Thank you to Tyler Austin Harper. Though certainly critical of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, his story hit upon a deeper problem facing the humanities: our culture's insistence on things of immediate 'worth,' and the Faustian bargain the humanities made in an attempt to prove that they were one of those things. Tyler Austin Harper suggests that the Mellon Foundation has yoked arts and letters to the wagon of social justice, subordinating pure inquiry to political fashion. But there never was a 'golden age' in which scholarship floated above the turbulence of history. Universities were built alongside empires and on the backs of the working class. Libraries were endowed by industrial fortunes and the robber barons. Canons of literature were curated by gatekeepers who mistook their vantage point for universality. The 'neutrality' that Harper mourns was not the absence of politics; it was the comfort of an unexamined center. To ask who was excluded from that center is not to corrupt...
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