The Humanities have defined, for centuries now, what we mean by the public, the demos, and therefore, democracy as well. The essays in this collection bring to the interested reader concerns that the Humanities as a discipline have addressed for some time now: atrocities and human rights, cultural memory, difference and dissent, climate crisis, the space of the university and the state of the disciplines within, and the transformation of the public university system itself through policies and pressures of different kinds. Written in response to immediate contexts, these reflections on higher education and the liberal arts, particularly the role of the literary – its ‘sanitization’, its connection with dissent and freedom and the ways in which the humanities deals with critical concerns such as climate change – address the public through the frames of humanistic understanding, in the language of public debate.