They’re Killing the Humanities On Purpose

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donbosco

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They’re Killing the Humanities On Purpose​

The crisis is not one of resources but of values.

THE REVIEW | OPINION, By Eric Adler August 13, 2025

University leaders in the United States are slashing the humanities left and right. If you take what they say at face value, it’s because of their limited fiscal capacities. But there is growing evidence that this isn’t the case — that it isn’t a lack of capacity so much as a fundamental lack of will on the part of administrators and boards of trustees to support humanistic education and research. How have the priorities of these university leaders wandered so far away from the age-old value of humanistic education and the true purpose of the liberal arts?

Let’s first consider some of the evidence. Back in June, Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa, announced that her institution’s new provost fired her as the dean of the Honors College that she had run for two years. Why? According to the provost, the program Frey established for the college was too expensive. But this was a puzzling suggestion. The university possesses a $1.36-billion endowment, and by all accounts Frey’s new program, which focused on reading core texts in the humanistic tradition, was phenomenally successful. Enrollment in Tulsa’s Honors College grew by over 500%. Retention rates in the college soared, and the program managed to attract multiple major grants and gifts. And although we’re often told that contemporary college students lack the skills, patience, or inclination to read great (or, now, any) works of literature, history, and philosophy, pupils flocked to Frey’s college.

Even administrators at far richer institutions are claiming the need to slash the humanities because of fiscal capacity. In July, the University of Chicago’s provost announced plans to “restructure” its Division of the Arts and Humanities, potentially gutting language instruction, consolidating departments, reducing graduate studies, and establishing minimum class sizes. As for why an institution with an over $10-billion endowment, famous the world over for its humanities programs, would make such dramatic changes, administrators offered a vague rationale centered on “historic funding pressures.” But what, specifically, are these pressures? As Clifford Ando, a distinguished professor of classics at Chicago, details in some illuminating articles, the university’s leadership has for years spent vast amounts of money, largely on STEM projects, and then attempted to weaken its Division of the Arts and the Humanities as a means to pay for these investments.

Obviously, there are fiscal problems in American higher education. But it’s quite a leap to suggest that the humanities are responsible for them, or must pay the greatest price. In fact, as Ando writes, they are the “only faculty in the arts and sciences who systematically pay for themselves: they do not need expensive buildings; they do not require substantial material infrastructure or expensive data sets for research; the provision of instruction in their fields is cheap.” Thus, it seems to many professors of the humanities that “fiscal crisis” has become a pretext for far-reaching changes that are not necessary so much as desired by university leaders. “The tragedy of the contemporary academy,” Frey concludes, “is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.”

Why might university leaders, including those at wealthy and prestigious institutions, deliberately choose to undercut humanistic education and research? Many reasons suggest themselves. Surely the incessant reports of artificial intelligence spelling the end of reading and writing aren’t helping matters. And STEM and vocational fields are far more often recipients of grants and thus potentially important sources of revenue.

But we should not overlook a deeper structural rationale built into the very creation of American research universities in the late 19th century. Prior to that time, higher education in the United States looked very different. The small colleges that dotted the nation then typically possessed a prescribed curriculum — a series of classes that were required of all students. Greatly influenced by the spirit of Renaissance humanism, these institutions devoted outsized attention to the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature, which students were to encounter in their original languages.

The leaders of the early American colleges believed that the study of the masterworks of Greco-Roman antiquity was key to shaping students’ characters—a prime goal of higher education in the United States. Thus, students who aimed to earn a bachelor’s degree translated a lot of Latin and ancient Greek texts during their school years; much of their education was taken up with reading both sacred and secular works from antiquity. By taking in the wisdom of these writings and the examples of virtuous conduct found therein, America’s young could learn how to live up to their higher potential.

Such a heavy focus on classical literature was always controversial here, and for legitimate reasons. Why, many wondered, should students devote so much of their time to the study of two “dead” languages? Why should the nation’s colleges prepare its pupils principally for a few so-called learned professions, for which a grounding in the classical humanities was necessary?

In the late 19th century, a group of American reformers radically recast their nation’s higher education, establishing a system of research universities that would eclipse the classical colleges. These reformers, whom the historian Andrew Jewett has called the first generation of “scientific democrats,” aimed to recenter higher education on the scientific method. Critical of the dominance of the classical humanities and theology in the classical colleges, the scientific democrats hoped to reorient American higher learning around the natural and social sciences, believing that the scientific method could supply the requisite tools to foment a cohesive and robust democratic society.

