released 1/19/2024

Two interviews with professors of literature from 1999 focus attention on deadly fault-lines in higher education. First, Alvin Kernan (The Death of Literature [1990]; What’s Happened to the Humanities? [1997]; In Plato’s Cave [1999]) argues that the academy suffers from being hyper-democratic: the university has become the demoversity, and hence hierarchies of knowledge — including that of teach and student — are lost with disorienting consequences. Then Marion Montgomery (Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body [1990]; Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth as Beauty [1997]; The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality [1999]) speaks about the necessity of learning to love limits.

25 minutes

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