No humanities curriculum has automatic, built-in moral or political results. A social justice-oriented curriculum could cause some students to recoil and become even more conservative or reactionary; a traditional curriculum could inspire the hunger for something more.

Students are human beings and therefore irreducibly unpredictable. In giving them access to certain cultural archives and patterns of thought, we are in no way determining what they will do with them.

I understand the impulse to claim a greater moral and political power for our disciplines -- after all, they mean so much to us that we dedicated our lives to them. But publicly insisting on their moral and political worth is doubly naive.

On the one hand, it's simply not true and all of us know, in our heart of hearts, that it's not true. On the other hand, it plays right into the hands of those who want to cut humanities programs because they see them as a form of political indoctrination. "See, they admit it!"

Even very minimal claims about the moral worth of the humanities are not necessarily true. "Critical thinking skills" could result in little more than greater skill in post-hoc rationalization. Greater empathy and understanding could lead to better manipulation of others.