Rediscovering the Renaissance
Steve Dufour
http://www.washingtontimes.com
Rediscovering the Renaissance
By Suzanne Fields
Published March 20, 2006
This is not a great century for the humanities. The great works that
once were essential to define the educated man are barely tolerated in
our great universities. By one estimate, only four percent of the
bachelor of arts degrees are awarded to English majors, and only two
percent to scholars of history. Nearly a quarter of all bachelor's
degrees are awarded to majors in business and business-related fields.
There are several reasons why. A college education is expensive and
student loans are burdensome. Students, and particularly the parents
who flirt with bankruptcy to send their kids to college, want degrees
in subjects that lead to something practical. Practical means making
money. So young people prefer engineering, science, medicine, law and
business. Arts and letters get short shrift.
The humanities faculties, furthermore, are usually riddled with
political correctness, with courses taught by priggish tenured
professors who are determined to persuade their students to think left
rather than to think critically. This was the concern of Lawrence
Summers, who was deposed as president of Harvard for trying to impart
actual learning into the humanities as taught on the Charles.
"At a time when the median age of our tenured professoriate is
approaching 60 the renewal of the faculty has to be a central concern,"
he said in his letter of resignation, implying that the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences had grown smug, stuffy, stodgy and self-satisfied.
Harvard is typical. David Horowitz describes in his new book, "The
Most Dangerous Academics in America," how the problem has become
pandemic on campus. "In the university in the social sciences and
humanities there is no bottom line for bad ideas," he says. "In the
real world a Marxist would be regarded as flat-earthist, yet in the
university they occupy positions as professors of history, political
science and even (at the University of Massachusetts) economists."
Others at Harvard nevertheless deserve credit for working beneath
the academic radar to revive interest in the humanities. Harvard Press
publishes a series of important texts from the Italian Renaissance,
edited for a broad readership among a new generation of readers,
presenting largely forgotten literature that is essential for
understanding how and why the humanities were once recognized as
crucial to the development of the educated man. These works take their
theme from Pier Paolo Vergerio, a Italian Renaissance humanist, whose
work six centuries ago defined liberal arts studies.
"We call those studies liberal, then," he wrote, "which are worthy
of a free [liber] man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom
are either practiced or sought and by which the body or mind is
disposed towards all the best things."
The Harvard series, published under the imprimatur I Tatti
Renaissance Library, is named after the villa near Florence that the
art critic Bernard Berenson bequeathed to Harvard. The university press
has already published 20 volumes. Adam Kirsch, who describes some of
the works in Harvard magazine, tells how these works nourished the
writers who flourished in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, Boticell and
Fra Angelica, Renaissance artists who continue to draw huge crowds to
our art museums.
What's astonishing in these revived texts is how they testify to
the changes in attitudes toward what we should learn. The humanist
writers saw the study of art and literature as necessary for teaching
virtue and building character. In that sense they were "useful,"
essential to the critical thinking that produces the wisdom for the
whole of society.
They remind the reader of how precious a book can be, an
appreciation that is swiftly evaporating in the age of the Internet.
Printing books was once a labor of love, literally. Cosimo de' Medici,
the rich ruler of Florence, hired 45 scribes who completed 200 volumes
in 22 months. "Gold, silver, gems, fine raiment, a marble palace...
such things as these give one nothing more than a mute and superficial
pleasure," wrote Petrarch. "Books delight us through and through, they
converse with us, they give us good advice; they become living and
lively companions to us."
Petrarch might have been writing about politically correct
professors when he observed that the more educated men become the more
aggressively perverse they become. It was more important to Petrarch to
be a man of character than a learned man. "If You [cq] choose to grant
me nothing else," he prays, "let it be my portion to be a good man...
If learning alone is granted us, it puffs and ruins and does not
edify."
If the scholars don't want to learn from these authentic masters,
now those of us who live outside the walls of academe can.
Rich Alderson
Nothing, only breaking the copyright of an apparently neo-con newspaper that
treats David Horowitz' fuckwit screed as if it were even true.
--
Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon |
ne...@alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against |
"You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and |
--Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
lariadna
>From article:
> What's astonishing in these revived texts is
>how they testify to
>the changes in attitudes toward what we
>should learn. The humanist
>writers saw the study of art and literature as
>necessary for teaching
>virtue and building character. In that sense
>they were "useful,"
>essential to the critical thinking that produces
>the wisdom for the
>whole of society.
I guess I don't get what is so special or
new about these texts. If they're from
Harvard, I imagine they are good, but
there have been plenty of texts about
the Renaissance over the years. I
thought it was one of the more
popular time periods to study,
particularly in art and literature.
C.