Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age [Hardcover]

Victor Davis Hanson (Author), John Heath (Author), Bruce S. Thornton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2000

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleagured, discipline—classics—and reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselves—their careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other things—as the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to “academic populism,” an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It has become quite common over the past 20 years for various groups of humanists to cry like prophets in the wilderness over the demise of the classics both in small liberal arts colleges and large state universities. Hanson and Heath (coauthors of Who Killed Homer? and professors of classics at, respectively, Cal State, Fresno, and Santa Clara University), along with Cal State classicist Thornton, contend that these arguments generally fail to strike at the heart of the problem which is, they say, that contemporary academics are hypocrites who decry racial discrimination, sexism and democratic capitalism from the vantage point of well-paid, tenured positions. These professors whom they deride as "Savonarolas... ideologues of the multicultural and postmodern Left" also purportedly contribute to the death of the classics by writing jargon-filled articles and books about ancient Greece and Rome that are inaccessible to a broader audience. In addition, such academics refuse to teach undergraduates, exploiting instead graduate teaching assistants who do not have the wealth of research to share with these younger students. The authors, who define their own enterprise as "academic populism," address this elitism and hypocrisy in a series of scathing essays and book reviews, which, unfortunately, suffer from many of the same problems of which they accuse their opponents (for instance, those they criticize, such as philosopher Martha Nussbaum and classicist Judith Hallett and thus these critiques themselves are more likely to be read by scholars than by a general audience). At best, the authors engage in defensive, whining, self-righteous diatribes in an effort to show how misguided their opponents are. At worst, Hanson, Heath and Thornton use this book to vilify those whom they perceive to have wronged them.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this collection of new and previously published essays, classicists Hanson (California State Univ., Fresno), John Heath (Santa Clara Univ.), and Bruce S. Thornton (California State Univ., Fresno) prove that the old saying "academic politics are so poisonous only because there is so little at stake" is true. Railing against what they perceive as rampant careerism among modern-day exponents of "fashionable" theories such as postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism, Hanson and Heath return to the question that they posed in their earlier work, Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, and provide the same answer, i.e., "They did." While the authors might compare their work to broader criticisms of the academy such as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (LJ 5/1/87) and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (LJ 3/15/91), this work is so steeped in the academic infighting specific to the field of classical studies that it is unlikely to find much of an audience beyond those already involved in the conflict. Recommended only for academic collections supporting advanced teaching and research in classics. Scott Walter, Washington State Univ., Pullman
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 373 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (December 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882926544
• ISBN-13: 978-1882926541
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,124,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Victor Davis Hanson is Professor of Greek and Director of the Classics Program at California State University, Fresno. He is the author or editor of many books, including Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, Free Press, 1998), and The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999). In 1992 he was named the most outstanding undergraduate teacher of classics in the nation.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

111 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Radical Chic?, July 15, 2001

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Joseph Winkler (Mariposa CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Hardcover)

Classics as an academic discipline, or classical philology, or simply classical studies, as it is also called, is the study of the ancient Greek and Latin languages, the civilizations which spoke these languages, their ideas and philosophies and all the other creations which they left behind in their writings and monuments. Ever since the Renaissance, when Western man first began to look backwards over the gulf of time which came to be known as the Middle Ages, the classical civilizations were seen as a flowering of man's intellectual and creative and ethical and inquiring spirit, a fruition which held meaning for modern man, one worthy of close study and emulation as the source of a better way of fulfilling man's natural role in the world and in the societies he created. Therefore for a long time throughout Europe, and in America too, studying the classics was at the core of an education based in the humanities, those liberal studies which, as their name suggests, free man from the constraints of narrow thinking and open his mind to all that has gone before, of which he is a product, teaching him not what to think, but how to think.

