Why isn’t there a Neil deGrasse Tyson for the humanities? We blame Camille Paglia
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/07/why-isnt-there-a-neil-degrasse-tyson-for-the-humanities-we-blame-camille-paglia/
Last week, Adam Weinstein asked on Gawker: Where Is the Humanities’ Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming on the heels of Nick Kristof’s badly-framed and much-derided call for professors to speak more broadly and openly to nonacademic audiences (as if we don’t already do that, every chance we get), Weinstein’s question was easy to misframe and deride. Also, it was on Gawker, so it was all the more tempting for academics to dismiss, as if it were a “which obscure humanist are you?” quiz on Buzzfeed.
But it’s a very good question, and Weinstein asked it as someone who believes in the humanities. Laments about the decline of the humanities are one of the few growth areas in the American intellectual economy, so why shouldn’t there be a “Cosmos”-like show devoted to explaining what’s been going on in the humanities for the past thirty years, and why it matters?
And it’s not about undergraduate enrollments, or high school, or grade school. Tyson happens to be entirely right about who needs shows like “Cosmos”:
The challenge has been adults… All the adults are saying, “We need to improve science in the world. Let’s train the kids.” I’ve never heard an adult say, “We need more science in the world. Train me.” I’ve never heard an adult say that. It’s the adults that need the science literacy, the kind of literacy that can transform the nation practically overnight.
But the same argument could be made, a fortiori, about the humanities– on behalf of all the people who don’t use sentences with “a fortiori” in them. The humanities are, after all, about human cultures and histories; and in recent years, they have also been about the boundaries of the human (in relation to animals, artificial intelligence, and the ecosphere) and facets of being human that had long been underacknowledged (in queer theory and disability studies and the medical humanities). It’s really quite fascinating stuff, and I don’t say this because I’m a humanities professor. Quite the contrary: I became a humanities professor because this material is really quite fascinating stuff.
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:arts kick:
His series Civilization is still considered a classic. It was re-broadcast on BBC HD in 2011 and is available in HD and Blu-Ray.
My freshman year in college, Civilization was part of our core humanities program. I still have the book somewhere.
It's record in the USA is interesting: "The series had difficulty at first in finding a home on American television, but success was assured after the National Gallery of Art in Washington put it on at lunchtime in the gallery theatre. This seated 300 people, but on the first day 24,000 turned up.[6] In 1970, the newly established Public Broadcasting Service aired the 13-part TV series in the US to high ratings." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisation_%28TV_series%29
any of them would do nicely. This one is even more fun than Neil:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/people/profile.asp?ID=1244
but she does have a tendency to speak in her native Academese, sometimes going even over my Ivy League head. 
edit: Oddly enough, her partner's name is Neil. 
