HTA Lecture: “Can Ancient Chinese Philosophy Make America Read Again?”

Timothy Gutmann will present the 2026 Humanities Teacher Award lecture for the University of Southern Mississippi titled “Can Ancient Chinese Philosophy Make America Read Again?”

“Can Ancient Chinese Philosophy Make America Read Again?” is about the crisis in the humanities at its most fundamental level: adults are spending less and less time reading, and reading comprehension is declining worldwide. To confront this situation, Gutmann argues we can take a helpful perspective from the philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), whose thought inspired China’s imperial exam system. He will explore how Zhu Xi taught critical thinking through the social example of a literary canon that readers would share with each other and not, as academic humanists often do, as an individual skill abstracted from any particular reading material. However, Zhu Xi’s goal was not to indoctrinate unthinking conformity but to cultivate critical judgment about how to follow tradition and when to take exception.

The lecture will take place on the University of Southern Mississippi campus on TBD at 5:30 p.m.