Intellectuals have few responsibilities, but one is to know the refutations of their best ideas. Those of us who think the study of man is in decay have some responsibility, then, to pay attention to a recent pamphlet issued by the American Council of Learned Societies. Entitled “Speaking for the Humanities” and written by a committee of six academics, including George Levine (Darwin and the Novelists), Peter Brooks (Reading for the Plot), Jonathan Culler (The Pursuit of Signs), and E. Ann Kaplan (Postmodernism and Its Discontents), the pamphlet is a reply to critics of the humanities as they are taught and studied now.¹ The humanities, according to the authors, are “being attacked unfairly” and, in fact, are “living through a revival.”

Although written in committee prose, the pamphlet is worthy of attention. For one thing, five of its six authors are directors of interdisciplinary humanities centers. These research centers, of which there are “close to 300 throughout the country,” the authors proudly say, are a relatively new phenomenon in the humanities. Robert Nisbet in The Degradation of Academic Dogmahas labeled the directors of such centers “the new men of power,” no longer attached to the traditional seat of authority in separate departments of study. And as such, the authors of “Speaking for the Humanities” are the spokesmen for a shift away from the traditional disciplines and toward unchartered modishness in humanistic study. Their pamphlet (co-signed by twenty-one other