Check out The Telegraph interview with historian and writer Simon Schama about British budget cuts to the humanities. Much of what he says applies to the American context as well. Schama argues, to quote from the article, that “history will become the preserve of the rich if the coalition continues to cut arts and humanities in favour of sciences.”
Here are a couple of snippets from the piece.
Schama said Britain runs the risk of causing “appalling” damage to culture by making the arts and humanities the preserve only of the well-heeled.
And…
He also slammed some fellow academics, adding: “You have to work very hard to make history boring, and there are plenty of people in the institutions who do a brilliant job of making it boring.
“I was lucky enough to be taught at school and particularly at university by teachers who believed that history was not just for other historians and was not purely an academic pursuit.
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