January 20, 2024: MLK Day and the Humanities

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

On three ways I’d connect the iconic Martin Luther King Jr. to the value of the Humanities.

1)      The Real King: I’ve shared that hyperlinked MLK Day post for most of this blog’s 14 (!) Januarys now, and so I wanted to make sure to include it in this year’s MLK post as well (and would ask you to check it out if you haven’t before and then come on back). But I would also say that the need to understand a subject like King in all (or at least a lot of) its breadth and depth, to get at nuance as well as essential elements, to hold complexity in our minds while still making the case for crucial takeaways, quite simply all the perspectives and ideas I argue for in that post, are at the heart of why we teach and learn the Humanities.

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

3)      The Task Ahead: In mid-December, the contrarian professor Tyler Austin Harper (who teaches Literature and Environmental Studies at Bates College) went viral for a combination of an Atlantic Monthly article and an accompanying Twitter thread critiquing the academic Humanities (at least at elite Ivy League institutions) for emphases on things like DEI, public engagement, and activism instead of learning, sharing, and creating knowledge. I agree with Harper that the latter goals remain paramount, and I hope in fact that my first two items in this post reflect layers to those goals. But I entirely disagree that these emphases are in any way either/or, and would indeed stress that one of our most significant goals is to help our students be publicly engaged activists, not for any particular issue (and certainly not with the same perspective as us), but in their own lives as citizens. No one in American history modeled that work better than did King, and so sharing him with our students, 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.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?