I spoke at the Future Humanities Conference, organized by Laura Mandell, at Texas A&M on March 29, 2018. My paper began by showing that there are three ways of defending the humanities: (1) We can align the fate of the humanities with the fate of the institution we call the university. Then the question becomes: What should a university be? (2) We can argue for the instrumental value of the humanities, which essentially means claiming that the humanities are good things because they are useful for some other activity. Or (3): We can argue for the substantive value of the humanities.

A copy of my talk is available available here at Duke PAL’s website