The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton

"It’s embarrassing suggesting anyone should read one of my books. I chose it because the subject of the book is crucial for understanding the way philology gets transformed into the various humanistic disciplines in the context of the modern university. Charles Eliot Norton is largely forgotten by most generally educated readers, but he’s remembered by particular people. Art historians remember him as the first professor of art history at a university in the English-speaking world. Dante scholars remember him as the founder of modern academic Dante studies in an American university, and the author of one of the standard translations of the Divine Comedy . Archaeologists remember him as the founder of the Archeological Institute of America, which quickly became the leading professional organization for archaeologists in the US. Scholars of English literature remember him as the author of an essay on John Donne’s poems, which laid some important foundations for the modern study of that 17th century English poet. None of these people, in these various disciplines, typically realize that Norton did all these other things too. On the one hand, he is the most important founder of humanities disciplines in American universities, and, on the other hand, he doesn’t think of the various disciplines he’s founding as different in kind. For him, they are all ways of studying, philologically, important cultural phenomena. Yet even in the course of his lifetime — he retired in 1898 and died in 1908 — these studies were splitting up into individual disciplines, the fundamental disciplines of what we now call the humanities. So he’s a key moment of transition in that development from a unified philology into a diverse set of apparently unconnected disciplines. That’s why I included him. There’s no other figure quite like that, so dramatically iconic in illustrating that development. Yes, it hit me very strongly that if you wanted to understand where the humanities came from in British and American higher education — which seems to me a very important question in understanding the structure of modern knowledge, and a question that no one had actually tried to answer as a coherent whole — that you had to understand the history of philology. I worked backwards from Norton and other scholars of his generation, people you can think of as the first generation of the modern humanities, into the history of philology. I think it’s very difficult, not for any intellectually solid reason, but because of the institutions that have grown up around disciplines. For example, if you are an assistant professor of art history in an American university and you write a book about Dante, you’re going to get fired. You’re certainly not going to get tenure. It’s very difficult for people to ignore the present disciplinary boundaries and get away with it in the structure of the modern university. People who are not hampered by universities can do this kind of work and they should. People who are old and in no danger of losing their jobs can write a book like I wrote. But one of the things that’s happening in universities, both in the UK and the US, is that the humanities are getting squeezed financially. There’s more and more a sense that students should be learning something practical, they should be learning business or engineering, something that has a clear and immediate economic return. So you can find humanities departments that don’t have large enrollments — Classics departments, German departments — being shut down in a number of American institutions. And, as those pressures continue, we might see a situation in universities where more and more humanistic scholars are forced into more broadly gauged programs, producing something more like an integrated philology than has existed for a century. I think that it would be, in a lot of ways, intellectually healthy. At the same time, I think the shrinking of the humanities and the devaluation, in the public mind, of humanistic learning — these are not good things. It’s a bad situation that may produce some good results."