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
Full Episode
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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