Athens, Jerusalem, Babel, Sodom

My guest on the show today is writer Ann Manov, the artist formerly known as personality girl and the author of a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Republican Machines: Can the GOP save the humanities?”

In it, Manov goes back to her alma mater, University of Florida, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, perhaps the best known of the growing number of schools and centers around the country, typically at state universities in red states, dedicated to some mix of the great books and what has come to be called “civic thought.” On their website, the Hamilton school says that it teaches “the ideas and habits of thought that founded our country and sustain our free society.”

The question Manov set out to answer, in her reporting, was basically whether these civic centers were, as they billed themselves, the saviors of liberal arts education in the US, or were they what their liberal and left-wing critics warned they were: indoctrination centers to incubate young right wing culture warriors and/or “Trojan horses designed to ravage humanities departments across the nation.”

Or, and this is what Manov set out to determine, something else entirely? She writes:

It struck me that, as an undergraduate at UF, I might have preferred to take Hamilton’s Great Books of the Medieval World over the English department’s Survey of American Literature, whose syllabus from this past spring included Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sailor Moon, and A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. It also struck me as sufficiently unusual for a member of the GOP to go on national news, as Sasse had, to say that “the answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts.” I decided I would go back to Gainesville and investigate for myself.

As I get into some in the conversation, this is of more than just academic interest to me. I work at a college of liberal arts at a flagship state university in a red state that has not just a school of civic leadership but a separate institute in this philosophical space and a separate center in this space and a new great books-focused core curriculum that all students will be required to fulfill when it’s launched in a year or two. Also, of course, I just care about these issues, because I’m a humanities guy down to my DNA.

So many of the people in my life are humanities folks as well. Some of them are in one camp or another, and many are just worried about the state of the humanities, the liberal arts, in America, which we all seem to agree are under threat even if we differ from whence the threat come, whether it’s the left, the right, neoliberalism, or big bad AI. So the stakes is high, as the great De La Soul once said.

Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and distributed through its publication, Arc.

Peace.

Here are timestamped show notes for the episode:

- 0:00 — Intro: guest Ann Manov and her Harper’s essay “Republican Machines: Can the GOP Save the Humanities?”

- 0:32 — Overview of the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and the rise of “civic thought” centers