I've just finished @ProfEricAdler's Battle of the Classics. It is well-worth the read, a book that can be read profitably both by those with a passing interest in the fate of the humanities and those well-soaked in the relevant debates. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-battle-of-the-classics-9780197518786?q=battle%20of%20the%20classics&lang=en&cc=us

Especially valuable is Adler's grounding of a defense of the humanities in Renaissance humanism: the value of the humanities in education consists above all in putting students in touch with "works of great wisdom that could perfect students' character and style."

Also useful: we've had versions of the debates we're now having before, and in some ways the old debates are revealing. For example humanists struggle in the 19th century against "scientific democrats" who themselves have a vision of what human beings should be.

Our debate, though an echo of older ones, sometimes proceeds as if we're not dealing with rival understandings of how human beings should be shaped. This is partly because humanists for well over a century have been trying to justify their enterprise in terms of skills.

Adler is quite convincing when he argues that this was and still is a losing argument; humanists were not convincing then when they argued that their courses uniquely strengthened mental muscles and they are not convincing now when they talk about "critical thinking" skills.

Adler turns to a mostly forgotten source to point in a better direction, the work of Irving Babbitt. Babbitt also plays a role in Anthony Kronman's Assault on American Excellence, a quite different sort of book. Babbitt revival?

What Adler and Kronman do have in common, though, is an insistence that, even if we can't specify one set of books that are great at perfecting students, some are better than others, and we ought to be on our campuses discussing our choices in these terms, which we shy away from.

Adler's book also reminds me of a book I love, Delbanco's College: What it Was, Is and Should Be, which also insists that even if antebellum American colleges were parochial, the unwillingness of today's colleges to opine about what students should learn is an abdication

Adler was perhaps wise mostly to steer clear of campus cultural warfare. But I wonder if he underestimates the resistance on the part of social-justice-oriented humanists even to the the understanding he draws from Babbitt, which is not insistently "Western."

In my n=1 experience efforts to include texts like the Bhagavadgita and Analects, or for that matter works of African-American literature and social thought written prior to the late twentieth century don't do much to mollify such humanists.

The "diversity" argument, in some ways an artifact of how the Supreme Court justified affirimative action was always about a certain conception of justice according to which it will always be more useful to read and reread "White Fragility" than to read Douglass or Dubois.