My good colleague Robert Frodeman and his friend Chris Buczinsky take a crack at rethinking how to keep the humanities something that resonates to 21st Century students.

In “Howl,” a blistering poetical rant and perhaps the most important poem of the 60’s counterculture, Allen Ginsberg anatomizes the minds of his generation. They are young men and women who “studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas.” When students come to our offices to consider studying the humanities, we can all recite the litany of reasons for doing so. It provides them with the critical thinking skills needed for success in any career; it endows them with the cultural capital of the world’s great civilizations; and it helps them explore what it means to be human.

But for those of us who have spent our lives studying the humanities, such reasons are often just the fossilized remains of the initial impulse that set us on our educational journey — the feeling that Kansas was vibrating at our feet, and that to chart our futures we desperately needed to understand the meaning of that vibration.

via Essay on how to keep humanities vibrant by rejecting elite universities’ models | Inside Higher Ed.

Related articles

• Allen Ginsberg- Howl (englisheleven56.wordpress.com)
• “People who know St. John of the Cross only superficially…” (insightscoop.typepad.com)
• Allen Ginsberg interview: From the archive, 24 April 1985 (guardian.co.uk)
• Getting a (science) PhD is not the most terrible idea in the world (toughlittlebirds.com)
• Essay: The Poetic Landscape of 1960s New York by Nikki Hall (nikkihall.wordpress.com)