No longer is such the case, and although the decline in teaching and study of the humanities is a general one, classics, a demanding discipline at best, is particularly hard hit, and what was once seen as the revealer of a noble ethic toward which we should aspire is dead or dying, say the authors here in Bonfire of the Humanities, a collection of essays and reviews by three classicists who protest the decline of their profession in the face of an onslaught coming both from outside and from within the profession itself.

The evolution of the university, once a refuge for those who sought objective truths, which then were believed to exist, into a mega-business where careerism and self-promotion are the criteria of excellence, provides the framework in which this decline proceeds. A renewed emphasis on teaching, on revitalizing studies at the undergraduate level, is suggested as one solution to the problem of indifference now projected to aspiring students by a professorial elite, although this reviewer hastens to add that indifference and bad teaching are not new creatures, as one occasionally may infer from the authors, but were certainly alive and well back in the fifties. Within this corporate structure, as society changed over the last thirty years, classics came to be seen as a privileged, white, all-male enclave busily perpetuating the repression and victimization not only of women, but also of every other kind of ethnic and minority group imaginable, and doing so in the name of teaching Western civilization, a concept which is not only no better than any number of other cultural paradigms, but perhaps with its oppressive tactics, not even as good as most, and perhaps more worthy of elimination from the curriculum than of emulation. Thus perhaps following the adage about knowing one's enemy, some with this new and jaundiced view of the classics actually entered the field to become classicists themselves, creating a schism of outlook and purpose within the discipline, where they continue to pursue vigorously a predetermined political agenda which dominates their outlook and pervades their work, the irony being that these self-appointed spokespersons for the downtrodden and oppressed, these radical-chic saviours of those who have been victimized by the classics and by Western civilization, are the most avid practitioners of the careerism and self-promotion afforded by the corporate-like university, where, the authors say, the student is avoided and forgotten. This type is well known to this reviewer from the area of social services, which was invaded in the late sixties by hordes of reformers, characterized by shallow educations, and with overriding political agendas, and although it is difficult to imagine any classicist with a shallow education, perhaps such shallowness can come about when the stream of thinking is filled in by the sediments of excessive ego and politicization. Add to this mixture, say our authors, the new literary theories which have become not only trendy but also the stairways to elevation within the university, where research now is a euphemism for the same old thing said over in new and more obfuscating jargon, and we have completed the final recipe for the decline and fall.

The book's personal revelations are humorous in the context of the academic world, but sad too when one realizes how such behavior reflects the pettiness and disingenuousness of some of its members, who think, as the modern theorists hold, that there is no objective truth, that our texts and values are meaningless, or mean only what we want them to mean, and that therefore perjury cannot be committed or intellectual dishonesty exist. Beleaguered from without and sprinkled within with enough loonieness, a quality which Professor Hanson seems to use in despair when thinking of one of his esteemed colleagues, classics as a discipline seems bombarded by nuts as they fall from the nut tree.

This book deserves a wider readership than probably it will attain, for the problems described are broad and general in scope, not confined even to just the humanities, but reflective of major changes in our society at large and what its concept now is of the university and what it expects from that institution.

70 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Be careful where you send the kids for an "education", October 16, 2001

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Dr. (Montgomery, Alabama United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Hardcover)

Before you pay tens of thousands of dollars to send little Jr. or Jr.ett off to the local state university--READ THIS BOOK!!!

What about when people who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and consort with her unworthily? What kinds of thoughts and opinions are we to say they form? Won't they truly be what are properly called sophisms, things that have nothing genuine about them or worthy of being called true wisdom?
Plato's Republic Bk VI

There is a mountain of evidence from several important books that the past thirty years has seen obvious and measurable decline within the modern American university. Decline of rigorous academic standards, decline of hours full-time professors teach undergraduate students, decline of competent teachers, and decline of full-time teaching faculty within the Humanities.

Many of the claims by the three writers will not settle well with the modern crying sensitive type and demanding everyone to be tolerant (while they are the essence of intolerance.) Heath courageously claims that while some of the glories of the Greeks are unique to the Greeks, "the sins of the West are the sins of mankind and that it's primarily in the West that the spirit of self-criticism has led to an amelioration of these evils."

