Professor of Classics @UofMaryland; interested in humanism, classics, higher education, and jazz. RTs ≠ endorsements. New book: https://xitter.cf/t.co/mkDLmJUFxo
Kensington, MD
Joined December 2017
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It exists! It exists! Folke Leander’s fantastic philosophical analysis of the New Humanism has finally seen the light of day.
Eric Adler retweeted
I’ll be giving the autumn Pharos lectures on one of the central puzzles in my new book, First Among Equals: “How did equality become an egalitarian ideal?”
The first lecture will take place tomorrow (Tuesday, 26 Oct) at 5pm in New College. Full details and registration below!
The Pharos Autumn Lectures 2026:
Professor Teresa Bejan (Oriel College) - 'First Among Equals: How Did Equality Become an Egalitarian Ideal?'
Tuesdays 27 October, 10 November and 24 November, 5pm, Noel Salter Room, New College.
eventbrite.co.uk/e/teresa-be…
@tmbejan
Eric Adler retweeted
Further, once we look at research production, it's hard not to notice the ways in which knowledge in the humanities, to legitimate itself, has been forced to ape the sciences.
Eric Adler retweeted
All of the structural incentives are ordered to research production. We do not have to denigrate research production to notice that there is a clear lack of balance in the incentives that have disproportionately harmed the humanities.
Eric Adler retweeted
I am going to say something that very few people want to hear, but I think it's true. The only way to "save the Humanities" is through serious gen ed reform that most universities don't want to undertake.
The hour is very late.
The number of people writing dissertations in the humanities has collapses, now the same thing is happening in the social sciences.
I'd wager that we will see a similar trend in psychology and other fields before long. Cuts in funding, the tight academic job market, and AI are rapidly changing the university and cratering graduate programs.
Eric Adler retweeted
Jen is obviously right here. The R1 model aims at the production of knowledge through research. The humanistic disciplines have always fit strangely into this framework, because traditionally they aim at producing a certain kind of person through teaching.
Eric Adler retweeted
The humanities began outside the university and began entering it in the 1420s. The effect, over time, was to turn humane letters into philology. Maybe it's time to recover Petrarch's vision.
It's no secret that there is a crisis in the humanities in U.S. higher education. The American Academy of Sciences and Letters has done a great service in diagnosing the crisis in this important new report by a team of scholars led by Josiah Ober of Stanford.
academysciencesletters.org/w…
Eric Adler retweeted
Today is the official release date for my new book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism (Belknap, 2026).
It explores how and why “equality” became, rather suddenly, a basis on which ordinary men and women could make political demands in early modern England.
hup.harvard.edu/books/978067…
Eric Adler retweeted
Paul Elmer More, a largely forgotten American intellectual who influenced thinkers like T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, believed that human flourishing requires more than freedom to pursue our desires.
It requires the discipline to restrain them.
More called this the “inner check”—the moral capacity to orient our lives toward truth, virtue, and higher goods.
Read more from Michael Lucchese of @LawLiberty in Religion & Liberty Daily.
ALT Surreal illustration of human figures with cosmic elements and text about Paul Elmer More's humanism.
Yesterday was the publication day for Folke Leander's book *The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More*.
The first review of the book has now appeared (from @ActonInstitute), and it does a good job demonstrating why More is worth reading today:
blog.acton.org/archives/1288…
“The most fatal error is to believe that one serves one’s country by calumniating those who founded it.”
—Ernest Renan (1883)
"Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book."
--John Morley, "Popular Culture" (1876)
"From the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show."
--Thomas Henry Huxley, "The Struggle for Existence: A Programme" (1888)
"All our greatest teachers are always dead."
--Philip Rieff, *Fellow Teachers* (1973)
“It seems likely indeed, that men make themselves miserable by the exaggerated opinion they have of themselves and their kind, and that if they could form a humbler and truer notion of human nature they might be kinder to others and kinder to themselves.”
—Anatole France (1893)
"When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascend in the scale of being. Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man's spiritual adventures--adventures of thought, ...of passionate feeling, ...of aesthetic experience."
--A. N. Whitehead (1925)
New in TAPA by me:
"...we must recognize how the elective curriculum shapes students’ souls: It encourages the young to view themselves as customers, who have no way of judging value beyond the criterion of mere popularity."
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/1…
Exciting things brewing at UVA...
NEW Classical Liberal Arts at UVA headed by Jenn Frey & Angel Parham. Ideas founded in friendship; the tradition is being handed on!
as.virginia.edu/news/pilots-…
Folke Leander's book *The Philosophy of Paul Elmer More*, with intros by Claes Ryn and me, is soon to be published (digital: Oct. 2; print: Oct. 7).
Humanism fans: Do yourself a favor and order a copy.
upress.missouri.edu/97808262…
