Who speaks for the humanities? A reply to NEH.

This article provides information on the Occasional Paper No. 7 produced by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in response to a report called Humanities in America issued by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the U.S. Describing the NEH attacks on teaching in the humanities as comic in their incongruity if they were not taken so seriously by so many, the ACLS paper goes on to detail some enlivening transformations in the field. For example, the authors write characteristically in literary studies; for instance, a boy's experience of growing up has been deemed universal and a girl's marginal and expansion of the old standard canon means an instruction in otherness. The authors also defend the study of popular culture, arguing that competing theories about popular culture provide students with a framework in which to criticize materials they consume daily and unthinkingly. In their conclusions, the authors stress that a national core curriculum would stifle imaginative teaching and be a restriction of intellectual freedom. They state in an unequivocal and resonant sentence that one of the humanities' most fundamental responsibilities is to expose and question the aesthetic, moral, cultural and epistemological assumptions which govern our behavior and our society.