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In a vitriolic response to Snow, the literary critic F. R. Leavis defended the primacy of the humanities for a civilizing education, insisting that science must not be allowed to operate outside of the moral norms that a first-rate humanistic education alone could provide. The Snow-Leavis debate spread also to this side of the Atlantic, triggering for a time serious and searching discussions regarding the aims of higher education and the importance of the humanities. Such discussions have, alas, largely disappeared not only from public discourse but even within the academy. Most professors in nearly all of our leading universities prefer to leave and be left alone, justifying their self-serving indifference to the goals and requirements of a liberal education by proclaiming for their students the American trumping value of choice. For themselves, they trumpet the maxim of Chairman Mao: 'Let a thousand flowers bloom.' In contrast to 50 years ago, few licensed humanists today embrace any view of the humanities that could in fact justify making them the centerpiece of a college curriculum. This abdication is especially regrettable because it comes precisely at a time in which, thanks largely to the successes of Snow's beloved scientific and technological revolutions, the meaning and future of our humanity cry out for serious and thoughtful attention. Never in sympathy with these prevailing prejudices, I have devoted most of my career to addressing this challenge. Although formally trained in medicine and biochemistry - fields in which I no longer teach or practice - I have been engaged with liberal education for nearly 40 years, teaching philosophical and literary texts as an untrained amateur, practicing the humanities without a license. Perhaps precisely because I am an unlicensed humanist, I have pursued the humanities for an old-fashioned purpose in an old-fashioned way: I have sought wisdom about the meaning of our humanity, largely through teaching and studying the great works of wiser and nobler human beings, who have bequeathed to us their profound accounts of the human condition. This essay traces my adopted career as an unlicensed humanist in an effort to suggest, by its form and its substance, what purpose a humanistic education might serve.

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I offer it not as an apologia pro vita mea, but rather in the belief that my own intellectual journey is of more than idiosyncratic interest.

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