via Paul Bowman, who posts a list of thinking “points” on the “point” of the Arts and Humanities:
1. Any ‘point’ of or for the Arts and Humanities is bound up with the question of ‘the point’ of the university as such.
2. Any answer about ‘the point’ of the university itself is bound up with the answer to the question of what kind of society we are or ought to be living in or striving to construct.
Or as Northrop Frye once argued “The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of the imagination.”