A year ago, North Carolina's governor, Pat McCrory, threatening cuts to UNC's flagship campus at Chapel Hill, said, "If you want to take gender studies that's fine, go to a private school and take it." McCrory's statement suggests that the public university is a place for training rather than for real thinking and questioning, that such questioning is not relevant for public-university students, for first-generation college students — that such students need not worry about imagining their lives because their lives have already been imagined for them.

To say that women's studies, or philosophy, or French is a waste of time for students who need more-practical training is to tell those students we already know who and what they are. It is to kill their other chances.

In the name of keeping those other chances alive, I want to make a plea for a very unsexy kind of public humanities: the kind that involves a classroom, and desks in a circle, and books. And I want to insist that it be a real classroom: the kind you physically walk into, where people complain about the weather and their finals and their lousy jobs before class starts, and to which, at our little campus in western Maine, people trudge from across town or drive for an hour in the snow to be together for a while and talk.

Kristen Case, The Other Public Humanities