在我职业生涯的大部分时间里，人文学科的未来是一个概念问题. That’s no longer the case. When enrollments are down, 澳门合法赌场官网下降, funding and jobs are down, 附加费涨了, and departments are being closed, 关于哪种新理论或跨学科视野正在兴起的抽象辩论并不重要. 当约翰霍普金斯大学著名的人文中心被提议关闭时(它后来以修改后的形式保存了下来), 我们知道，人文学科的繁荣并不取决于高层人士.

不，这取决于底层的人，那些用脚投票的大学生. If an 英语 department’s chairman tells the dean, "We’ve got to hire someone in this new area of ____,院长回答道, "But you can’t even get your existing courses half-filled." If, 然而, a parent calls and grumbles, "I’m paying lots of money, 而我女儿却进不了她想上的任何英语课,“嗯, that calls for action.

这是一种很少有人文学科教授能够克服的情况. 研究生院和助理教授职位不会促使你去吸引大一和大二的学生. Instead you learn how to impress senior professors. 但现在，没有什么比19岁孩子的喜好更重要了.

And as humanities enrollments have slipped, in some places precipitously, 教师们感到了让他们的课程更相关、不那么严格的压力. 典型的寻找课程的学生不会被充满老戏剧和每周400页阅读材料的教学大纲所吸引. Contemporary and multicultural materials, 更多的媒体, less reading and fewer writing assignments, 而且绝对没有诗歌——这是建立招生的处方.

Nothing could be further from it than what W.H. Auden did at the University of Michigan in 1941. 奥登于1939年离开英国，在安娜堡大学做了一段时间的客座教授. 他把自己的课程命名为“欧洲文学中的命运与个人”,在大屠杀和存在主义情绪盛行的时代，这是一个及时的主题. 几年前，它的教学大纲重新浮出水面，并引发了许多关于它的大量评论,000页最强大和最具挑战性的文学经典:神曲全文, 四个莎士比亚, 帕斯卡思想, 贺拉斯的常微分方程, 狐坡尼, 拉辛, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, 《澳门合法赌场官网》, The Brothers Karamazov, 《澳门合法赌场官网》, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, 卡夫卡, 克尔, T.S. 艾略特. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, 每周都有数百万人收看大都会博物馆的周六广播, 但很难想象还有什么比瓦格纳的日耳曼暴行更不符合千禧一代的注意力持续时间. Auden assigned three of them.

We don’t have any records of the student response to Auden’s course, 但我们可以肯定，这样的阅读清单会让21世纪的大学生反感. 即使是那些少数寻找“好书”项目的人也可能会因为工作量而望而却步. 哥伦比亚大学著名的“文学与人文”课程声誉卓著, 但教学大纲里的阅读量远不及奥登的课程. 此外，这也是哥伦比亚大学和芝加哥大学的必修课. Any Auden-like course today would have to be voluntary; otherwise it might chase away applicants and annoy faculty members who prize student choice. 有人会认为，一旦特里林和巴赞的鬼魂消失，它就不会在任何地方存活, or Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, 离开, and certainly not in the provinces. “今天在地球上哪里能找到如此大胆的机构、老师或学生去尝试类似的事情?"

这个问题, 事实上, appears on the syllabus of LTRS 3803, the first part of the two-semester, 这是俄克拉何马大学的一门团队授课课程，与所有的传统观念背道而驰. It’s modeled on Auden’s course, with a few changes. The instructors — Kyle Harper, a classicist and the university’s provost; the historian Wilfred McClay; and David Anderson, a professor of 英语 — have spread it out over an entire year, and they’ve excised a few books (Dante’s Paradiso, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, 卡夫卡). But they added The Odyssey, 《澳门赌场玩法官网》, 贝奥武夫, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 《澳门合法赌场官网》, 《澳门赌场玩法官网》, 傲慢与偏见, 尼采, 看不见的人, 以及其他20世纪的杰作，比如德里克·沃尔科特的新荷马史诗《澳门合法赌场官网》. 他们放弃了大部分歌剧，但保留了《澳门合法赌场官网》和瓦格纳的《澳门合法赌场官网》. 在课程描述中，他们坦率地说自己“喜欢西方经典”，并坚持在研究界不太流行的主题:命运, 上帝和诸神,有意义的人生, 权威.

When enrollment opened last semester, the unexpected happened. The course filled up within minutes. 哈珀已经警告过他的学生:“这是你们上过的最难的课." The syllabus was posted online in advance, so that students knew exactly what they were getting into. The course meets a general-education requirement at Oklahoma, but so do many other courses with half the workload. To accommodate the unexpected demand, the class was expanded from 22 to 30 students, the maximum number that the assigned classroom could hold.

I sat in on a class in October. McClay lectured on Inferno. The atmosphere was genial but focused. 五分钟后你就能知道一个班级是否有团队精神——没有阴郁的面孔, no eyes drifting to windows and cellphones, even the bad jokes get a laugh. McClay slid from Augustine to Bonaventura to Jesus, 约拿, 《澳门赌场玩法官网》, and the prodigal son before taking up Paolo and Francesca, 然后是自杀, 鸡奸者, 杀人犯, and frauds in Dante’s torture zones.

下课后, 大约一半的学生和我一起去了邓纳姆学院的餐厅, one of Oklahoma’s graceful new residential colleges, 吃午饭. 在那里, without the professors present, 我问了一个关键的问题:他们为什么要报名参加西方文明的新兵训练营?

 一个同学抱怨说，他要做的功课是其他课的三倍. 其他人点点头. 但你可以从他的话中听到一种自尊，这种自尊来自于比正常情况下做更多的工作, from climbing the highest hill while your peers dog it. 另一名学生说，教学大纲的页数让她感到得意, 这表明教授们足够尊重她，要求她承担繁重的历史文学工作. "This is what I came to college for," another said. One more chimed in, "This class is changing my life."

他们承认, 太, the distinctiveness of the works they read, 一名学生称其为他们在其他地方学习的东西的“基础”. 诚然，他们钦佩教授们，但真正吸引人的是教材. When I asked what they would change about the course, 他们直接去找书:加上《澳门合法赌场官网》和《澳门合法赌场官网》的部分内容.

Their attitude was enlivening. But the only thing that really matters is enrollment. "Will you sign up for next semester’s course?我问. "Definitely," they replied, all of them. (This semester has 32 students enrolled, 超过了最初的22人上限，因为有更多的人申请加入.)

This is now the measure of success for the humanities. Do undergraduates want to come? 人文学科在物质上的衰落，使得理论和政治辩论退居次要地位, 如果不是不相关. Recovery and survival must start from the base.

俄克拉何马州奥登大学的课程是如何做到这一点的一个小而重要的例子. Western-canon talk offends many people in the humanities these days, 少数教师的传统主义者经常反对进步的正统观念. 但是30年前, 当时欧洲中心主义与多元文化主义的辩论成为了一个全国性的话题, nothing much changed within the departments. 当代、“非传统”和“相关”阅读的趋势仍在继续.

I advise the traditionalists to try the Oklahoma way. 设计你的西方文明或名著课程，并将其提升到奥登的水平. Be frank about the reading challenge. Boast of the aged, uncontemporary nature of the materials. Highlight the old-fashioned themes of greatness, 英雄主义和邪恶, 爱与背叛, 上帝与真理, and say nothing against intersectionality and other currencies. Your antagonists are mediocrity, 青年文化, 现代主义, and the disengagement of professors and students. You occupy a competitive terrain, and your brand is Achilles, 那喀索斯, 巴斯的Wyf, 伊索尔德, 和更大的. Let’s see what happens. Let the undergrads decide.