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10 Questions about the future of What does the intellectual climate of today forecast for the writers and scholars of tomorrow? Thomas Mallon poses 10 questions about the future of the humanities in America. Mallon is the author of the novels Bandbox, Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and the soon-to-appear Fellow Travelers. His nonfiction books include Stolen Words, A Book of One’s Own, Mrs. Paine’s Garage, and In Fact, a collection of essays. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, he is a contributing editor of The American Scholar, and the former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1. How can American professors learn to write about literature in language that isn’t a crude, pseudo-technical insult to the text it’s supposedly explicating? 2. How can current undergraduate instruction in the humanities, mired as it is in jargon and political faddishness, hope to inspire at least a portion of the most gifted students to enter academic life rather than, say, business school or TV production? 3. Are we willing to make the effort to teach a new generation — one that’s never known a world without the wildly accessible Web — that words and ideas can in fact be owned, at least for a period of time? 4. Even so, are owners of intellectual property willing to realize that longer and longer copyright terms are doing more to inhibit than promote creativity? 5. How can the contemplative mind survive in the multitasking, ADD-inducing world of digitization? Are we willing to face the downside of this great electronic boon? Do we really want students reading electronic texts of the classics that are festooned with more links than a Wikipedia entry? Aren’t a few moments of quiet bafflement preferable to an endless steeplechase across Web page after Web page? 6. Are we willing to consider the irony that our unceasing communication with one another — the dozen extra phone calls that we all now make each day; the two dozen pointless e-mails — is making us less human? And that we might have more important things to say if we could re-master the lost art of shutting up, for at least a half hour every now and then? 7. Are American writers, artists, and thinkers truly prepared to admit that Islamofascism is a real, and even imminent, threat to everything they are accustomed to thinking, saying, and creating? 8. Can the National Endowment for the Humanities, even as it continues a laudable effort to make Americans better acquainted with their own history, learn to resist a platitudinous rhetoric that sometimes makes it seem like the National Endowment for Classroom Civics? 9. Are Americans in general prepared to admit that their writing and speaking skills are in no better shape than their waistlines? 10. Are we also willing to admit that the universalization of English is more apparent than real? And that our general failure to know foreign languages is an act of both laziness and arrogance — one that threatens America’s legitimate claims to leadership in the world?
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For reproduction or distribution rights, please contact scholar@pbk.org. __________________________________________________________ Copyright © 2007 The American Scholar. All rights reserved.
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