Eric Adler
@ProfEricAdler
Professor of Classics @UofMaryland; interested in humanism, classics, higher education, and jazz. RTs ≠ endorsements. New book: https://tinyurl.com/4zyc3kxb
Look what's arrived in the mail, dear reader. It's my author's copies of *Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt - Paul Elmer More Correspondence*, which will be officially released on Sept. 15!
"The utilitarian specialists who control most of our state universities are not content that the common man should be a worker: he should be nothing else, he should be kept a mere worker. They will not recognize and develop his humanity." --Norman Foerster (1946)
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
My friend @jennfrey 100%: “It’s not that liberal learning is out of step w/ student demand. It’s out of step w/ the priorities, values & desires of a board of trustees w/ no commitment to liberal ed & an admin class that won’t fight for liberal arts” nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
“The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.”
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
Here's an important and valuable column about the pathologies of the American college from Frank Bruni.
“What happened to college as a theater of intellectual betterment, character development, self-discovery?” Neither Chat GPT nor Trump killed the idea of college as intellectual discovery. That slow, deliberate death has been 70 years or so in the making. nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opi…
Even my beloved alma mater, although it takes in, give or take, a kajillion dollars per year in gifts, is under some pressure. Luckily, these proposed changes affect only teaching and research, rather than core university functions, such as gift solicitation.
The Division of the Arts & Humanities is considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight, reducing language instruction, and establishing minimum class and program sizes, citing new federal policies and shifts in the “underlying financial models” for higher education.
If Harvard, Columbia, etc go down, can the rest of us stop with the endless pursuit of more: UC “is still dealing with the effects of the $221 million deficit it acquired while trying to assert itself as a peer to older and better-funded universities.”
The Division of the Arts & Humanities is considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight, reducing language instruction, and establishing minimum class and program sizes, citing new federal policies and shifts in the “underlying financial models” for higher education.
U of Chicago is going to merge humanities departments and downscale its language offerings in part because...the institution spent too much money on construction projects. Its endowment: over $10 billion. Are there any leaders in higher ed who *want* to save the humanities?
U of Chicago is going to merge humanities departments and downscale its language offerings in part because...the institution spent too much money on construction projects. Its endowment: over $10 billion. Are there any leaders in higher ed who *want* to save the humanities?
U of Chicago is going to merge humanities departments and downscale its language offerings in part because...the institution spent too much money on construction projects. Its endowment: over $10 billion. Are there any leaders in higher ed who *want* to save the humanities?
The Division of the Arts & Humanities is considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight, reducing language instruction, and establishing minimum class and program sizes, citing new federal policies and shifts in the “underlying financial models” for higher education.
"It is not an advantage to us to indulge a sentimental attitude towards the past. For one thing, in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism..." --T. S. Eliot, *After Strange Gods* (1934)
“When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students.” @jennfrey on a successful program at @utulsa , and why it was destroyed.
I worry about this very much these days. If educators don’t come up with real answers to the challenges of AI, we run the risk of “educating” future generations that are close to functionally illiterate.
Maybe as more and more young people fail to develop basic literacy, university learning and book study, will revert to the (spiritually/intellectually) aristocratic or elite privilege it once was. I.e. the possibility of mass education will be increasingly revealed as a sham.
The antidote to a college that encourages left-wing soap-boxing on the part of faculty is not a college that encourages right-wing soap-boxing. It’s a college whose faculty has enough respect for students and their learning to allow them to come to their own conclusions.
A locked account: "Universities are very left. But most of what they do is not leftist propaganda. When conservatives look at them, that’s all they see, because they only think of universities as means to reproduce political beliefs. This tells you why they can’t make their own."
“The temptation has been to expand the subjects within the traditional four-year course so that mental mediocrities could readily complete an educational cycle which is more social than educational.” —Ray Lyman Wilber, President of @Stanford, 1930
Enrollment, number of majors or ratio of majors:faculty are easy metics favored by (1) people who know little about higher ed and plan to remain ignorant and (2) cynical academics who expect to benefit from the carnage.
How did enrollment become the main criterion? Why did the university leaders agree? Why did they strip the flagship as well as the satellites? Did university leaders outsource a difficult decision to politicians? Why did they cede authority over their budgets?
If enrollment and student popularity are to be a university’s sole criterion for worth, it should stop offering classes altogether and complete its transformation into a football resort/waterpark