An Open Letter Addressed to the Dean of an Arts College

IN THE fall of I945, Wayne University entered upon the fifth year of the project through which the members of the faculty have sought more effective means of instruction in the humanities.1 You recall that about I940 we became acutely conscious that we shared with all other American colleges and universities a profoundly disturbing problem with respect to the future of the humanities. It is easy now, in looking back, to delineate the causes of our uneasiness. We felt utterly frustrated by the barriers which the department groups had built up so successfully amongst themselves. Learning in the natural sciences was almost completely divorced from that in the social sciences and the humanities, and vice versa. Professors in these three major areas were often uninterested in, and at times even contemptuous of, each other's work. Institutions of higher learning might be described as con

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