Cont.
 
To this end, the scientific democrats jettisoned the prescribed curricula of the classical colleges, in which the classical humanities and theology played such a prominent part. Heavily influenced by the recent publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), these reformers favored an elective-based course of studies, which they cast as an educational “survival of the fittest.” Students would choose all their own courses, and those disciplines that failed to win sufficient enrollments would die — and rightly so.

Many of the scientific democrats turned their institutions into bona fide research universities where scientific-style research and the concomitant creation of new knowledge would thrive. Professors of the humanities — whose efforts were previously focused on the transmission of wisdom from masterpieces of the classical past — would now be compelled to produce such research, which always fit the natural and social sciences better than it did the humanities. In short, starting in the late 19th century, the sciences became the bedrock of American higher education, as could be seen from its new curricula and its new investment in minute and technical research.

American institutions of higher learning have obviously experienced many changes since then. But the system remains narrowly organized around the sciences and far less amenable to the needs of a humanistic education. As proponents of the humanities have noted for over a century, the humanistic disciplines were likely to wither in a system deliberately created to marginalize them.

It has taken decades, but that marginalization is by now obvious to all, and continues apace. Hence, contemporary administrators naturally undercut the humanities in favor of the sciences and vocational disciplines. Without another major change in intellectual and pedagogical orientation, this is precisely what one would expect to see.

Lost in these vicissitudes is the notion that American colleges and universities should be countercultural institutions, in the best sense of that term. In a society dominated by so much economic hustling, they should provide opportunities for Aristotelian leisure — to allow undergraduates the opportunity to contemplate the human predicament and determine the sort of life they’d like to lead and the sort of nation they’d like to inhabit. In a society obsessed with utilitarian approaches to education, our institutions of higher learning should focus on character development just as much as they highlight career training. And in a country often oblivious to the past, they ought to act as stewards of culture, protecting our common human heritage as carefully as they produce new knowledge.

Our system of higher education cannot do these crucial things with leaders who undervalue the humanities, who fail to broaden our approach to the liberal arts beyond the scientistic vision of higher education pioneered in the 19th century.

To a great extent, it appears, our crisis of the humanities is a crisis of academic leadership — a crisis of will, not capacity.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-killing-the-humanities-on-purpose
 
Maybe this belongs on the War on Universities Thread...just thought it was more specific.

Certainly hits home in the UNC System.
 
My wife's university is basically cancelling any class that doesn't have 10 enrolled, while telling the professors they need to come up with more creative courses to attract students (you know the small seminar ones they cancel.) They keep dumping large intro level courses on the English (and other) professors to replace the small seminars and people are burning out. They are trying to get them to quit. They have also gotten rid of electives requirements for most majors, so students have no incentive to enroll in classes outside their majors.
 
altmin said:
My wife's university is basically cancelling any class that doesn't have 10 enrolled, while telling the professors they need to come up with more creative courses to attract students (you know the small seminar ones they cancel.) They keep dumping large intro level courses on the English (and other) professors to replace the small seminars and people are burning out. They are trying to get them to quit. They have also gotten rid of electives requirements for most majors, so students have no incentive to enroll in classes outside their majors.
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Tenure ain't all it's cranked up to be if the admin has enough hate for Education
 
There's more to this story.

1. Humanities departments don't *really* pay for themselves. They rely so heavily on distribution requirements. That's why departments fight tooth and nail to have as many courses listed in the list of classes that all students have to take some of. Even then, a lot of the departments really struggle. There were 5 students in a comparative literature course I took in college. One was a grad student.

As more students go into STEM fields, where the distribution requirements are greatly reduced, humanities courses are getting starved. That an intuition not backed by data, but rather my own observations and some conversations. Even worse, some of those distribution requirements are porting over to the science departments, which more commonly offer "physics for poets" types of classes. The physics department at my son's school offers courses that are basically phil of science, and guess what -- they qualify for distribution.

2. There's a difference between "education that doesn't help employability" and "education that actively hurts it." Some of the humanities departments have gone so loco that it's hard to succeed in them without an outlook like, "the world is such an unjust place that my duty to the world is to become a social activist and fight against the capitalist system." I remember Duke humanities in the 1990s. Marc Andreesen recently said or wrote (can't remember exactly where) that he turned against liberal politics because the kids he was hiring were Marxists who were trying to undermine his companies from within. So that was a lot of bullshit, but it probably did happen a couple of times.

