In a recent Salon article, Katie Billotte, a classics scholar based in Berlin, answers the rhetorical question of my title with an emphatic “yes!” “The conservative movement killed the liberal arts,” she writes, “Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, William F. Buckley and their latter-day heirs.” How? “They have done so through a combination of decreasing access to education and demonizing academic culture and academics. Make no mistake about it: The death of the humanities is an ideologically motivated murder, more like a massacre.” There are elements of truth in Billotte’s argument. For example, higher education is more expensive, and the liberal Read more