Hours after young students scampered out of the building, numerous senior citizens, armed with books and a fervent passion for the humanities, wrestled for vacant seats in the congested auditorium. They safeguarded their jackets and copies of “Leadership in Turbulent Times” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and conferred with their spouses. They surveyed the stage as Goodwin advanced to its center with former radio host Alison Cuddy.

Goodwin — a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, and Camille Paglia — an academic and social critic separately addressed Chicagoans in the Diane and David B. Heller Auditorium, on Tuesday, October 30. Participating in the Chicago Humanities Festival, Paglia and Goodwin respectively discussed the future of American society.

Goodwin, a scholar of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson, came with the intent of using “her presidents” to provide context for present-day politics and provided the audience with optimistic insight on current political and social affairs. “There are a lot of young people now, lots of women—more women than ever before—teachers and doctors getting into politics,” Goodwin said. “Maybe that’s a hope in the terrible turmoil we’re living through now: that they will be coming in, not just to assume power, but to want to change the nature of our culture.”

Paglia, who gained national attention for her criticism of the modern feminist movement, delivered a different message about political and social affairs—referencing specific aspects of both. “Journalism is dead,” Paglia said. “It’s a big stinky corpse in the United States right now.”

The social critic continued to spread her pessimistic outlook on political and social affairs in the United States with a tirade about the arts in American society. “The entire art industry is shot through with political correctness,” Paglia said. “The traditional fine arts have withered and waned.”

Paglia and Goodwin each addressed the change in the American political climate in recent years. “Discussion of politics on TV has become ugly,” Paglia said. “You’re either on one side or the other. Everything is pitched on the shows in terms of opposites.”

Goodwin addressed the translation of the partisanship spirit displayed on the television to Capitol Hill. “I worry right now because being in politics in these last couple decades or so for many people in Congress, you don’t feel that sense of fulfillment of bipartisanship, getting legislation through that’s changing the face of the country the way people felt in the ‘60s,” Goodwin said. “The combination now of the complete paralysis in Washington, the need for raising money and spending four hours every day for these stupid campaigns.”

Paglia and Goodwin both discussed the importance of studying the humanities. Paglia, who regards herself as the creator and inspiration for women’s studies curricula nationwide, frequently chastised the movement of “second-wave feminism”—the movement she describes led by activist Gloria Steinem that, among other things, pushed for gender equality in employment. Paglia’s primary criticism was the movement’s “focus on the horrors of man.” “Only weak women can’t acknowledge men,” Paglia said, eliciting applause from the audience.

To Paglia, no reassurance exists that the awfulness she associates with second-wave feminism will disappear. Second-wave feminism, a movement more lovingly embraced on the left, was far from Paglia’s only criticism of the left. She discussed gaps in left-leaning policy including various gaps in women’s studies curricula nationwide—for which she believes she is not culpable. “When problems on the left go unresolved,” Paglia said, “the right get it and use it against them.”

Goodwin, unlike Paglia, is sanguine about political and social affairs, discussing the insights of her recently deceased husband Richard N. Goodwin—who served as a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Senator Robert Kennedy. “The most important part about what he was writing,” Goodwin said of her late husband, “which still is so important for us today is, ‘I’ve lived through the Depression, lived through World War II,’ he had been with Kennedy when Kennedy died, he was with LBJ and saw the war eat things up, he was a great friend of Bobby Kennedy and was with Bobby when he died. He’d seen all of these terrible moments in American history, yet he’d seen us come through. He said, ‘We’ve had these ups and downs, but in the end, America is not as fragile as we think.’ That was one of the last lines he wrote, and I believe that so much still today.”