I don't have any idea how big a factor this actually is in reality, but it has certainly dimmed the star in terms of reputation. I can say from my own experience teaching law students: every year there were a few students who, to their surprise, came to really like my course in corporate law. I said at the beginning of the class: the stereotype of corporate law is boring spreadsheets and stock offerings, but that's not true. It's really about the darkness and occasional generosity of the human soul. Mostly darkness. But corporate law is actually a lot more like psychology than it is like accounting. The skeptics who came around were invariably the humanities majors. And good for them for coming around, but they came in with an attitude.

For what it's worth, I had that same attitude when I was that age. Some of it is youth.

3. There was always an implicit bargain, at least in the elite universities: humanities didn't prepare you for a career exactly, but the big money industries would hire you based on intellectual talent alone and then train you. That's how Michael Lewis, BA in English from Princeton, ended up at Salomon Smith Barney, from where he launched his career. The management consulting companies used to hire out of the humanities. You could be a stockbroker with a history degree.

Those career paths are gone. There's too much specialized prep education these days. Consulting companies don't hire english majors any more. They want economists or business students. Wall Street barely bothers with undergrads at all. The late 90s pathway of "college degree -> Silicon Valley project manager or evangelist position" is gone.
 
I think Thomas Jefferson said this but if he did not please attribute this quote to me...

"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

The last thing autocratic regimes want is an educated citizenry...connect the dots
 
That said, I agree that the "research" model of the university was always a bad fit for humanities. And it's that model that has produced a lot of those flaws. I mean, there's only so many plausible ways of reading a Jane Austen novel. But all these professors have to publish something. So we would get things like "Jane Austen and The Masturbating Girl," which sort of twists Austen almost beyond recognition. I actually like that piece a lot, so I'm not criticizing it per se. But that was also in the early 90s, IIRC. Now layer 30 more years of heavy "theoretical" "deconstructions" and the result is predictably going to be nonsense.

I can't speak to work on race at the undergrad level, but I am familiar with Critical Race Studies in law schools. Most of that scholarship is horrendous. They decided that writing about external things was too hard, so they decided that writing about their own experiences became a valid subject. I read one piece called, "Ain't I A Law Professor?" She's going Sojourner Truth because she felt marginalized as a black queer woman pulling in $150K a year in a prestigious educational environment? And from what I could tell -- not being at her institution, admittedly -- there was no objective evidence of that. To the contrary, she was generously published, had an easy teaching load that didn't require her to teach 1L classes, etc. But of course those are features. The personal feeling of marginalization is unrebuttable.

But how can I blame her for that? She's got to publish to get tenure. And there's just only so much to write in crit race studies. One tragedy is that black law students feel pressure to "do race work" when they teach. The number of black corporate law professors was dismally low, and the few that there were mostly concentrated on questions of the interaction between race and corporate law. I'm a fan of seeing the behind-the-scenes factors in seemingly technical disciplines, but nobody in corporate law is "coded white." For one thing, usually plaintiffs and defendants are companies of some sort. Many of the more successful corporate law plaintiffs were public pension funds (and also some of the less successful ones too).

I'm not sure where it goes wrong, but the world needs more black professors to teach bankruptcy law and less to teach Chapter 11: Critical Race Edition. It's fair to ask questions about racial justice in bankruptcy -- absolutely. But race is a sidebar there, and treating it as central just leads to bad teaching and bad research.
 
donbosco said:

They’re Killing the Humanities On Purpose​

The crisis is not one of resources but of values.

THE REVIEW | OPINION, By Eric Adler August 13, 2025

But it’s quite a leap to suggest that the humanities are responsible for them, or must pay the greatest price. In fact, as Ando writes, they are the “only faculty in the arts and sciences who systematically pay for themselves: they do not need expensive buildings; they do not require substantial material infrastructure or expensive data sets for research; the provision of instruction in their fields is cheap.”
Click to expand...
There's some truth in this assessment, but it's also revealing. Those expensive buildings are assets. They attract grad students and money. Even if a PI leaves, the physical infrastructure remains. Another professor can slide in and the cutting edge research continues. By contrast, humanities departments don't really have any assets except their human capital. And when a star professor leaves, it's a permanent hit. Usually schools then hire laterally to replace them, leading to the perverse result that the top humanities professors are the highest compensated professors around -- well, highest in terms of university compensation. I'm not crying for the engineering professors, who maybe make $150K from the university and then $350K in industry or from grants or whatever. But if we're concerned that the engineering discipline is too corporate, too cozy with industry, paying the humanities professors isn't going to help.

