But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.
“Go woke, go intellectually bankrupt.” That is the latest rallying cry of conservative critics in America’s forever war over the state of higher education. In this case, the man on the attack was Joseph Massey: a self-described “not woke” conservative poet and alleged victim of cancel culture who blasted the recent announcement that Harvard’s English department would feature a course on Taylor Swift. “Come for the intifada rallies, stay for the course on the literary genius of Taylor Swift,” Massey quipped.
The idea that radical faculty members are destroying majors like English by teaching classes on the “queer subtexts” of Taylor Swift, rather than the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, makes for a provocative talking point. But narratives like this unwittingly turn the problem inside out. If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are “useful.” In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.
Conservative critics of the humanities tell an idealist story—one in which the humanities are in a battle of ideas that they are losing because of wokeness. But they should tell a materialist story about how administrative incentives and financial pressures have forced the humanities to contort themselves in their own defense. And now the same trends that were supposed to justify the existence of the humanities are greasing the skids for their undoing. Humanities scholars and departments have not only failed to save their disciplines—a tall task that was perhaps always impossible—they have provided ammunition to conservatives who want to gut government funding for higher education.
Benjamin Schmidt: The humanities are in crisis
If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.
In a certain sense, the currently raging debates about the humanities are all too familiar. Critics like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball gained national notoriety for claiming that “tenured radicals” had corrupted humanities education way back in the 1980s and ’90s. What is new today is not that many humanities professors are openly political in their research or teaching. What is new is that departments like English at elite universities have become officially politicized at the behest of university bureaucrats.
Administrators, not professors, usually approve hiring decisions, and these administrators are under intense external and internal pressure to diversify the faculty and curricula. Diversifying the faculty is a noble goal—I’m a beneficiary of these initiatives—but universities have looked for clumsy shortcuts. The reigning assumption is that scholars of color are disproportionately represented in activism-oriented fields such as “decolonial theory,” which means that deans—always seeking more brown faces to put on university websites—are more likely to approve new tenure lines in ideologically supercharged, diversity-rich disciplines. It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.
Outside observers mock job ads looking for scholars working on “anti-racist Shakespeare,” and these listings are frequently tortured and ridiculous. However, such ads do not always reflect the scholarly priorities of the professors on the hiring committees. Rather, they’re often a product of the plotting of superiors who care more about their university’s public-facing diversity data than they do the intellectual needs of the English department, the interests of its students, or the health of the discipline more broadly. A humanities faculty member at an elite research university—who did not want to be identified, because he does not have tenure—is only one of several professors who told me that his department struggles to balance its curricular needs with the more political subfields being pushed by administrators.
“The directive came down from the dean that new tenure lines were only likely to be approved if they contributed to diversifying the faculty and/or curriculum,” he told me. When the faculty discussed it, he went on, “the senior faculty members were very critical of trendy hiring and believed that it was harming the field.” Nevertheless, when his department attempted to skirt the directive by submitting a request for an open-hire position—meaning that scholars from any subfield could apply for the job—it was rejected by the dean. (“As expected,” he added.)
At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice. I went on the job market in 2019—the last year before hiring and Ph.D.-admission trends toward activism dramatically accelerated as a response to George Floyd’s murder. The pressure, as a scholar of color, to bend my work to the study of race was already intense. Were I on the job market now, it would no doubt feel insurmountable. Open literature jobs this year are overwhelmingly skewed toward subfields related to identity, politics, and power. The message this sends to scholars of color, who are the intended audience for these job ads, is clear: The only expertise we want from you is the expertise that flows from your identity.
These hiring practices aren’t problematic only because they instrumentalize both scholars of color and the humanities in the service of dubious politicking. They’re troubling because putting all the opportunity eggs in one basket will distort our disciplines for years to come. As the historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a vocal champion of the history profession, told me: “We’re no different from the sciences and math. Just as there wouldn’t be any computer chips without quantum mechanics, there wouldn’t be any 1619 Project without scholarship on early-modern accounting practices. But it’s the curiosity-driven research in the humanities that’s being seriously undermined right now—this is what needs defending and advocacy.”
Humanists today need to reckon with the fact that the only thing our politicking is accomplishing is hastening our own demise—and the effects are not borne evenly. Perversely, humanities departments at wealthy private universities are the ones responsible for the most inflammatory rhetoric, yet under-resourced public ones clearly bear the brunt of the backlash. The push to cultivate an activist humanities has succeeded in furnishing new strawmen for reactionaries, who are all too eager to point to the madness of the Ivy League and conjure up the fantasy that their local public universities are in the grip of the same cultural politics. A few vocal humanists at rich schools make things harder for those at poor ones. Meanwhile, at their own elite universities, progressive humanities professors provide a smoke screen for their employers.
The ugly truth is that the humanities work as beards for billion-dollar universities. We prattle on about anti-racism and justice and the politics of this and that, and the cumulative political effect of all that pseudo-radical chatter is scant to nil. A cynic could easily argue that the core purpose of the humanities has become to provide the illusion of progressivism to deeply unprogressive institutions, helping them appeal to wealthy liberal students. Colleges usher in social-justice-warrior faculty through the front door while exploiting workers, piling up student debt, and wooing mega-rich donors in the back. Humanities professors often think we’re critics of academic capitalism and rarely pause to wonder if we’re its unwitting stooges.
Hiring activist faculty and making curricula more directed toward justice aren’t just about professors courting (or failing to court) the favor of a college’s higher-ups. These tendencies have also been a bid to defend the very existence of humanities departments. In a brave new world where every major must prove its worth to its debt-saddled “student-customers,” the humanities have a hard time mounting a credible case that their disciplines catapult graduates into six-figure salaries. What humanities departments can offer their young charges—who grow more progressive by the year—is the promise that their majors can help them understand power and fight for equality.
Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, some would have you believe that it is humanities departments that do the bending.
It should have been evident to anyone possessed of a modicum of foresight that, in a highly polarized country, the ivory tower could not get away with shameless progressive politicking indefinitely. And unsurprisingly, the humanities are being thrown under the bus at public universities now that the squeeze is on from the reactionary right. As the education historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, the author of a recent book on campus politics, told me, “The right failed miserably at getting their ideas into the classroom, but were successful where it counts: in wielding power over the campus by way of becoming presidents, trustees, and politicians who can directly influence what happens in higher ed.” Over the past year, we’ve seen how that power has been wielded.
This summer, West Virginia University disinvested from a number of its humanities programs—as well as its math department—to shift the institution’s resources toward “market-driven majors.” The implosion of the humanities at WVU was in part the brain child of RPK, a higher-education consulting firm. In October, legislators announced that the University of North Carolina system—which includes the prestigious Chapel Hill campus—would no longer be endowing chairs in humanities fields, diminishing promotion possibilities for humanists employed at public schools in the state. Not long after, UNC released a controversial ROI report—also orchestrated, in part, by RPK—showing that humanities majors such as English and history offer significantly less return on investment compared with STEM majors.
These moves to assess—and punish—humanities programs based on their ultimate financial upside should be understood as part of a broader effort to defund them entirely. Unlike Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke” at the New College of Florida, politics was not mentioned as an explicit reason for the decisions to diminish the humanities at either UNC or WVU. However, the accelerating pace of budget cuts under way at red-state public universities in the past few months cannot be divorced from the broader conservative media and social-media ecosystem in which humanities departments are under near-constant assault for their identitarian leanings.
In his provocative 2022 book, Professing Criticism, the literary scholar John Guillory took aim at the conflicts within English and related disciplines. At the center of the crisis, Guillory argued, is the question of use: both how outsiders see the uses of literary study and how literary scholars see the uses of their labor. “The distinction between useful and useless knowledge is a bit of ideology that works endless mischief in the market for intellectual goods,” Guillory writes. “It is a scandal that the distinction has been associated with the division between the sciences and the humanities. A good deal of science is in market terms ‘useless’; conversely, literary knowledge, understood as imparting certain cognitive skills, is much more useful than is often acknowledged.”
Guillory observes that literary criticism today is all too often understood by its practitioners as a mode of what he calls “surrogational politics.” Novels become the site of a “proxy war”: Critiquing the power relations or the depictions of race or gender in a literary text becomes a surrogate for critiquing those same phenomena in the real world. Reading and interpretation are redefined as a kind of activism, and thus as an endeavor like policy work or criminal defense. Guillory also points out that the political efficacy of the humanities is invariably “justified by faith”; that is, there is little evidence in the ledger proving that literature actually realizes a transformative social good.
A few months after 9/11, the anti-war novelist Kurt Vonnegut—nearing the end of his life—opined on the power of literature in times of political conflict and reflected on the Vietnam era. “Every writer, every painter, every poet, every musician was against the Vietnam War,” he observed to an interviewer. “And I have said that it’s like a laser beam, you know, where all the beams of light are aimed in one direction and so all art, the total art world, and also a whole lot of other decent people, would form this laser beam, everybody aimed at the Vietnam War to stop it. And the power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie, two feet in diameter, dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” Vonnegut laughed before summarizing: “It made no fucking difference.”
Of course, a case can be made that Vonnegut was too negative: The Vietnam War did end in part because of its unpopularity, and it’s hard to know whether protest art played a role. But Vonnegut’s appraisal of art’s political uselessness demands to be taken seriously. It should occasion us to question the political power of the humanities more broadly, as well as the real-world impact we can expect from recent hiring trends. Despite conservative fearmongering about student and faculty revolutionaries, the humanities seem to be about as politically powerless as Vonnegut assessed more than 20 years ago. The increasing politicalization of humanities departments over the past decade has occurred in parallel with the increasing radicalization of the right during that same period, and the former has done positively nothing to curtail the latter.
It is not clear to me that the genie, having slipped its bottle, can be put back. The literary scholar Christopher Newfield has recently argued that reinvigorating the humanities requires that “we build a public reputation as a set of important research disciplines and a research infrastructure to realize that.” He outlines a path forward that calls for collecting data, collaborating across fields and scholarly associations, and drafting strategies to draw national attention to program closures. Newfield is hard-nosed and practical, eschewing the sentimental pablum that undergirds so many defenses of the humanities. But if his proposals are not pie in the sky, it’s also hard to escape the feeling that the task he lays before us is immense.
We cannot conjure out of thin air lucrative job markets for our humanities majors to walk into. We cannot deprogram students and parents who are acculturated to view naked economic ambition as the highest good. We cannot force our deans to provide tenure lines for fields that don’t fit into their political agendas. We cannot coax sincerity or real racial justice out of universities that reduce diversity to a commodity that must be purchased through the crudest and quickest tools. We certainly cannot satisfy our conservative critics without selling our souls.
Adam Harris: ‘An existential threat to American higher education’
If Newfield is right that we must reestablish the humanities as a serious research discipline, then we must begin by defending the idea that the humanities have value that is independent of their political or economic use-value. We can make the case that we are not the stewards of some rigid and exclusionary Western cultural heritage or literary canon but of a millennia-old tradition of human inquiry that is still capable of producing knowledge vital to understanding our present. And above all, we can start by being honest—publicly honest—about the forces that form, and deform, the humanities today.
Ironically, activist faculty and their conservative critics share the same nihilistic vision of the future of higher education: Both believe that the only valuable forms of research and teaching are those that accomplish something obviously useful. Such views are born of austerity, and they are utterly foreign to me. When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me—and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med—because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect—or require—from the humanities.
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