What are universities for? Or, to be more precise, what are they good for? In the British magazine Standpoint, an articulate answer by Nigel Biggar in which, toward the end, talking about the humanities, he writes: To ask a scholar of history, literature or theology to explain what he does matters is one thing. To ask [...]

Last month, William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan, wrote a disparaging article about the Humanities–The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind–enumerating all the reasons why one should not proceed with a graduate education in a battlefield littered with the dead and dying. This was a follow-up [...]