THE MARKETPLACE

OF IDEAS

Louis Menand

American Council of Learned Societies

ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 49

ISSN 1041-536X
THE MARKETPLACE
OF IDEAS

Louis Menand

American Council of Learned Societies

ACLS OCCASIONAL PAPER, No. 49

© 2001 Louis Menand
 Introduction
In this provocative paper, Louis Menand seeks to address what are
the "philosophical roots" of the humanistic disciplines and how-
or if-those disciplines now connect to those historic roots. The
complex interplay of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and what
Menand calls "postdisciplinarity" is certainly one of the most
striking features of humanistic scholarship today. The modern
American university is only a bit more than a century old, yet we
find that its basic component parts, disciplinary departments and
professional schools, no longer suffice. Departments and schools
must accommodate dramatic intellectual change, but those changes
increasingly are incubated in centers, programs, and diverse sites
that do not easily fit disciplinary models. Professor Menand sees in
these trends the promise of an intellectually and socially healthy
future, but he also notes the many snares on the road to realization
of that hope.
Louis Menand is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, where he is also a
Professor of English. His books apply a deep humanistic sensibility
to intellectual history. They include DiscoveringModernism: T.S.
Eliot and his Context; Pragmatism:A Reader; and The Metaphysical
Club. He is the co-editor ofAmerica in Theory and of the Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism. He has taught at Queens College,
Princeton and Columbia Universities, and served as Visiting
Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Menand is also a
public intellectual, a species too often thought extinct. He is literary
editor and staff writer of The New Yorker, associate editor of The
New Republic, and contributing editor of the New York Review of
Books. We are delighted that he has agreed to publish this piece as
an ACLS OccasionalPaper and to continue his association with
ACLS as a member of the selection committee for the Charles A.
Ryskamp Research Fellowships.

ill
 The Marketplace
of Ideas*

Louis Menand
DistinguishedProfessor ofEnglish,
Graduate Center, City University of New York

