The Humanities

4 credits · Undergraduate

Today the humanities, once considered the jewels of a liberal arts education, find they must justify their very existence. In 1967, Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, argued against taxpayers "subsidizing intellectual curiosity." By 2015, the Wisconsin governor had reduced his university's mission to "meeting the state's workforce needs." Is this self-styled "commonsensical" thinking valid? Should the humanities try to make themselves more professional or "scientific"? Rather than seeing the humanities as a series of independent disciplines focused on different specific ends, this course argues that the humanities map the many ways that human beings have sought to be human throughout human history.