I have no insight on what the entry levels in the humanities make. My sense is that it's quite poor. That is, humanities is a tournament game. The winners make a lot, but the majority of make peanuts or get squeezed out altogether. They are hidden casualties that don't show up on balance sheets or financial statements -- except sometimes as cheap "adjuncts" or "instructors" that keep costs down.
 
GeeWhy said:
"Jane Austen and The Masturbating Girl"? I would read that.
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I believe this is it:


And as if to confirm my critique of later scholarship, here's a piece building on that essay. It's posted on the author's (posthumous, I think) website so it has some approval.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick |

Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl Izzy Isgate Good afternoon, I’m Izzy Isgate, I’m a PhD researcher in the Department of English and Related Literatu...
evekosofskysedgwick.net

"I might call this paper ‘Intellectual Wanking: (I Know What You Did Last Term)’; the affective strategy of which would not only play upon the possibility of what Sedgwick calls ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You)’ – and I hope in some way that you all know that my paper is – but also to finger the disciplining, accusatory, occasionally wagging and pointed, finger from which we are increasingly under pressure in Arts and Humanities as a discipline, as research productivity and value is increasingly understood in terms of public engagement and impact. As Arts and Humanities loses funding hand over fist (and I’ll discuss the ethics of fisting another time), and sciences are prioritised, to attach value in terms of ‘productivity’/’re-productivity’ arguably becomes an anti queer move.

I would be humiliated if I ever published that. For one thing, it's the type of grotesque run-on sentence that seems to be ubiquitous in the humanities (and has been for a while) and treated more as feature than bug. But that's an entire paragraph of absolute garbage nonsense and it's the second paragraph in the paper! Well, not counting the Shawn Colvin lyrics (!!) that open. It ain't exactly Prufrock's invocation of Dante.
 
Some very brief thoughts--

I'm unfamiliar with Sedgwick's paper on Austen but the days of high theory are long, long gone.

And, by and large, one would be hard pressed to find high-theoretical Marxist blah blah blah classes in the vast majority of graduate and undergraduate English/Lit programs.

And, finally, what replaced theory was an expansion of what counted as legitimate objects of literary study. Graduate students are apt to freight all sorts of cultural flotsam and jetsam (TikTok videos, horror movies, video games) with intellectual weight that it cannot sustain (or, at the very least, that they cannot make it sustain).
 
breepf said:
Some very brief thoughts--

I'm unfamiliar with Sedgwick's paper on Austen but the days of high theory are long, long gone.

And, by and large, one would be hard pressed to find high-theoretical Marxist blah blah blah classes in the vast majority of graduate and undergraduate English/Lit programs.

And, finally, what replaced theory was an expansion of what counted as legitimate objects of literary study. Graduate students are apt to freight all sorts of cultural flotsam and jetsam (TikTok videos, horror movies, video games) with intellectual weight that it cannot sustain (or, at the very least, that they cannot make it sustain).
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1. All right, fair about the high-theoretical Marxist blah blah. I mean, I don't know if you're right, but my knowledge in this regard is absolutely dated.
2. I would say the issue isn't whether the work is "high theoretical" itself. I would say the "high theory" has become the accepted "method," and that's the problem. Right? Most physics departments, I think, have more experimentalists than theoreticians. But the experimentalists are working within the theorists' framework. The discovery of the Higgs Boson was the work of hundreds or thousands of physicists, and it's within the framework of the Standard Model. So I don't know if you can count influence by comparing the numbers of theoreticians to "experimentalists."
3. The Sedgwick paper was famous for creating a dialogue between high literature and the "hygiene pamphlets" of the time that of course strongly discouraged any type of female sexuality. I think that's valuable, if not taken too far. TikTok videos are taking that too far, in no small measure because it's impossible to write anything meaningful about TikTok videos given that there are millions upon millions of them, and any thesis about them could be unraveled between draft and publication.

Horror movies can be revealing if handled well. Unfortunately, cultural studies has been plumbing horror movies for forty years. In a sense, they are too obvious. Think Godzilla. Gee, you think that Japanese culture was influenced by Nagasaki and Hiroshima? What might give you that impression?
 
Of course the guy picked to be UNC Univ System president had a couple decades of running the community college System in Scar and NC. He is good at identifying what trades need workers and training them specifically to perform those trades-training that usually takes say 2 mths (health Care Aide ) or maybe 2 years (electronics tech )..Pretty clear where we are headed
 
No, I wouldn't call high theory the accepted method. Literary scholarship is still dominated by variations on close reading, historicism, and formalism, though that's not to say that there aren't "fads" (for lack of a better word) of varying durations. Literary studies is certainly balkanized, but feminist readings of Austen novels (or anything else) really isn't more than a niche.