People say that the humanities disciplines have collapsed, but for
the most part they do not say this with a huge amount of anxiety.
Students continue to enroll in humanities courses, they continue to
go to graduate school (even though they are often advised not to)
so that they can some day teach humanities courses themselves, and
a great deal of scholarship is still published. It is comforting to
assume that as long as these conditions obtain, the disciplinary
situation will shake itself out. I have no idea whether or not the
complacent attitude will prove to be the wise attitude, though it
often does. I do think, however, that the humanities disciplines are
facing a crisis of rationale, and sooner or later crises of rationale can
lead to crises of funding, and those, at least, are serious. The
humanities occupy only a corner of the higher education market-
place, but it has historically been a very prestigious corner. Al-
though no one is likely to take the trouble to cut the humanities
disciplines off, there is some fear that the action, including the
funding, is moving into areas of teaching and research that can
demonstrate a more obvious market utility. The humanities disci-
plines don't seem to be dying out, but they do feel dislocated. They
are institutionally insecure because they appear to have lost their
philosophical roots. The question this paper attempts to address is
exactly what those roots were in the first place.
 The history of higher education in the United States since the
Second World War can be divided into two periods. The first
period, from 1945 to 1975, was a period of expansion. The
composition of the higher education system remained more or less
the same-in certain respects, the system became more uniform-
but the size of the system increased dramatically. This is the period
known in the literature on American education as the Golden Age.
The second period, from 1975 to the present, has not been honored
with a special name. It is a period not of expansion, but of
diversification. Since 1975 the size of the system has grown at a
much more modest pace, but the composition-who is taught,
who does the teaching, and what they teach-has changed dramati-
cally. You cannot understand the second phase, the phase the
university is in now, unless you understand the first.
In the Golden Age, between 1945 and 1975, the number of
American undergraduates increased by almost five hundred per-
cent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly nine
hundred percent.' In the 1960s alone enrollments more than
doubled, from 3.5 million to just under 8 million; the number of
doctorates awarded each year tripled; and more faculty were hired
than had been hired in the entire 325-year history of American
higher education to that point. 2 At the height of the expansion,
between 1965 and 1972, new community college campuses were
opening in the United States at the rate of one every week. 3
Three external factors account for this expansion: the first was
the baby boom; the second was the relatively high domestic
economic growth rate after 1948; and the third was the Cold War.
What is sometimes forgotten about the baby boom is that it was a
period of record high birth rates that followed a period of record
low birth rates-the Depression and the Second World War.
When Americans began reproducing at the rate of four million
births a year, beginning in 1946, it represented a sharp spike on the
chart. The system had grown accustomed to abnormally small
demographic cohorts.
The role played by the Cold War in the expansion of higher
education is well known. The American university had been drawn
into the business of government-related scientific research during
the Second World War by men like James Bryant Conant and
Vannevar Bush. Conant was the president of Harvard; he had been
trained as a chemist, and he became, during the war, the civilian
overseer of scientific research for the military. (He was also chair-
man of the group that directed the production of the bomb used at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Bush was a former vice president and
dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and the director of the government Office of Scientific Research
and Development during the war. At the time of the First World
War, scientific research for military purposes had been carried out
by military personnel, so-called "soldier-scientists"; it was Bush's
idea to contract this work out to research universities, scientific
institutes, and independent private laboratories instead. In 1945 he
organized the publication of a report, Science-The Endless Fron-
tier, which became the standard argument for government subven-
tion of basic science in peacetime, and which launched the collabo-
ration between American universities and the national government.
Bush is the godfather of the system known as contract overhead-
the practice of billing granting agencies for indirect costs, an idea
to which many humanists owe their careers. This was the start of the
gravy train that produced the Golden Age. 4
Then, in 1957, came Sputnik. Though it had the size and lethal
potential of a beach ball, Sputnik stirred up a panic in the United
States. Among the responses (including, possibly, the election of
John F. Kennedy in 1960) was the passage of the National Defense
Education Act of 1958. The Act put the federal government, for the
first time, into the business of subsidizing higher education di-
rectly, rather than through government contracts for specific
research. Before 1958, public support had been administered at the
state level (which is one reason why there are public state universi-
ties in the United States but no public national university).
After the passage of the National Defense Education Act, the
main spigots from which government largesse flowed moved from
the Defense Department (which, ofcourse, continued to be a major
source of funding) to civilian agencies, notably the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foun-
dation, and the National Institutes of Health. The Act singled out
two areas in particular as targets of public investment: science and
foreign languages, thus pumping up two distinct areas of the
academic balloon.
This was also the period, shortly after Sputnik, when economists
such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz introduced the concept
of "human capital,"'5 which, by figuring educated citizens as a
strategic resource, offered another national security rationale for
increased government investment in higher education. In the
words of the enabling legislation for the National Defense Educa-
tion Act itself: "The security of the Nation requires the fullest
development of the mental resources and technical skills of its
young men and women.... We must increase our efforts to identify
and educate more of the talent of our Nation. This requires
programs that will give assurance that no students of ability will be
denied an opportunity for higher education because of financial
need." 6 This was the trigger for the fantastic expansion of the 1960s.
The National Defense Education Act was passed just before the
baby boom kicked in. Between 1955 and 1970, the number of
eighteen to twenty-four year olds in the United States grew from 15
million to 25 million. 7 The expansion received a late and uninten-
tional boost from the military draft, which provided a deferment
for college students until 1970. The result was that by 1968, 63.2
percent of male high school graduates were going on to college, a
higher proportion than do so today.8 This is the period when all
those community college campuses were springing up out of the
ground. They were, among other things, government-subsidized
draft havens.
Then, around 1975, the Golden Age came to a halt. The student
deferment was abolished and American involvement in the Viet-
nam War ended; the college-age population leveled off; the country
went into a recession; and the economic value of a college degree
began to fall. In the 1970s the income differential between college
graduates and high school graduates dropped from 61 percent to 48
percent. 9 The percentage of people going on to college therefore
began to drop as well, and a system that had more than quintupled
in size in the span of a single generation suddenly found itself with
empty dormitory beds and a huge tenured faculty. This was the
beginning of the long-term job crisis for American Ph.D.s, and it
was also the beginning of serious economic pressures on the liberal
arts college. Pressure on the liberal arts college translates into
pressure on the humanities disciplines, for research in the humani-
ties is essentially a by-product of the production of college teachers.
When the demand for college teachers drops, the resources avail-
able for research drop as well. From 1955 to 1970, the proportion
of liberal arts degrees among all bachelor's degrees awarded annu-
ally had risen for the first time in this century; after 1970, it began
going down again.'1 Today only one-third of all bachelor's degrees
awarded annually in the United States are in the liberal arts, and less
than one-third of these are in the humanities. The most common
major by far is business: twenty percent of all undergraduate
degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent are awarded in
education, and seven percent are awarded in the health professions.
There are almost twice as many undergraduate degrees awarded
annually in a field that calls itself"protective services" (concerned
largely with training social workers) than in all foreign languages
and literatures combined."
American higher education did grow after 1975, but much more
slowly, at a rate averaging about one percent a year. And it changed,
but in a different way: it diversified. In 1947, seventy-one percent
of college students in America were men. Today, a minority of
college students-forty-four percent-are men. As late as 1965,
ninety-four percent of college students were classified as white.
Today the figure for non-Hispanic whites is seventy-one percent.' 2
Much of this diversification happened after the Golden Age, and a
single statistic makes the point. In the decade between 1984 and
1994, the total enrollment in American colleges and universities
increased by two million, but not one of those two million new
students was a white American-born male. They were all non-
whites, women, and foreign students. The absolute number of
white American men in American higher education actually de-
clined between 1984 and 1994.13
Faculty demographics changed in the same way, a reflection not
so much of changes in hiring practices as of changes in the group
that went to graduate school after 1975. Current full-time Ameri-
can faculty who were hired before 1985 are twenty-eight percent
female and about eleven percent nonwhite or Hispanic. Full-time
faculty who have been hired since 1985-that is, for the most part,
faculty who entered graduate school after the Golden Age-are half
again as female (forty percent) and more than half again as
nonwhite (eighteen percent).14 These figures apply only to full-time
professors; they do not include part-time faculty, who now consti-
tute forty percent of the teaching force in American higher educa-
tion, and who are more likely than full-time faculty are to be
female."5 In 1997, there were 45,394 doctoral degrees conferred in
the United States; forty percent of the recipients were women (in
the arts and humanities, just under fifty percent were women), and
only sixty-three percent where classified as white American citizens.
The other thirty-seven percent were nonwhite Americans and
foreign students. 16 The demographic mix in higher education,
including both students and faculty, completely changed in the
span of about a generation. And this change just happens to have
coincided with the period, beginning around 1987, when higher
education came under intense public criticism for radicalism and
elitism-the period of the so-called "culture wars."
There are several reasons why more women and nonwhite
Americans, not to mention more non-Americans, began entering
higher education in greater proportions after 1970, but one ofthem
is purely structural. After 1970, there were fewer white American
males for selective schools to choose from. As a result, colleges and
universities sought new types of students. After 1970, virtually
every nonmilitary all-male college in the United States went co-ed.
The system had overexpanded during the Golden Age. Too many
state-subsidized slots had been created, and a much higher level of
competition in college admissions was the result. There had been
talk before 1975 about the educational desirability of coeduca-
tional and mixed race student bodies, but in the end it was
economic necessity that made it happen."7
The intellectual changes in many of the academic disciplines,
and particularly in the humanities, have the same etiology. This
does not mean that changes in the disciplines have been triggered
by changes in demographics (though this is often asserted). It
means that the factors leading to the new demographic make-up of
higher education are the same as those leading to the present
condition of the disciplines. The two phenomena are both fallout
from the Golden Age.
The strategic rationale for postwar expansion in American
higher education was geopolitical-we needed better hardware
than the communists-but the social policy rationale was
meritocratic. Postwar educational leaders, including James Conant
and George F. Zook, were concerned about broadening the range
of educational opportunity for all Americans, 8 and (as we have
seen) the National Defense Education Act of 1958 was quite
explicit on this point. If you seek to maximize your talent pool in
the name of greater national security, or of greater economic
productivity, you will not wish to limit entrants on the basis of
considerations extraneous to aptitude, such as gender, family
income, and skin color. Conant also believed that inherited privi-
lege leads to class resentments, and that class resentments lead to
conditions in which communism can grow. He therefore became
a leader in the establishment of standardized testing: he essentially
created the SATs, which he conceived of as a culturally neutral
method for matching aptitude with educational opportunity. 9
The meritocratic philosophy was accompanied by two other
postwar developments. One was the belief in the importance of
general education in undergraduate teaching, and the other was the
dominance of the scientific model in research. In practice, most
people paid lip service to general education in American universi-
ties after the war; relatively few colleges created general education
curricula-that is, required undergraduates to take specified extra-
departmental courses of the kind for which Columbia College is
famous. But such curricula were not necessary for the idea to have
an effect, since general education did receive a great deal of lip
service. Most educators subscribed to the ideas that the great works
of the Western tradition are accessible to all students in more or less
the same way, that those works constitute a more or less coherent
body of thought (or, at least, a coherent debate), and that they can
serve as a kind of benign cultural ideology in a nation wary of
ideology. This is the argument of the famous study Conant

