While the humanities reached unprecedented heights in the WWII era, they have now become like the former Ottoman Empire: sprawling, incoherent and steadily declining, according to Wilfred McClay, a professor of History at UT-Chattanooga.

In his lecture, titled "Burden of the Humanities," McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, discussed both the weight the humanities have to bear and the ways in which the humanities can burden people. In the long run we can't do without them, and they can't do without us, he said.

"Humanities need to be saved by the men and women who believe in them," he said. "They cannot be saved by funding alone. We need more robust, less ironic, defenses of the humanities." This proves challenging in a world where the very definition of humanities may some day be unanswerable, he said.

The most common definition of the humanities is the language of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, but McClay said this definition is circular and evasive. Instead, he gives his own definition:

"The task of humanities is to grasp human things in human terms. -Wilfred McClay, professor of history at UT-Chattanooga
The task of humanities is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else, physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, and so on," he said.

In addition, meetings where humanists discuss why the humanities should be valued are often silly, he said. For instance, Donald Randel, former president of the University of Chicago, at a Philadelphia meeting, said:

"When the lights go out and our friends in science haven't developed a national energy policy, they'll be out of business. But we, with a book of poems and a candle, will all still be alive."

McClay said of the quote, "This is the kind of airy-fairy, self-congratulatory silliness that gives the humanities a bad name."

He also said the knowledge that humanities offers cannot be replaced by the sciences, but noted developments in biotechnology could transform the humanities by opening new doors of possibility.