As the universities expanded in the twentieth century, and as the hard sciences began to retreat to the margins of an educational system increasingly reluctant to demand too much of its students, the humanities moved to the center of the curriculum. First among them was English, a subject that established its place as a university degree in Britain only about mid-century, and largely as a result of the failed attempt by I. A. Richards to treat the study of literature as a branch of empirical psychology. Art history rose along with English, bringing with it the Hegelian historical approach that had been developed in the German universities. And the growing prominence of philosophy (still considered a branch of the “moral sciences” during my undergraduate days in Cambridge) laid the foundations for the continuing expansion of the curriculum into areas as diverse as classical civilization, film studies, and creative writing. The simultaneous expansion of the social sciences to encompass anthropology (coupled to archaeology in the Cambridge of my youth), sociology, economics, political science, and the theory of education meant that many of the new areas of study fell uneasily between arts and sciences and required extensive borrowings from both. Take media studies: was it a branch of sociology or a subsection of literary criticism? The habit very quickly arose during the 1960s and 1970s of throwing together clusters of disciplines from the social sciences and the humanities in order to generate “studies” that would appeal to the increasingly unqualified intake of students by conveying a spurious — and usually highly politicized — image of relevance.
In the current university, the impression arises that outside the hard sciences just about anything goes, and that the humanities have neither a method nor a received body of knowledge, it being up to the professor to decide what to teach in his class. Occasional attempts to establish a canon of great books are quickly and easily overthrown, while the journals fill with articles devoted to what Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal have castigated as “fashionable nonsense.”
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