7
sponsored at Harvard, General Education in a Free Society, pub-
lished in 1945, the volume known as the Red Book. Conant
believed that general exposure to the great books could help the
United States withstand the threat of what he actually referred to
as the "Russian hordes." 20
The other critical Golden Age development, the emergence of a
scientific model of research, was a reflection of the anti-ideological
temper of postwar American thought-the temper epitomized in
Daniel Bell's famous phrase "the end of ideology." 21 To some
extent the antipathy to ideology was simply a response to global
political history between 1914 and 1945, but to some extent, as
Thomas Bender has suggested, it was a response to all that federal
money that began pouring into universities after the war. Scholars
eschewed political commitments because they wished not to offend
their granting agencies. 22 The idea that academics, particularly in
the social sciences, could provide the state with neutral research
results on which pragmatic public policies could be based was an
animating idea in the 1950s university. In the sciences, it helped
establish what Talcott Parsons called the ethos of "cognitive
rationality." 23 In fields like history, it led to the consensus approach.
In sociology, it produced what Robert Merton called theories of the
middle range-an emphasis on the formulation of limited hypoth-
eses subject to empirical verification. 24 Behaviorism and rational
choice theory became dominant paradigms in psychology and
political science. In literature, even when the mindset was anti-
scientific, as in the case of New Criticism and structuralism, the
ethos remained scientistic: theorists aspired to analytic rigor. 25
Boundaries were respected and methodologies were codified. Dis-
cipline reigned in the disciplines. Scholars in the 1950s who looked
back on their pre-war educations tended to be appalled by what
26
they now regarded as a lack of analytic rigor and focus.
Because public money was being pumped into the system at the
high end-into the large research universities-the effect of the
Golden Age was to make the research professor the type of the
professor generally. This is the phenomenon to which Christopher
Jencks and David Reisman referred as "the academic revolution": 27
for the first time in the history of American higher education,
research, rather than teaching or service, defined the paradigm of
the professor-not only in the doctoral institutions, but all the way
down the institutional ladder. This strengthened the grip of the
disciplines on scholarly and pedagogical practice. Distinctions
among different types of institutions, so far as the professoriate was
concerned, began to be sanded down. This is how it was that the
system of higher education became more uniform as it expanded
between 1945 and 1975. The Cold War homogenized the aca-
demic profession.
This is the wind my academic generation inherited. It now seems
obvious that the dispensation put into place in the first two decades
of the Cold War was just waiting for the tiniest spark to blow sky-
high. And the spark, when it came, wasn't so tiny. The Vietnam
War exposed almost every weakness in the system Conant and his
generation of educational leaders had constructed, from the dan-
gers inherent in the university's financial dependence on the state,
to the way its social role was figured in national security policy, to
the degree of factitiousness in the value-neutral standard of research
in fields outside the natural sciences.
Then, after 1970, as new populations began to arrive in numbers
in American universities, the meritocratic rationale was exploded as
well. For it turned out that cultural differences were not only not
so easy to bracket off as men like Conant had imagined; those
differences suddenly began to seem a lot more interesting than the
similarities. The trend was made irreversible by Justice Lewis
Powell's decision in Regents ofthe University of Californiav. Bakke,
handed down in 1978.28 Powell changed the language of college
admissions by decreeing that if admissions committees wanted to
stay on the safe side of the Constitution, they had to stop talking
about quotas and begin talking about diversity instead. Powell's
opinion blew a hole in meritocratic theory, because he pointed out
what should have been obvious from the beginning, which is that
college admissions, even at places like Harvard, have never been
purely meritocratic. Colleges have always taken non-standardized
and non-standardizable attributes into account when selecting
students, from musical prodigies to football stars, alumni legacies,
and the offspring of local bigwigs. If you admitted only students
who got top scores on the SATs, you would have a very boring class.
"Diversity" is the very word Powell used in the Bakke opinion, and
there are probably very few college catalogues in the country today
in which the word "diversity," or one of its cognates, does not appear.
As the homogeneity of the undergraduate student body broke
down during the period of diversification, and the homogeneity of
the faculty began to break down with it, the disciplines themselves
underwent a series of transformations. These shifts are visible today
at the level of the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum in a new
emphasis on multiculturalism (meaning exposure to specifically
ethnic perspectives and traditions) and values (an emphasis on the
ethnical implications of knowledge); in a renewed interest in
service (manifested in the emergence of internship and off-campus
social service programs) and in the idea of community; in what is
called "education for citizenship"; and in a revival of a Deweyite
conception of teaching as a collaborative process of learning and
inquiry. The landmark study identifying this shift is Ernest Boyer's
Scholarship Reconsidered, published by the Carnegie Foundation in
1990. Boyer's findings have been confirmed by others, including
Bruce Kimball in his study of changes in the liberal arts curriculum. 29
This transformation in the undergraduate curriculum is clearly
a reaction against the model created by the Golden Age and the
academic revolution: the model of disinterested research and the
core curriculum. The vocabulary of"disinterestedness," "objectiv-
ity," "reason," and "knowledge," and talk about things like "the
scientific method," "the canon of great books," and "the fact/value
distinction," have been replaced, in many fields, and especially the
humanities, by attention to "interpretations" (rather than "facts"),
"perspective" (rather than "objectivity"), and "understanding"
(rather than "reason" or "analysis"). An emphasis on universalism
and "greatness" has been replaced by an emphasis on diversity and
difference; the scientistic norms that once prevailed in many of the
"soft" disciplines are viewed with skepticism; context and contin-
gency are continually emphasized; attention to "objects" has given
way to attention to "representations." The field in which these
transformations have been most emphatic and, seemingly, irrevers-
ible is my own, English, where much of the theorizing of this