Several times the author's recognize that the larger cultural and social context of the modern university is part of the problems but not likely at the center of the problems. However, the authors are unrelenting in their case that much of what is wrong within the Humanities is a self-inflicted wound.

What goes on in the name of scholarship that is explicitly and unashamedly narcissistic and is expressed in the language of the "therapeutic multiculturalist Left" and "the self-esteem of the victim du jour" all "lack Thucydidean gravitas", according to Victor Davis Hanson.

The struggles of these scholar-teachers is one that sounds like battles that have raged for centuries but the level of pettiness demonstrated toward them has reached an all time low. There may be another reason so few are teaching within the Humanities and so many hate the "new humanities". If this type of attack is normative, many will be discouraged from the once noble profession of teaching.

The profundity of The Bonfire of the Humanities is that the authors shed light into the cave by utilizing simple logic, close analysis, and bold confrontation common to the greatest of the ancient minds to expose many of the current problems. If the modern reader needs to see not only the effects of the academy's rejection of the classical ways but the true genius of those ways, you need go no further than the essays in this volume.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Was A Pleasure to Burn, September 1, 2008

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Martin Asiner "Adjunct College Instructor" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (Hardcover)

The first sentence of BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES reads "The American university is in trouble." Authors Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce Thornton then provide eight essays which explain that this trouble relates specifically to the moribund discipline of classical Greek and Roman literature. As one reads each essay, one gets the idea that the trouble is not limited to the nation's collective classics departments but can be extended to all the humanities departments as well. All eight essays overlap while focusing on differing targets. The three writers are all professors of classical literature and each notes that there is a variety of reasons for the metaphorical burnings, not the least of which is that their university bretheren, the very ones charged with the responsibility of keeping the spark of classical learning well lit, are tragically enough the very ones who have led the charge to eliminate their own jobs. Now it sounds paradoxical that professors who have some of the easiest and highest paying jobs in the country are wilfully eliminating their jobs by ensuring that the next generation of scholars have learned all the wrong lessons. All three authors agree that the initial impetus for this bonfire lay in the realization reached in the 1960s that as far as original scholarship went in finding something new to publish concerning Plato or Aristotle, there were simply no more fertile fields of exploration. Thus, the majority of non-tenured professors understood that they had to find a new way to grind an old axe. At this time, they found this new way when Jacques Derrida led the postructural demolition of a universally accepted core meaning to texts. In came feminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, New Historicism and other untested and flawed methodologies that used fancy and obtuse jargon to hide any number of logical and linguistic sins. Out went traditional research that focused on the text. The result was a net increase in articles published in accepted journals but a destabilizing decrease in the numbers of readers who actually understood the new jargon. The authors also link the emergence of multiculturalism as a significant factor in the erosion of classical study. Since multiculturalism essentially holds that all cultures are equal, there is no reason to favor one over the other. Hence, for the dying breed of traditional academicians who held that the Greeks and Romans were the very originators of western culture, they now had to take a back seat to the New Kids on the Block who pontificate about how Aristotle stole his ideas from contemporary African cultures or how Cleopatra was black. What I found most remarkable about BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES was the ease that the authors tore apart the logic of the too clever sophistries of those who pay far more attention to the business side of teaching than to the actual teaching itself. For example, in "Cultivating Sophistry" Thornton examines the position of the deconstructionists who argue relentlessly that since words merely point to other words, there can never be a "true" and verifiable fact in the text. If this is so, he notes then their claim as to the inability of anyone to reach any buried truth is itself spurious, and at this point, the entire flimsy house of flawed logic comes tumbling down. What emerges after a considered reading of the book's eight essays is that there will not be any changes anytime soon in either the classics in particular or the humanties in general. Thornton, Heath, and Hanson are left with the depressing but seemingly inevitable conclusion that their beloved discipline will soon be as dead as the dodo.