PSA: Humanities to be overrun by the rich, and idiots.

From the NYTimes, today, an article lamenting the plight of the humanities in tough economic times:

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Unless, for instance, people who can't afford a humanities degree can still read.

It's the insistence that we all get a piece of paper tallying what we've learned that will be the province of the rich -- but it already is, in the hierarchy of legacy-enabled private universities like Harvard or Yale, so that's nothing new.

The rest of us will keep on judging people by who they are rather than the papers that prove they're worthwhile.

(True, it's a bit more difficult to tell who's worth your time and who's not when they don't all have handy labels affixed to them, but then, that's more or less the work of humanitarians, isn't it? Critical thinking? Caring less about money than other things?? Can I get an 'Amen' here???)

The idea that anyone for whom a humanities degree is financially out of reach can't "come to grips with the question of what living is for" is absurd enough to make me wonder whether it isn't these sorts of opinions that are making humanities obsolete, rather than an economic recession.