10
phenomenon has taken place; its influence has spread, though,
across the humanities disciplines.
This trend is essentially a backlash against the scientism, and the
excessive respect for disciplinarity, of the Golden Age university. I
don't attribute it to demographic diversification, because most of
the people one would name as theorists of this development are
white men, and because the seeds of the undoing of the old
disciplinary models were already present within the disciplines
themselves. The artificiality of those Golden Age disciplinary
formations is what made the implosion inevitable. Thomas Kuhn,
Hayden White, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Paul De Man,
Stanley Fish-these are the people associated with the demise of
disciplinary integrity, and it is not a group that any contemporary
college catalogue would feel comfortable naming as a diverse
selection of humanity. 30 And, their work, for the most part, took
place entirely within the disciplinary frameworks in which they had
been trained. De Man's work was in many respects the culmination
of the New Critical tradition of ahistorical rhetorical analysis, just
as Fish's was the culmination of the reader-response approach
pioneered by two of the founders of modern English studies, I. A.
Richards and William Empson. Their work, though, helped spell
the end of the conception of literature as an autonomous field of
academic inquiry. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty's
attempt to put an end to (or to transcend) the analytic tradition in
philosophy, constructs its argument entirely from within the
tradition of analytic philosophy, just as The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, Kuhn's revisionist interpretation of the history of
science, is a perfectly conventional work in the philosophy and
history of science. But there is also no question that the turn in the
intellectual dialectic exemplified by these works fed into the
collapse of the color- and gender-blind ideal of meritocratic educa-
tional theory, and that it gave members of groups previously
excluded from or marginalized within the academy theoretical
equipment for the business of critiquing the traditional forms of
knowledge. Kuhn's book is emphatically not a work of science
studies, but science studies is what it gave birth to.

11
 The turn Boyer and Kimball have described at the level of the
undergraduate curriculum does not seem really to describe what
happened at the level of scholarship within the disciplines. Talk
about "values" and "civic education" is still mostly deanspeak; it's
the philosophical padding for certain intellectual changes for which
no one has yet devised a very coherent public-relations-tested
rationale. What happened to the humanistic disciplines happened
in two stages, and we are just emerging (if we are in fact to emerge)
from the second stage. In the beginning, what took place was not
a redefinition ofdisciplinarity so much as a kind ofantidisciplinarity.
Academic activity began flowing toward paradigms that defined
themselves essentially in antagonism towards traditional disci-
plines.
It would be simple to name these paradigms as Women's
Studies, Cultural Studies, Science Studies, Gay and Lesbian Stud-
ies, Postcolonial Studies, and so on, all ofwhich are nondepartmen-
tal by bureaucratic design (that is, they generally do not have their
own faculty lines or award terminal degrees) and interdisciplinary
by definition. But the general trend is much broader. It consists not
so much in an identification with a particular group-women or
gays or postcolonials--as in a widely diffused skepticism about the
universality of any particular line of inquiry or pedagogy, and a
rigorously enforced suspicion of the notion of "rigor." In English,
the discipline that seems, to its own practitioners and to others, the
most thoroughly at sea, the mood is more of bewilderment than
anything else. As my colleague David Richter has put it, "Once I
built a railroad, now it's done. Buddy, can you paradigm?"
Antidisciplinarity arose from the marriage of the theoretical
position that the disciplines are arbitrary (or at least limiting and
artificial) ways to organize knowledge, with the institutional failure
to integrate new areas of inquiry adequately into the traditional
disciplines. Women's Studies departments came into being be-
cause English and history and sociology departments were at first
not terribly interested in incorporating gender-based courses into
their curricula. The fundamental rationale for Women's Studies
was the perception of a gender bias in the disciplines: that is why its
spirit was, in the beginning, fundamentally antidisciplinary. People

12
flocked to the new, nondepartmental centers because the tradi-
tional disciplines, staffed largely by Golden Agers, did not recog-
nize gender or ethnic identity as valid rubrics for teaching or
scholarship. Outside the discipline became the good place to be,
and there was a period in the 1980s and 1990s when many
disciplines were almost defined by the internal criticisms they
generated. The stars were the people who talked about the failures
and omissions of their own fields.
When it became clear in those years that a split was developing
between Golden Age and post-Golden Age approaches to inquiry,
it was common to argue for a teach-the-conflicts resolution-an
idea championed most notably by Gerald Graff.3 1 The notion was
that professors might neutralize the divisiveness within their own
disciplines by making divisiveness the subject of their teaching. But
this teach-the-conflicts approach now seems otiose; although there
are certainly conflicts between disciplines, there are no longer
conflicts within most of the disciplines-not, for example, within
most English departments. The traditionalists have been co-opted.
And so, in a way, have the iconoclasts. They have awakened to find
that history, in its cunning, has made them the rulers of the towns
they once set out to burn down. A certain nostalgia for the culture
wars is even starting to be felt: at least they provided a context for
debate, something against which professors could define them-
selves. It's a little like the way Samuel Beckett described what we
will do in the afterlife: We'll sit around talking about the good old
days, when we wished that we were dead.
Once the antidisciplinary stage had passed, the academy entered
into a different phase, which might be called the phase of
postdisciplinarity. Some professors now establish themselves as
stars not by attacking their own disciplines, but by writing books
on subjects outside, or only tangentially related to, their disciplines.
That is one meaning of postdisciplinarity. More often it simply
means a determined eclecticism about methods and subject matter.
Of course, across-the-board generalizations about this phenom-
enon are not completely helpful. Some fields have been trans-
formed and some have not. Anthropology, for example, has be-
come more postdisciplinary; sociology has not. English has become

