January 20, 2024: MLK Day and the Humanities

[As thisnew semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment forteaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previewsseries I’ve highlighted one thing from each of my courses that embodies thevalue of the Humanities for us all—leading up to this special weekend post onMLK Day and the Humanities!]

On threeways I’d connect the iconic Martin Luther King Jr. to the value of theHumanities.

1)     TheReal King: I’ve shared that hyperlinked MLK Day post for most of this blog’s14 (!) Januarys now, and so I wanted to make sure to include it in this year’sMLK post as well (and would ask you to check it out if you haven’t before andthen come on back). But I would also say that the need to understand a subjectlike King in all (or at least a lot of) its breadth and depth, to get at nuanceas well as essential elements, to hold complexity in our minds while stillmaking the case for crucial takeaways, quite simply all the perspectives andideas I argue for in that post, are at the heart of why we teach and learn theHumanities.

2)     The Written Word: For my 2021MLK Day series, I wrote about a series of important King texts beyond theMarch on Washington speech (on which that Real King post focuses in part). Someof them were speeches, some essays, some books, and I didn’t come close tohighlighting all or even most of his work with any of those genres. I know asan English Professor I might focus on the written word more than otherhistorically minded types, but I don’t believe any historical figure betterexemplifies the importance of the written word to American activism, social andcultural progress, and our collective story than does King. And where else yougonna get better equipped to connect with the written word than in Humanitiescourses?!

3)     The Task Ahead: In mid-December, the contrarianprofessor TylerAustin Harper (who teaches Literature and Environmental Studies at BatesCollege) went viral for a combination of an AtlanticMonthly article and an accompanyingTwitter thread critiquing the academic Humanities (at least at elite IvyLeague institutions) for emphases on things like DEI, public engagement, andactivism instead of learning, sharing, and creating knowledge. I agree withHarper that the latter goals remain paramount, and I hope in fact that my firsttwo items in this post reflect layers to those goals. But I entirely disagreethat these emphases are in any way either/or, and would indeed stress that oneof our most significant goals is to help our students be publicly engagedactivists, not for any particular issue (and certainly not with the sameperspective as us), but in their own lives as citizens. No one in Americanhistory modeled that work better than did King, and so sharing him with ourstudents, in all the ways I’m talking about in this post and many more besides,is one great example of helping them get to that point as well.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?