Episode description

Our speaker will be John Ellis who is the former Dean of the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Professor of German Literature. The topic is the corruption of the Humanities, and what this means for the University.

I’ve raided the What Happens Next archives to find additional material that supports John Ellis’s discussion. We are going to hear from Arnold Weinstein who is a Professor of English at Brown University who will discuss the increasing resistance to teaching Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

We will also hear from my friend David Grazian who is a Professor of Sociology at UPenn who will discuss the challenges of teaching Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and why it is much easier to teach the HBO Series The Wire than the novels of Tom Wolfe.

Our final speaker is Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory University.  Patrick is going to discuss the increasing relevance of George Orwell and his central role in the American literary canon.