The Humanities’ Intellectual Authority Must Not Be Compromised

Excellent column by Dean Jarrett! I couldn’t agree more. To this day, I’m so appreciative of the many courses I took in the humanities at Princeton, including in philosophy, my major. It was simple to also fulfill the pre-med requirements so I could go to medical school, ending up as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Just one caveat. English departments were once dominated by Shakespeare professors who have shamefully abused their authority to promote the increasingly discredited dogma that there is no doubt that the traditional Shakespeare authorship theory is correct. Hardly. Elizabeth Winkler’s 2023 book on the taboo against questioning the traditional theory is a shocking exposé of academic authority gone awry.