13
almost completely postdisciplinary; comparative literature, a field
that has always been "definitionally challenged," seeks a heightened
sense of disciplinarity. History, for the most part, has been accom-
modating to the new dispensation; philosophy, for the most part,
has not. The existence of incompatible scholarly standards and
assumptions across the different liberal arts is part of the problem
the humanities face.
The purpose of this paper has been to suggest a genealogy for the
current state of the humanities that avoids the following narrative:
when more women and nonwhites came into the system, tradi-
tional notions of scholarly rigor disappeared. My argument is not
that this narrative is undesirable-though, amazingly, one often
hears proponents of academic diversity reiterating a more upbeat
version of it. My argument is that the narrative is incorrect. My
purpose has also been to suggest that within the history of higher
education in the twentieth century, the Cold War university is the
anomaly, and that what are criticized as distortions in the present
system are largely reactions against that earlier dispensation. Be-
yond this analysis, I do not have much to say in the way of
prescription or prophecy-since, as I have been trying to show,
changes in higher education appear to be driven much more by
external contingencies than by deliberate planning or an orderly
and progressive evolution of ideas. It is possible, though, to
examine a few tensions within the present system.
In trying to imagine the future of disciplinarity, it is worth
remembering that the disciplines are not actually very old them-
selves. Most of them came into being between 1880 and 1910,
when larger, more holistic organizations, such as the American
Social Science Association and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, broke up into smaller and more special-
ized professional associations, such as the Modern Language Asso-
ciation, the American Historical Association, and so forth. It was
during this period, around the turn of the century, that the
department first established itself as the basic unit of academic
organization. 32 When we talk about "the disciplines," then, we are
talking about a bureaucratic arrangement whose history is not very
long.

14
 People refer to the new organizations of knowledge as "interdis-
ciplinary," but this seems mistaken. The collapse of disciplines
must mean the collapse of interdisciplinarity as well; for
interdisciplinarity is the institutional ratification of the logic of
disciplinarity. The very term implies respect for the discrete per-
spectives of different disciplines. You can't have interdisciplinarity,
or multidisciplinarity, unless you have disciplines. There is more
interest on the part of administrators in interdisciplinary work, and
some college catalogues now feature interdisciplinary majors, but
there is nothing terribly new or anti-foundational about it. Inter-
disciplinary scholarship or teaching simply means the deployment
of professional expertise in two or more disciplines. That is not the
same phenomenon as postdisciplinarity.
At a recent conference at the Stanford Humanities Center, one
of the directors read the titles of projects of applicants for fellow-
ships at the center and asked the audience to guess the field of each
applicant, the idea being that scholars' projects often bear no
obvious relation to the discipline to which they belong. The only
time the audience was right was when they guessed that an
applicant whose project was about politics must be from an English
department. In English today, the pattern for success seems to be
to produce a doctoral dissertation in a traditional period of literary
history (since it is by historical period that most entry positions
continue to be advertised), and then to produce a second book on
some completely nonliterary subject, like the history of carrots,
written in the first person. An indifference to traditional profes-
sional boundaries demonstrates that you are a serious professional.
One can pick up evidence of the decay of disciplinary integrity
more readily from undergraduate catalogues than from the subjects
of doctoral dissertations, which are, after all, the most traditional of
academic genres. 33 The biggest change in college catalogues be-
tween 1970, the height of the Golden Age, and 1994 is an
enormous increase in the number of offerings, even in departments
whose enrollments have remained constant. At the same time,
courses have become much more specialized. This seems to be a
symptom of uncertainty about the essential character of the disci-
plines. In the catalogue for Trinity College, for example, the

15
philosophy department's announcement asserts: "A good philoso-
pher should know at least a little something about everything." The
department then recommends the study of a foreign language, but
only because it "encourages the habit of careful attention to a text."
It recommends a "broad understanding of modern science," but
suggests that "any good science course ... is suitable." It goes on to
recommend courses in history, literature, and the arts, but advises
that students generally select courses in these fields according to the
amount of reading assigned (the more reading, the more desirable).
It ends by saying what was already clear enough: "We require no
particular nondepartmental courses as part of the major." The next
section, entitled "Introductory Courses," begins: "There is no
single best way to be introduced to philosophy." 34 One is reminded,
byway of Golden Age contrast, of Quine's classic remark: "Philoso-
phy of science is philosophy enough."
Still, one also finds departmental self-descriptions of a different
sort, and this is one of the clearest indications of a collapse of
consensus about the humanities curriculum. Compare, for ex-
ample, the English departments at two otherwise quite similar
schools, Amherst and Wellesley. 35 English majors at Wellesley are
required to take ten English department courses, eight of which
must be in literature. (Wellesley's English department also offers a
number of courses in film.) Basic writing courses do not count
toward the major. All English majors must take a core course called
"Critical Interpretation"; one course on Shakespeare; and at least
two courses on literature written before 1900, one of which must
be on literature written before 1800. Cross-listed courses-that is,
interdisciplinary courses-are, with one exception, not counted
toward the major. The course listing reflects attention to every
traditional historical period in English and American literature.
Down the turnpike at Amherst, on the other hand, English
majors have only to take ten courses "offered or approved by the
department"-in other words, apparently, they may be courses in
any department. Majors have no core requirement and no period
requirements. They must simply take one lower and one upper
level course, and they must declare, during their senior year, a
"concentration," consisting of three courses whose relatedness they

16
must argue to the department. The catalogue assures students that
"the choices of courses and description of the area of concentration
may be revised as late as the end of the add-drop period of a
student's last semester." Course listings, as they appear online, are
not historically comprehensive, and many upper-level offerings
focus on such topics as African (not African-American) writers. At
Amherst, in short, the English department has a highly permissive
attitude toward its majors. I'm sure if you asked why, the response
would be that English represents more an intellectual approach, a
style of inquiry, a set of broad concerns, than a distinctive body of
knowledge. At Wellesley, the department obviously holds an
opposing view, envisioning the field more substantively and con-
cretely. What this contrast suggests is that there has been a great deal
of paradigm loss within the humanities disciplines, and that this
loss is manifesting itself at the undergraduate level, as well.
One obstacle to a positive redefinition of the forms of knowledge
is the prevalence of negative definitions. The spirit of
antidisciplinarity persists in many places. In 1999, the New York
Times reported that Smith College was introducing engineering
into its curriculum. The paper quoted the rationale being offered
by the administration and the faculty. Smith wanted to build an
engineering curriculum, they explained, in order, first, to attract
more nonwhite applicants to Smith. (Although nobody said so,
Smith also wanted to maintain selectivity by broadening the pool
of potential applicants, a special problem at a single-sex school.)
Secondly, the institution also wished to integrate an overwhelm-
ingly male profession; and thirdly, it hoped to expose the field of
engineering to critical theory. The vice-provost of Smith was
quoted as follows:

