The trouble with the Humanities

Many colleges, both private and many campuses of state schools, are in trouble. Demographics indicate that there are, and will be, fewer and fewer students of college age. Less expensive alternatives and the prospect of higher pay also lead to alternatives like junior colleges and trade schools. But some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. From the "Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences":

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi. However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized. ....

...[O]ur review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished. ....

...[W]hile we have focused entirely on the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, there is reason to believe that the problems we have identified exist to some extent in other areas, including the natural sciences. Our report does not speak to these larger issues but may form a useful template for the study of them. Second, within the humanities and social sciences, we have focused exclusively on core academic disciplines represented at research universities by Ph.D.-granting departments in schools of Arts and Sciences rather than the academic work generated by interdisciplinary units of various sorts and by scholars elsewhere in the university, e.g., in schools of education, social work, communications and so forth. There is reason to believe that the problems we have identified in the core disciplines are significantly more serious in some of these allied areas, but we have not studied these issues in detail. ....

An indispensable condition for serious scholarship in any area is institutional openness to a range of ideas. That openness requires firmly resisting any effort to judge scholarly work based on its conformity to a priori ideological constraints. .... (more, very much worth reading if you care about higher education).

"Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences," April 5, 2026.