Delbanco on Obama

In a NY Times article about the struggle by university humanities departments to demonstrate their relevance in tough economic times, Andrew Delbanco (author of a great biography of Herman Melville) suggests that Barack Obama embodies the value of studying the humanities:

“He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”