Teaching the Humanities for the Future Public

Abstract This manifesto is a case study of a new method of configuring Humanities wisdom. Following the 2008 financial crisis, students and parents questioned the value of Humanities disciplines in relation to debt and future employment prospects. The experiment described here is an attempt at Arizona State University to reinvigorate humanistic pedagogy by means of an entirely new transdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts degree that abandons the disciplinary nomenclature that goes back to Aristotle and was instantiated, then ossified, in the twentieth-century university. The problem, it is argued, is not in the content, but in the naming: History, Literature, Philosophy, Language, and Religion. The experiment is to begin not with these discrete and seemingly moribund bodies of knowledge, but with the most pressing concerns of present and future publics. We name these, and so we name the new degree, Culture–Technology–Environment. The manifesto describes the design and content of the degree and raises the hope that curricular innovations of this kind will create Humanities-wise citizens for the future.