Like everybody, I went to college at a time of transition. It was a pretty good time, it was a pretty weird time, we lived the heyday of laxity, we lived the constraints of puritanism, ours were the last of the good years, ours was the beginning of the glorious future, and so on.

Languages and literature were what drew me on. I was good enough at them to get into advanced courses and be encouraged to major in one of those fields. My fellow students were already talking like their parents: “Major in Greek? What are you going to do with that?”

I don't remember what I answered, but I'm sure I thought it was a critical reflection on the presuppositions of their question and they thought it was obnoxiously snooty.

The majority of the Duke students of 1977-1981 were (depending on how you saw things) either still children of the 50s, seeking security and the good life through a solid professional qualification, or already Reaganites, determined to get as rich as possible and concentrating only on efforts that would achieve that goal. I say “the majority”: I don't have statistics to back this up (I guess the Alumni Office could provide them), just the subjective impression that there weren't many of us who were studying languages, literatures, philosophy, anthropology and history, heedless of the morrow and likely (with luck and persistence) to end up in front of a blackboard. It wasn't, by the way, at all the case that the artsy students came from privileged backgrounds and the business-minded ones came from the striving and starving classes. Rather the opposite. My two best college friends grew up in the kind of circumstances where a roll of paper towels was an unreasonable luxury (so kids, sitting over their hot dog and bean soup, yelled “Pass the rag!” when a napkin was needed), and they were the ones who I felt were really living the life of the mind. When I was in the company of people from the comfortable classes, like myself, I thought they deserved more honor if they were going for something less likely to yield profit, and merely rational if they were already planning to preserve or enlarge their family fortunes. But I guess the times were not so dire: whether because supply of the nice things in life was not so constrained, or because the demand for them was less voracious, being pulled towards the arts and humanities wasn't yet seen as an indication of irresponsibility or mental defect.

These days the drumbeat is hard to ignore: the papers are repeating each other's assertions that colleges need to prepare people for careers, not adorn them with the luxuries of a liberal education. When a financial paper interviews the president of an Ivy League college, the topic of how the crisis affects the institution just naturally segues into a question about whether it's time to close down the “department of French literature” (sic; to read the phrase with a knowledge of the semantic associations of American journalism, it's bad enough that it should be “French,” but “literature” on top of that!). Maybe this is the bombing that precedes the assault, an attempt to take away the talking points that would make it easier to appeal to a glorious tradition or a high purpose in defense of those fields of knowledge whose results are, yes, not immediately exchangeable for cash but more useful than a lot of other things in leading life, or national life, in a complicated world.

Suppose the humanities really are a batch of “social graces” added onto the person. Well, would it be entirely a waste of time for us to teach our children good manners? Isn't the spectacle of a person with money but no insight or curiosity or social tact one of the most uninspiring things imaginable? I would even be willing to take the rock out of the hand of the attackers of the humanities and argue that, in a large sense of “social” and a large sense of “graces,” social graces are just what we need, just what people have always needed to make decent lives for themselves and their children. It's not about different shapes of fork and how to curtsey. Another talking point: though they may not bring in the riches, the humanities and philosophy are cheap, cheap to learn and cheap to practice. Some of the best stuff in these domains comes out of countries where you won't find a lot of electricity or marble countertops. Homer and Aeschylus accepted as a matter of course diet and living conditions that would repel a modern street person.

I know this must sound like a self-interested argument. Of course I want my field to survive and prosper, and not just for the duration of my career, but well beyond. But in this case, I'm also trying to knock down a poor argument that casts humanities as indulgences, therefore things that need to be cut back now that times are tough. (The real matter at issue may be that the humanities are poorly defended within the universities themselves, and so easy targets for cutting; the “luxury” argument would then be no more than a pretext. But let's take it as a genuine argument for now.) It's not so clear that a lot of what you might learn in business school is such serious, meat-and-potatoes, bedrock, necessary stuff either. For example, all that theorizing, so well-received in the day, that assumed the rationality of markets. If there had been less of that, people would have made fewer stupid assumptions in buying stocks, in leveraging assets, in structuring businesses and portfolios, and we would be sitting in a smaller pile of dreck today. Surely an influential and erroneous economic ideology, maintained well after market behavior has questioned its validity, is a more serious luxury to have spent the rent money on. You could buy a lot of French departments for what the Chicago economics department has lost the US economy lately.

If the economic stimulus package isn't just money to burn, it should be spent on things we need: infrastructure, education (not just the B-school variety, please; see above), health care, and repairs to our environment, by which I don't just mean cleaning up Superfund sites or planting trees or thinking pious thoughts about the ozone hole, but also rebuilding our cities to make them less inequitable and more livable. To spend money on this sort of thing-- that's an investment. It would make the future a much pleasanter place to inhabit. And this would be meaningful work for lots of people who need it.

The people who were made so smug about the justification for their existence by the consensus of the Reagan years-- I'm not calling for them to be pushed aside, put on show trial or eliminated, because we're a decent polity, but perhaps we can listen to them a little less as we direct young people to think about solving the problems of the human body and belly. And we might invite the scholars of the humanities to get off the time-out chair and join in the discussion. Their time will come; it's always been their time. For it doesn't take much, just a bit of food, shelter and medicine, to equip your human being for doing the humanities: asking “why,” saying “wow,” making up a little tune.