Diversity is a concept that humanists have the

words to debate, but engineers cannot even begin
that discussion. Engineers, particularly engineer-
ing faculty, are nearly a homogenous group in
thinking and attitudes. Smith has a unique oppor-
tunity to create a really forward-looking engineer-
ing experience, avoiding the stereotypes of the past

17
 and incorporating language and cultural studies,
ethics and so on. 36

Engineering enlightened by cultural studies: this is the new

deanspeak. No one said, simply, Smith is adding an engineering
program because it wants to train excellent engineers. Diverse
engineers, critically thinking engineers, gendered engineers, ethical
engineers, yes, but not just excellent engineers. Excellence, the
golden word of the Golden Age, is no longer part of the vocabulary.
One enters a discipline in order to reform it.
One of the institutional implications of postdisciplinarity con-
cerns studies centers. Scholarly action is clearly gravitating toward
the kind of work represented by the studies centers; at the same
time, though, the intellectual authority of the centers themselves is
waning. As their concerns have become mainstream, they have
begun to lose their focus. This has certainly happened in the case
ofWomen's Studies-a field whose impact on the university since
1975 has been enormous. Just as the New York Times reported, in
1997, that courses on gender and sexuality could now be found in
virtually every liberal arts college catalogue in the country, the
feminist journal Differences published a special issue entitled
"Women's Studies on the Edge." Feminism still commands tre-
mendous graduate student loyalty, but the field itself has become
somewhat inchoate. The area known as "Cultural Studies," though
it is plausibly the name for something many people do-that is,
examining the political implications of culture through the study of
representations-has always been narrow and exclusionary, driven
by a set of specific theoretical and ideological assumptions. For
many people, it has been more comfortable to undertake cultural
studies outside a Cultural Studies program. And Science Studies, or
at least the wing of Science Studies associated with Cultural
Studies, suffered a serious blow from the publicity surrounding the
Sokal hoax.
The only thing that will save the studies centers from redun-
dancy is to transform them from programs into departments, or
the institutional equivalent of departments. Right now the tradi-
tional disciplines still control the production and placement of new

18
professors. They possess the credentialing and hiring power. Still,
however little the disciplines are respected intellectually, it is not
clear that it is in the faculty's interest to let them wither away, since
one of the functions they perform is the preservation of academic
freedom. 37 The discipline acts as a community that judges the merit
of its members' work by community standards. When professors
are hired on an ad hoc basis by academic administrators, or when
they are not professionally situated in particular departments, they
lose this protection, and their status becomes a function of lines in
a budget. Administrators would love to "melt down" the disci-
plines, since that would allow them to deploy faculty more effi-
ciently-and the claim that disciplinarity represents a factitious
organization of knowledge is as good an excuse as any. Why support
separate medievalists in your history department, your English
department, your French department, and your art history depart-
ment, none of them probably attracting huge enrollments, when
you can hire one interdisciplinary super-medievalist and install her
in a Medieval Studies program, whose survival can be made to
depend on its ability to attract outside funding?
Another danger of postdisciplinarity, as many people have
remarked, is the devaluation of expertise. In a professionalized
economy, in which specialists are more highly rewarded than
generalists, the devaluation of expertise leads to economic vulner-
ability. To a degree this has already happened, which is why the
university humanities professor is a vocation that simultaneously
appears too professionalized in its self-conception and insuffi-
ciently professionalized in its public image. Lynn Hunt has even
suggested that the decline in the professional reputation of aca-
demic work in the humanities is a consequence of the increasing
feminization of both faculty and students in these fields. 38 Excellent
work in the humanities and the liberal arts generally is still
produced, but for that to continue it is necessary for disciplines to
justify themselves in terms that make sense to the rest of society.
The fate of the National Endowment for the Humanities is a pretty
good signal of what can happen at all but the best-endowed
institutions when such justification is lacking. It is an assertion with
an entirely impressionistic basis, but the universal word of praise in

19
humanistic scholarly circles seems to have become "smart"-a term
that sidesteps any implications of knowledge production, or even
disciplinary continuity. To the extent that funding depends on a
demonstration of social utility, "smart" is unlikely to do the trick.
The transformation, or dissipation, of the humanities disciplines
is happening in two places in the higher education system: at the
high end of scholarship, where the most prestigious older scholars
and the most ambitious younger scholars make a point of trans-
gressing disciplinary boundaries and assumptions, and at the mid-
level liberal arts college, where the competition for students makes
curricular innovation not only attractive but necessary. But it is not
happening within doctoral programs: graduate students are still
being trained as specialists, and for a scholarly and pedagogical
world that is rapidly ceasing to exist. Doctoral programs are, of
course, the most conservative bastions of an institutionally conser-
vative profession. (As Cornford pointed out long ago in
MicrocosmographiaAcademica, the basic rule of faculty governance
is: "nothing should ever be done for the first time.""39) But, at some
point, graduate programs will have to produce the generalists and
postdisciplinary teachers American colleges are demanding. Doc-
toral students are still being trained, at an increasingly enormous
expense of time, as though they were about to enter research
institutions. Most, however, are not.
My own view is that the academy is well rid of the Golden Age
and its disciplinary hubris, but that it is at some risk of sliding into
a predictable and aimless eclecticism (as opposed to an imaginative
and dynamic eclecticism, which I support). In a perfect world,
which is to say in a fully funded world, the intellectual uncertainties
caused by the collapse of the disciplines would eventually shake
themselves out. The good ideas would drive out the bad. People
would find a way to separate what is worth studying and teaching
from what is trendy or meretricious. But the world is not fully
funded. Funding is, alas, a function of the cogency of the work as
it exists right now, and this cogency has become, for reasons I have
tried to explain, very difficult to articulate. A lot has changed in
higher education in the last fifty years.

