The Point was founded in 2009 by three graduate students in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, which served as a formative intellectual model for the magazine—so it will likely come as no surprise to many of our readers that we’ve been following the news about the university’s decision to pause Ph.D. admissions in several programs (including the entire Humanities Division and, indeed, Social Thought), and to potentially consolidate and eliminate numerous departments within the Humanities Division, with increasing apprehension.
We’ll have further reflections on UChicago and the contemporary university coming soon to our website and our Substack, but in the meantime, we’ve been returning to our extensive archive of writing on the humanities in higher ed, from our issue 25 college symposium to our coverage of West Virginia University’s shuttered language program to some UChicago-specific deep cuts. A few of these are highlighted below.
Gray’s memoir is so insistently out of place among higher-education polemics that it might be worthwhile for that reason alone. She is an inveterate institutional loyalist, impervious to the appeal of the movements and ideologies to which many academics have openly and happily hitched their work. To call someone an institutional loyalist now cannot help but sound like an accusation of moral corruption—surely you’re not going defend Yale over justice?
The organization of knowledge in the university—here [Humboldt] was quite influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant—should take for granted that there were incommensurable spheres of knowledge that the university ought to reflect in its organization. Roughly: science and value.
If college is both an individual experience and all the things we collectively assert, believe and hope for in its name, the discourse about college too often reinforces the normative force of a college ideal by lumping together myriad institutions and experiences.
What follows is an attempt to disentangle some of those experiences, and how they relate to different ideas of what college is.
Whereas the quit-lit canon depicted the academic humanities as a charnel house of competition and hopelessness, it was to become for me an oasis: a place where I could observe and contemplate, from however small a remove, the riddles of existence revealed in everyday life.
Santos’s popularity at Yale tells us something about the contemporary university, an institution not only structured so as to produce Santos’s class, but also to promote it with the sort of devotion that I, as a philosophy professor, can only look upon with a mixture of envy and despair.
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
