What good is a Humanities degree? According to two intellectuals, Dr. Ally Louks and Jason Stanley, the Humanities help us better connect to other humans. According to a lot of online haters, they're worthless.Dr. Louks recently posted her Cambridge University PhD thesis online and was piled on by a loud group of right-wing anti-intellectuals. Brittany, Dr. Louks, and Jason Stanley, a professor of Philosophy at Yale University investigate the backlash to Dr. Louks, higher education at large, and why "anti-intellectualism" is prevalent in Republican politics.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus. Join NPR+ today. Have you battled loneliness? What was it like, and what did you do about it? If you're over 18, let us know by sending a voice memo to [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What sparked the viral outrage around Dr. Louks' thesis?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Our show today starts with a story of viral outrage. In November, an academic named Allie Lukes posted a photo of herself on X, holding her thesis. After years of work, she was celebrating finishing her PhD at Cambridge University.
Chapter 2: What is the focus of Dr. Louks' PhD thesis?
My thesis is titled Olfactory Ethics, the Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. So I look at why certain authors of the past century use smell to indicate social hostilities. And I connect these literary examples with the real world understanding of smell and how we think about smell in society.
Ali thought she'd get a couple congrats comments and go on with her life. That's not what happened.
Chapter 3: How did social media react to Dr. Louks' thesis announcement?
It didn't even occur to me, actually, that it could blow up in a negative way. After it was retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts who had kind of mocked the idea of my thesis and actually the fact that I was doing a PhD in English literature.
To make it clear, just the title alone of her thesis, which you could see in the picture she posted, was enough to make it go super viral. It now has over 126 million views. I'm sorry to say I was on X the day that this went viral. And let me tell you, that comment section was rough. Here's a taste of it. 10 years of childbearing youth that she will never regain.
A liberal arts education is worth nothing. Academia is a disaster. We should be teaching math, science, not this nonsense.
Chapter 4: What does anti-intellectualism mean in today's society?
Make education great again. It seemed like a perfect storm of cultural threads converging. Alt-right misogyny, the anti-woke crowd, calls for disinvestment in the humanities. And to me, it all pointed toward a larger threat, anti-intellectualism. That is, hostility and mistrust towards academics, experts, and education. And I'm not the only one seeing this.
Chapter 5: How are cultural threads influencing views on education?
Researcher Matt Mata found that one in three Americans holds anti-intellectual views. But who benefits? I sat down with Dr. Allie Lukes. Just Allie is fine. And Dr. Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale.
Thank you so much.
To dig deeper into anti-intellectualism and what it means for the future of our democracy. To jump right in, Ali, I want to start with you. Despite a lot of the negative attention that came your way, you've really taken this and kind of run with it. I see you connect something new happening in culture back to your dissertation. All the time.
You know, I think about how Cardi B recently posted about how she smelled, kind of touting her lack of smell in some ways as an asset. And you tied it back to your research. You were like, this is kind of what I'm talking about in my research. It's really cool to see you show people how to think a bit more critically about smell, despite everything else that happened.
Chapter 6: What role does disgust play in politics and scholarship?
Yeah, well, that's the thing. I mean, smell is a sense that almost all of us possess. But it largely goes unacknowledged and uncritiqued. And olfactory language is really pervasive too. It's just that we're not used to thinking about it critically. So it's not difficult for me, actually, to recognise these instances where my work is relevant in the world.
It's something that I've been doing for years. It's just that I haven't been posting about it on social media. I've been putting it in my thesis.
So Jason, I heard you're not online like that anymore. Yeah. But you did read about what happened with Ali's thesis and the reaction to it. What was your initial reaction?
Well, it's interesting that the far right targets exactly the scholars who are studying elements of the far right. So they're trying to attack the aspects of scholarship that allow us to understand scholarship. their politics and their propaganda. A lot of the politics of the far right is the politics of disgust. And smell is, of course, a central feature of disgust.
So I'm seeing that aspect recur. And then, of course, the very idea that there's scholarship that may problematize the ordinary status quo and that scholarship is done by women is taken as an existential threat.
It's interesting. We actually had... a disgust scholar on this show, Josh Rotman. And he talked with us about disgust. We were actually talking about it in terms of dating and getting the ick, like that immediate feeling of disgust that makes you just not want to date someone anymore and not find them attractive.
And to your point, one of the things that I discovered in talking with him is that there are so many other little assumptions that kind of undergird that ick, there are so many other societal expectations and norms that form disgust.
I liked your comparison to the notion of a romantic ick, because at least in a social context, smells are not going to harm us. Smells are harmless, even if they're uncomfortable. Whoa, wake it up. I'm sorry. That is true. There's a very real and distinct difference between harm and discomfort. And when we're talking about smell and using it to create prejudices, i.e.
to make prejudicial statements, what we're doing is we're mobilizing disgust. And disgust is a particular emotion that induces fear, even in instances when fear is not necessary. And smell is one of those instances.
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Chapter 7: How does socioeconomic status relate to education in America?
Well, I believe Trump once said, I love the poorly educated. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. We're the smartest people. We're the most loyal people. Education gives us the foundation to understand changing aspects of culture. What happens in the university is critical inquiry into the status quo.
Chapter 8: What connection exists between elite status and anti-intellectualism?
And so if you can attack that and represent it as somehow deviant or decadent, then you can go back to representing critique of the status quo as something terrifying.
Quality of an access to formal education in America is often determined by how much money you have. From public, pre-K to Ivy League programs, obviously formal schooling isn't the only way to learn valuable information. But as a result, being knowledgeable is often associated with being a member of the elite.
I wonder, what does the perceived connection between elite status and intellectualism have to do with this current wave of anti-intellectualism?
Obviously, there's an element of truth, of legitimacy to the critique of the elite. If you can connect these institutions to a kind of repugnant elitism, which they are connected to, let's be frank, then you can marshal a populist movement against learning. What it enables is a politics that says – OK, the rich, snobby elite, those are the ones who are questioning your traditions.
Going into academia is an extremely difficult choice because it's almost impossible to get a tenure track job. This idea of academics as somehow a economically privileged class is fictional. And then notice the people who are advancing this sort of quote-unquote populist view are all themselves graduates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton.
Ron DeSantis, Yale, and then Harvard, Tom Cotton, Harvard, Harvard. But they're promoting this attack the university's line because it's politically efficacious.
Coming up, there's been so much disinvestment in the humanities. Do they still matter?
The humanities allows you to talk about anything. And that's a threat.
Stay with us. I want to talk about the humanities of it all. Allie, I know that you're in the UK, but we're all in each other's business together on X and on social media. But in the US, many universities have cut humanities majors and faculty. And only about 12% of students receive humanities degrees.
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