The Fate of the Humanities, the Fate of the University

The aim of this article is to analyze the current crisis of higher education and to propose a new model to counter the threat this crisis poses to the arts and humanities. The crisis of the university is presented through a comparison with two earlier crises: the first occurring in the seventeenth century and the second in the early nineteenth century. I argue that as an institution and a culture the mission of the university is to uphold the value of autonomy, a term I borrow from Cornelius Castoriadis, and to actively cultivate the autonomy of its students and teachers.