20
 What has not changed, though, is the delicate and somewhat
paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general
culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant-
for the university to engage with the public culture, and to design
its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in
view. That is, in fact, what Golden Agers tried to accomplish, and
it is what post-Golden Agers are trying to accomplish. To continue
to be relevant today, I believe academic inquiry ought to become
less specialized, less technical, less exclusionary, and more holistic.
I hope that this is the road down which postdisciplinarity is taking
us. At the end of this road, though, there is a great danger, which
is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the
public culture. That would be a catastrophe. The academic's job in
a free society is to serve the public culture by asking the questions
the public does not want to ask, by investigating the subjects it
cannot or will not investigate, by accommodating the voices it fails
or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to
see what kind of teaching and thinking needs to be done, and how
they might better organize themselves to do it; but they need to
ignore the world's insistence that they reproduce its self-image.

21
 Notes
* My work on higher education is supported by a generous grant from
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I am especially grateful to Jesse Ausubel
of the Foundation for his encouragement and advice. Versions of this
paper were delivered at the University of Oxford, Trinity College,
Stanford University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. I am grateful to the sponsors of
those talks for the invitations and to audience members for their
responses. This paper appeared, in different versions, in The New York
Review ofBooks (October 18, 2001) and The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn
2001).
1. Roger L. Geiger, "The Ten Generations of American Higher
Education," in American HigherEducation in the Twenty-First Century:
Social, Political,and Economic Challenges, ed. Philip G. Altbach, Robert
O. Berdahl, and Patricia J. Gumport (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), 61.
2. US Bureau of the Census, HistoricalStatistics of the United States,
Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Office, 1975), 1: 382, 387; Walter P. Metzger, "The Academic Profes-
sion in the United States," in The Academic Profession:National, Disci-
plinary, and InstitutionalSettings, ed. Burton R. Clark (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 124.
3. Geiger, "Ten Generations," 62.
4. See, generally, Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge:
American Research Universities Since World War II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 157-97, and Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy
Diamond, The Rise ofAmerican Research Universities: Elites and Chal-
lenges in the Postwar Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997), 26-50.
5. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical
Analysis, with SpecialReference to Education, 2d ed., (NewYork: National
Bureau of Economic Research, 1975), and Theodore William Schultz,
The Economic Value of Education (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1963).
6. Quoted in Elizabeth A. Duffy and Idana Goldberg, CraftingaClass:
CollegeAdmissions and FinancialAid,1955-1994 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 170.

22
 7. Duffy and Goldberg, Craftinga Class, 4.
8. "College Enrollment of Recent High School Graduates: 1960 to
1994," US Bureau of the Census, StatisticalAbstractofthe UnitedStates,
1996 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996), 180.
9. Duffy and Goldberg, Crafting a Class, 22,; see also Marvin
Lazerson, "The Disappointments of Success: Higher Education After
World War II," Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social
Science, 559 (1998): 72.
10. Joan Gilbert, "The Liberal Arts College: Is It Really an Endan-
gered Species?" Change, 27 (September/October 1995), 36-43.
11. "Earned Degrees Conferred, 1996-97," Chronicle ofHigher Edu-
cation, 47 (September 2000), 32. Business BAs are categorized as
"business and marketing."
12. National Center for Education Statistics, "Total Fall Enrollment
in Institutions of Higher Education, by Attendance Status, Sex of
Student, and Control of Institution: 1947 to 1997," "Enrollment of
Persons 14 to 34 Years of Age in Institutions of Higher Education, by
Race/Ethnicity, Sex, and Year of College: October 1965 to October
1998," DigestofEducationStatistics, 1999, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/
digest99/d99t 175.html>, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/digest99/
d99t215.html>.
13. Louis Menand, "Everyone Else's Higher Education," New York
Times Magazine, April 20, 1997, 48. Statistic calculated from tables in
the Chronicle of HigherEducation, "Almanac Issue, 1996."
14. Martin J. Finkelstein, Robert K. Seal, and Jack H. Schuster, The
New Academic Generation: A Profession in Transformation (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 26-32.
15. Part-Time Adjunct, and Temporary Faculty: The New Majority?:
Report of the Sloan Conference on Part-Time andAdjunct Faculty ([New
York]: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1998), 5.
16. National Center for Education Statistics, "Doctor's Degrees
Conferred by Institutions of Higher Education, by Racial/Ethnic Group
and Sex of Student: 1976-77 to 1996-97," Digest ofEducation Statistics,
1999, <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2000/digest99/d99t275.html>.
17. This is the conclusion of Duffy and Goldberg's Crafting a Class,
a study of admissions policy at sixteen Ohio and Massachusetts liberal
arts colleges.

23
 18. See General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Harvard
Committee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945); and
Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President's
Commission on HigherEducation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
19. See Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the
American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), esp.
42-52.
20. James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvardto Hiroshimaand
the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), 520.
21. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political
Ideas in the Fifties (New York: The Free Press, 1962).
22. Thomas Bender, "Politics, Intellect, and the American University,
1945-1995," in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty
Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Bender and Carl E. Shorske (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 17-54.
23. Talcott Parsons and Gerald M. Platt, The American University
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 47; see Geiger,
Research and Relevant Knowledge, 331-2.
24 . Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed.
(New York: The Free Press, 1968), 39-72.
25. See Wallace Martin, "Criticism and the Academy," in The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 7: Modernism and the
New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 269-321.
26. See the essays inAmericanAcademic Culturein Transformation,ed.
Bender and Schorske, esp. Carl E. Schorske, "The New Rigorism in the
Human Sciences, 1940-1960," 309-29.
27. Christopher Jencks and David Reisman, TheAcademic Revolution
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968).
28. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 US 265.
29. Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Prioritiesof the Profes-
soriate (San Francisco: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, 1990), Bruce Kimball, The Condition of American Liberal
Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition (New York: College
Entrance Examinations Board, 1995). See also Education and Democ-
racy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, ed. Robert Orrill (New
York: College Entrance Examinations Board, 1997).

