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"Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get from not reading it."
- Unknown
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ZIN Product Number: 10518981
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Hardcover, 410 pages
Publisher: ISI Books
ISBN: 1882926544
Release Date: Jan 10, 1994
| |  | | | In Brief
Classical studies, once considered the foundation of all higher learning, is today nearly moribund. Studentsand the general publicseem no longer interested in what the Greeks and Romans did or what they had to say. They certainly have no expectation of discovering wisdom in our classical past. The rejection of the relevance of the past, moreover, has increasingly spread throughout the humanities. Why is this occurring? And does it matter? Though many have sought to explain, or explain away, the problems of contemporary higher education, and the humanities in particular, few authors have examined the problem as deeply or as thoroughly as have Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton, well-known classicists and the acclaimed authors of such books as Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind.
No one has explained so well, as these authors, the crucial linkages between the discipline of classics and modern Western civilization. They demonstrate here that no one can understand, much less hope to defend, the modern West without a thorough grounding in the classical authors and ideas that were its progenitors.
In Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age, Hanson, Heath, and Thornton begin by unsparingly documenting the degeneration of classics. They also reveal the root causes of this decline. They point to the academics themselvestheir careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized, inaccessible work, among other thingsas the source of the crisis, and call for a return to “academic populism,” an approach characterized by accessible, graceful writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.
Subsequent chapters detail the betrayal of classics by classicists, including chapters discussing the hypocrisy of Professor Martha Nussbaum's attempt to justify the radicalization of classical studies, the self-indulgent careerism of humanities professors, the solipsistic narcissism of recent academic work in classics, the postmodernist contradictions and inanities now plaguing classical studies, and the disappearance of the disinterested humanities professor. An epilogue reviews the hilariously bizarre (but disturbing) “Unabomber episode,” in which authors Hanson and Heath were turned in as potential Unabomber suspects by one of their feminist colleagues.
Hanson, Heath, and Thornton write in a style that is as illuminating as it is engaging. No one who reads this book will be able to deny the seriousness of the crisis in classics and the humanities at large; it will be equally impossible to deny the cultural significance of this crisis. Fortunately, the authors lay out detailed proposals to arrest the decline in humane learning. These proposals, and especially their call for professors to embrace academic populism, merit a fair and widespread hearing. Bonfire of the Humanities should be read by anyone interested in a sophisticated yet accessible analysis of the root problems affecting academia and the necessary measures to effect recovery.
| | | | From The Publisher
With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleagured, disciplineclassicsand reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselvestheir careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other thingsas the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to “academic populism,” an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.
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| | | |  | | | The Word On The Street
Donald Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of History and Classics, Yale University
Professors Hanson, Heath and Thornton have written a set of powerful essays that combine scholarship, passion and wit in a devastating critique of the errors and sins that have brought the condition of the humanities low in America's colleges and universities. They take on the elite rulers of what has become a shrinking and increasingly embattled kingdom with a vigor and zeal that embody the power latent in studies that are truly humanistic. Their assaults resemble the attacks made by the humanists of the Renaissance against the scholastic pettifoggers of their day and, in time, are bound to win a similar victory. —Donald Kagan
Virgil Nemoianu, William J Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy, Catholic University of America
The true enemies of the Humanities are an unholy alliance between the tenured ideological dictatorship of deconstructive Leftists and the corporate-managerial mentality of fat overpaid administrators. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton are resolved to give these nefarious forces a run for their money. What makes this book genuinely splendid is that its authors know where to start: in Classical Antiquity, the indispensable foundation for any education that wants to see young minds growing into their full human potential. —Virgil Nemoianu
| |  | | | Accreditation
Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Greek and Director of the Classics Program at California State University, Fresno. He is the author or editor of many books, including Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, Free Press, 1998), and The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999). In 1992 he was named the most outstanding undergraduate teacher of classics in the nation. John Heath is Associate Professor of Classics at Santa Clara University. His books include Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder (Peter Lang 1992) and Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press 1998). Bruce S. Thornton is Professor of Classics and Humanities and in the Department of Foreign Languages at California State University in Fresno. Thornton's books include Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Westview, 1997), Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge(ISI Books, 1999), The Humanities Handbook (Prentice Hall, 2000), and Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter, 2000).
| |  | | | Introduction: Academic Populism and the Assault on the Classics Part I: What We Should Not Be and Not Do
1. Cultivating Sophistry—3
Bruce S. Thornton
2. Socrates Redux: Classics in the Multicultural University?—29
John Heath Part II: Very Bad Theory
3. More Quarreling in the Muses' Birdcage—55
John Heath
4. "Too Much Ego in Your Cosmos"—93
Victor Davis Hanson
5. The Enemy Is Us: The "Betrayal of the Postmodern Clerks"—137
Bruce S. Thornton Part III: Elitists, Careerists, and ssorted Opportunists
6. Self-Promotion and the "Crisis" in Classics—195
John Heath
7. Who Killed Homer?: The Prequel—239
Victor Davis Hanson & John Heath
8. The Twilight of the Professors—299
Bruce S. Thornton Epilogue: Not the Unabomber—309
John Heath Notes—335 Index—359I
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| | | | | | Keywords
Education, Humanistic, United States, Classical education, Education / Teaching, Education, Higher, Ancient and Classical, Aims & Objectives, Educational Policy & Reform, United States, Education, Humanistic, Classical education
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