To the Editor:
While Mark C. Taylor’s warnings about bloated college tuitions are certainly welcome (“Academic Bankruptcy,” Op-Ed, Aug. 15), I disagree with his proposed solution.
There are significant dangers in reducing or combining humanities
departments. For one thing, there is little common doctrine that would
allow combining departments even from neighboring institutions—the
study of philosophy, my own field, is one of the more contentious
disciplines.
More problematic, though, is the implication regarding the role that
humanities play in a student’s education. They are not a mode of job
training, but a way of forming thoughtful citizens and individuals,
aware of the perils and the promise of ideas. They help develop
self-understanding and tolerance.
If we wish to discover the roots of bloated tuitions, we should look
instead to the proliferation of administrative staffs and their
projects, many of which have little or no connection to the main reason
colleges and universities exist: to humanize us.
Timothy Sean Quinn
Cincinnati, Aug. 15, 2010
The writer is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 