Sure, people can profitably "read" horror films. I'm just saying that graduate students have a tendency to pursue tendentious readings of, well, shit because they're still mistaking what they personally like for what is an interesting intellectual project.
 
breepf said:
No, I wouldn't call high theory the accepted method. Literary scholarship is still dominated by variations on close reading, historicism, and formalism, though that's not to say that there aren't "fads" (for lack of a better word) of varying durations. Literary studies is certainly balkanized, but feminist readings of Austen novels (or anything else) really isn't more than a niche.

Sure, people can profitably "read" horror films. I'm just saying that graduate students have a tendency to pursue tendentious readings of, well, shit because they're still mistaking what they personally like for what is an interesting intellectual project.
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All right, fair. It's the accepted method in what I've read -- which is but a subset of all literary scholarship and also dated. There's no reason for me to overgeneralize.

I think grad students do mistake what they personally like, but it's also true that it's got to be hard for a grad student to find a topic. The advantage of neologic forms is that they are new. You're not fighting three generations of Victorian literary specialists for breathing space.
 
superrific said:
There's more to this story.

1. Humanities departments don't *really* pay for themselves. They rely so heavily on distribution requirements. That's why departments fight tooth and nail to have as many courses listed in the list of classes that all students have to take some of. Even then, a lot of the departments really struggle. There were 5 students in a comparative literature course I took in college. One was a grad student.

As more students go into STEM fields, where the distribution requirements are greatly reduced, humanities courses are getting starved. That an intuition not backed by data, but rather my own observations and some conversations. Even worse, some of those distribution requirements are porting over to the science departments, which more commonly offer "physics for poets" types of classes. The physics department at my son's school offers courses that are basically phil of science, and guess what -- they qualify for distribution.

2. There's a difference between "education that doesn't help employability" and "education that actively hurts it." Some of the humanities departments have gone so loco that it's hard to succeed in them without an outlook like, "the world is such an unjust place that my duty to the world is to become a social activist and fight against the capitalist system." I remember Duke humanities in the 1990s. Marc Andreesen recently said or wrote (can't remember exactly where) that he turned against liberal politics because the kids he was hiring were Marxists who were trying to undermine his companies from within. So that was a lot of bullshit, but it probably did happen a couple of times.

I don't have any idea how big a factor this actually is in reality, but it has certainly dimmed the star in terms of reputation. I can say from my own experience teaching law students: every year there were a few students who, to their surprise, came to really like my course in corporate law. I said at the beginning of the class: the stereotype of corporate law is boring spreadsheets and stock offerings, but that's not true. It's really about the darkness and occasional generosity of the human soul. Mostly darkness. But corporate law is actually a lot more like psychology than it is like accounting. The skeptics who came around were invariably the humanities majors. And good for them for coming around, but they came in with an attitude.

For what it's worth, I had that same attitude when I was that age. Some of it is youth.

3. There was always an implicit bargain, at least in the elite universities: humanities didn't prepare you for a career exactly, but the big money industries would hire you based on intellectual talent alone and then train you. That's how Michael Lewis, BA in English from Princeton, ended up at Salomon Smith Barney, from where he launched his career. The management consulting companies used to hire out of the humanities. You could be a stockbroker with a history degree.

Those career paths are gone. There's too much specialized prep education these days. Consulting companies don't hire english majors any more. They want economists or business students. Wall Street barely bothers with undergrads at all. The late 90s pathway of "college degree -> Silicon Valley project manager or evangelist position" is gone.
Click to expand...

Humanities outside English and foreign languages became popular in the 1960s and into the 70s. They've served university budgets as avenues for undergrads into law and business. They were means for smaller "liberal arts" universities to have an identity and train a workforce to deal with an increasingly diverse community. A mechanism for a society to grow and thrive...a unifying culture.

The economics of state supported flagship universities in today's fiscal and federal anti-education environment (where the Sec. of Education bragged about not being able to spell) is that priorities are shifting as mentioned to STEM and other more lucrative fields. State is State and also a land grant university, so it's never going to focus on the humanities.

If I were to provide just a morsel of advice for the humanities, it would be to back away from the politics business and migrate home toward philosophy, history, human cultures. History as a perspective of who we are, sprinkling in the evolution of human societies and studying societies around the world. Just my $0.02.
 
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