were a fight between implaca­ble foes. But in ret­ro­spect, per­haps we would do well to remem­ber a time when all sides of a nation­al debate believed that a human­i­ties-based edu­ca­tion was cru­cial to the sur­vival of a democracy.

As a lead­ing con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture war­rior, Ben­nett held a tra­di­tion­al­ist vision of the human­i­ties. He believed the West­ern canon — which he defined in the terms of Matthew Arnold as ​“the best that has been said, thought, writ­ten, and oth­er­wise expressed about the human expe­ri­ence” — should be the philo­soph­i­cal bedrock of the nation’s high­er education.

“Because our soci­ety is the prod­uct and we the inher­i­tors of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” Ben­nett mat­ter-of-fact­ly con­tend­ed, ​“Amer­i­can stu­dents need an under­stand­ing of its ori­gins and devel­op­ment, from its roots in antiq­ui­ty to the present.”

Most aca­d­e­mics in human­i­ties dis­ci­plines like Eng­lish and his­to­ry, in con­trast, took a more crit­i­cal stance towards the West­ern canon. They believed it too Euro­cen­tric and male-dom­i­nat­ed to prop­er­ly reflect mod­ern Amer­i­can soci­ety and thus revised it by adding books authored by women and minori­ties. Toni Mor­ri­son was to sit along­side Shake­speare. As lit­er­ary the­o­rist Jane Tomp­kins told a reporter from The New York Times Mag­a­zine in 1988, the strug­gle to revise the canon was a bat­tle ​“among con­tend­ing fac­tions for the right to be rep­re­sent­ed in the pic­ture Amer­i­ca draws of itself.”

Many col­lege stu­dents agreed with the canon revi­sion­ists. In 1986, Bill King, pres­i­dent of the Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Black Stu­dent Union, for­mal­ly com­plained to the Stan­ford aca­d­e­m­ic sen­ate that the university’s required West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion read­ing list was racist. ​“The West­ern cul­ture pro­gram as it is present­ly struc­tured around a core list and an out­dat­ed phi­los­o­phy of the West being Greece, Europe, and Euro-Amer­i­ca is wrong, and worse,” he con­tend­ed, ​“it hurts peo­ple men­tal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly in ways that are not even rec­og­nized.” Stan­ford stu­dents opposed to the West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion cur­ricu­lum marched and chant­ed, ​“Hey hey, ho ho, West­ern culture’s got to go,” and the aca­d­e­m­ic sen­ate approved mild changes to the core read­ing list that they hoped would sat­is­fy the under­stand­able demands of their increas­ing­ly diverse stu­dent body.

A sen­sa­tion­al­ist media made Stanford’s revi­sions seem like a proxy for the death of the West. Newsweek titled a sto­ry on the top­ic ​“Say Good­bye Socrates.” Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go philoso­pher Allan Bloom wrote a let­ter to the Wall Street Jour­nal edi­tor in 1989 — two years after his book, The Clos­ing of the Amer­i­can Mind, made a rig­or­ous if eccen­tric case for a clas­sic human­i­ties edu­ca­tion root­ed in the West­ern canon — in which he argued the Stan­ford revi­sions were a trav­es­ty: ​“This total sur­ren­der to the present and aban­don­ment of the quest for stan­dards with which to judge it are the very def­i­n­i­tion of the clos­ing of the Amer­i­can mind, and I could not hope for more stun­ning con­fir­ma­tion of my thesis.”

Bloom believed that a human­i­ties edu­ca­tion should pro­vide stu­dents with ​“four years of free­dom,” which he described as ​“a space between the intel­lec­tu­al waste­land he has left behind and the inevitable drea­ry pro­fes­sion­al train­ing that awaits him after the bac­calau­re­ate.” Lib­er­als and left­ists might have been sym­pa­thet­ic to such an argu­ment had Bloom not dis­missed texts authored by women, minori­ties, and non-west­ern­ers as lack­ing mer­it com­pared to the great books authored by those like Socrates who com­posed the West­ern canon.

In ret­ro­spect, these cul­ture wars over the human­i­ties are rather remark­able arti­facts of a his­to­ry that feels increas­ing­ly dis­tant. Whether Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty ought to assign John Locke or the anti­colo­nial the­o­rist Frantz Fanon, a debate that played out on The Wall Street Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al page in 1988, would be non­sen­si­cal in today’s neolib­er­al cli­mate marked by bud­get cuts and oth­er aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures. Now Locke and Fanon find them­selves for the first time on the same side — and it’s look­ing more and more like the los­ing one. On the win­ning side? Well, to take but one exam­ple, Win­ning, Gen­er­al Elec­tric CEO Jack Welch’s breezy man­age­ment book, which is wide­ly read in Amer­i­can busi­ness schools. Sad­ly, even the almighty West­ern canon, revised or not, seems fee­ble up against Win­ning and the cult of busi­ness. Con­ser­v­a­tive defend­ers of the human­i­ties are voic­es in the wilder­ness. The philistines are on the march.

The cul­ture wars over the human­i­ties that dom­i­nat­ed dis­cus­sion of high­er edu­ca­tion in the 1980s and 1990s had endur­ing his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Shout­ing match­es about acad­e­mia rever­ber­at­ed beyond the ivory tow­er to lay bare a cri­sis of nation­al faith. Was Amer­i­ca a good nation? Could the nation be good — could its peo­ple be free — with­out foun­da­tions? Were such foun­da­tions best pro­vid­ed by a clas­sic lib­er­al edu­ca­tion in the human­i­ties, which Matthew Arnold described as ​“the best that has been thought and said”? Was the ​“best” phi­los­o­phy and lit­er­a­ture syn­ony­mous with the canon of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion? Or was the West­ern canon racist and sex­ist? Was the ​“best” even a valid cat­e­go­ry for think­ing about texts? Debates over these abstract ques­tions rocked the nation’s insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion, demon­strat­ing that the cul­ture wars did not boil down to any one spe­cif­ic issue or even a set of issues. Rather, the cul­ture wars often hinged on a more epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ques­tion about nation­al iden­ti­ty: How should Amer­i­cans think?

But in our cur­rent age of aus­ter­i­ty, Amer­i­cans are not asked to think about such ques­tions at all. Neolib­er­al­ism is fine with revised canons — with a more inclu­sive, mul­ti­cul­tur­al vision of the human­i­ties. But neolib­er­al­ism is not fine with pub­lic mon­ey sup­port­ing some­thing so seem­ing­ly use­less. Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives have aban­doned their tra­di­tion­al­ist defense of the West­ern canon in favor of no canon at all.

Andrew Hart­man will be dis­cussing his new book A War for the Soul of Amer­i­ca: A His­to­ry of the Cul­ture Wars with In These Times Asso­ciate Edi­tor Mic­ah Uet­richt at 2040 N. Mil­wau­kee in Chica­go on Thurs­day, May 21 at 7pm.