24
 30. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (1962; 2nd
ed,. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Hayden White,
Metahistory: The HistoricalImagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretationof Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Richard
Rorty, PhilosophyandtheMirrorofNature (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1979); Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1971); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of
Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980).
31. Gerald Graff, Beyondthe Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts
Can RevitalizeAmerican Education (New York: Norton, 1992). See also
Francis Oakley, Community of Learning: The American College and the
LiberalArts Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 160-
64. Oakley has an interdisciplinary dialogue in mind; Graff's is essen-
tially intradisciplinary.
32. See Metzger, "The Academic Profession," 136; BurtonJ. Bledstein,
The Culture ofProfessionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of
Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976); and Laurence
R. Vesey, The Emergence oftheAmerican University (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1965), 320-21.
33. See generally, in support of what follows, Francis Oakley,
"Ignorant Armies and Nighttime Clashes: Changes in the Humanities
Classroom, 1970-1995," in What's Happened to the Humanities?, ed.
Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 63-83.
34. <http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/major.html>. It might seem
that this catalogue description is only a Socratic definition of philosophy
as open-ended inquiry, and therefore perfectly traditional. I was told by
a member of the Trinity department, though, that it was, in fact,
designed to avoid the suggestion that philosophy is an autonomous
discipline.
35. <http://www.amherst.edu/-english/>; <http://www.wellesley.edu/
English/>.
36. Ethan Bronner, "Women's College to Diversify via Engineering,"
New York Times, February 20, 1999, Al.
37. See Joan Scott, "Academic Freedom as an Ethical Practice," in The
Future ofAcademic Freedom, ed. Louis Menand (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 163-80.

25
 38. Lynn Hunt, "Democratization and Decline? The Consequences
of Demographic Change in the Humanities," in What's Happened to the
Humanities?,ed. Kernan, 17-31.
39. Gordon Johnson, University Politics:F. M. Cornford's Cambridge
and HisAdvice to the YoungAcademic Politician(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 105.

26
 ACLS Occasional Papers
1. A Life of Learning (1987 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Carl E. Schorske
2. Perplexing Dreams:Is There a Core Tradition in the Humanities?
by Roger Shattuck
3. R.M. Lumiansky: Scholar, Teacher, Spokesman for the Humanities
4. A Life ofLearning (1988 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by John Hope
Franklin
5. Learned Societies and the Evolution ofthe Disciplines by Saul B. Cohen,
David Bromwich, and George W. Stocking, Jr.
6. The Humanities in the University: Strategiesfor the 1990s by W.R. Connor et al.
7. Speakingfor the Humanities by George Levine et al.
8. The Agenda for the Humanitiesand Higher Educationfor the 21st Century by
Stephen Graubard
9. A Life of Learning (1989 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Judith N. Shklar
10. Viewpoints: Excerpts from the ACLS Conference on The Humanities in the 1990s
by Peter Conn et al.
11. National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities
12. A Life of Learning (1990 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Paul Oskar
Kristeller
13. The ACLS Comparative Constitutionalism Project:FinalReport
14. Scholars and Research Librariesin the 21st Century
15. Culture's New Frontier:Staking a Common Ground by Naomi F. Collins
16. The Improvement of Teachingby Derek Bok; responses by Sylvia Grider,
Francis Oakley, and George Rupp
17. A Life of Learning (1991 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Milton Babbitt
18. Fellowships in the Humanities, 1983-1991 by Douglas Greenberg
19. A Life of Learning (1992 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by D.W. Meinig
20. The Humanities in the Schools
21. A Life of Learning (1993 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Annemarie
Schimmel
22. The Limits of Expression in American Intellectual Life by Kathryn Abrams et al.
23. Teaching the Humanities: Essays from the ACLS Elementary and Secondary
Schools Teacher Curriculum Development Project
24. Perspectives on the Humanitiesand School-Based Curriculum Development by
Sandra Blackman et al.
25. A Life of Learning (1994 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Robert K. Merton
26. Changes in the Contextfor CreatingKnowledge by George Keller, Dennis O'Brien,
and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
27. Rethinking Literary History--Comparativelyby Mario J. Valdes and Linda
Hutcheon
28. The Internationalizationof Scholarship and Scholarly Societies
29. Poetry In and Out of the Classroom: Essays fom the ACLS Elementary and
Secondary Schools Teacher Curriculum Development Project
30. A Life of Learning (1995 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Phyllis Pray Bober
31. Beyond the Academy: A Scholar's Obligations by George R. Garrison et al.
32. Scholarship and Teaching: A Matter of Mutual Support by Francis Oakley
33. The ProfessionalEvaluation of Teaching by James England, Pat Hutchings, and
Wilbert J. McKeachie
34. A Life of Learning (1996 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Robert William
Fogel
35. CollaborativeHistoriography: A ComparativeLiterary History of Latin America
by Linda Hutcheon, Djelal Kadir, and Mario J. Valdes
36. New Connectionsfor Scholars: The Changing Missions of a Learned Society in an
Era of Digital Networks by Douglas C. Bennett
37. Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship:Achievements, Prospects, and
Challenges-The United States Focus by Pamela Pavliscak, Seamus Ross, and
Charles Henry
38. Report ofthe President, 1986-1997by Stanley N. Katz
39. A Life of Learning (1997 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Natalie Zemon
Davis
40. The Transformation of Humanistic Studies in the Twenty-first Century: Oppor-
tunities and Perils by Thomas Bender, Stanley Chodorow, and Pauline Yu
41. Computing in the Humanities: Summary of a Roundtable Meeting
42. A Life of Learning (1998 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Yi-Fu Tuan
43. Wave of the Present: The Scholarly Journalat the Edge ofthe Internetby
Christopher L. Tomlins
44. The Humanist on Campus: Continuity and Change by Denis Donoghue et al.
45. A Life of Learning (1999 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Clifford Geertz
46. A Life of Learning (2000 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture) by Geoffrey
Hartman
47. The Humanities and The Sciences by Jerome Friedman, Peter Galison, and Susan
Haack, with an Introduction by Billy E. Frye
48. Collectors, Collections, and Scholarly Culture by Anthony Grafton, Deanna
Marcum, and Jean Strouse, with an Introduction by Neil Harris
49. The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand