Downfall of the Humanities

Something is rotting at the core of our education system. It is not shrinking budgets. It is not student apathy. It is the spreading belief that humanities are expendable, that the apple, long held out as the emblem of learning, has been hollowed, polished on the surface but browning from within. 

For most of the 20th century, no one questioned the purpose of, say, the English department. The answer seemed obvious. It was the place you went to study the great works of literature, to converse with beauty and meaning across time, from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. It was the place where you studied the best that has been thought and the best that has been said. Hence, the English degree used to be a popular choice amongst ambitious young students. This popularity stemmed from not only the willingness to engage with the works of Shakespeare, Eliot, and Dickens, but also from the fact that it was a manageable, expandable path toward a viable career. At the time, everyone was reading the great works that are studied academically. And so the English department was a new addition to postsecondary education: it would be the equivalent of adding a Social Media Studies department to universities today. However, the popularity of an English major has fallen substantially, whereas the popularity of STEM subjects has skyrocketed.

This phenomenon can, somewhat ironically, be explained with simple principles of economics. When demand increases, supply increases to meet demand (and vice versa). Academia has become more practical rather than pure. The STEM fields of today are the “money-making fields”, and so many humanities programs at public universities (which are more popular than private universities due to their affordability and accessibility) are not funding the humanities; instead, they are redirecting their already limited budgets to ensure that graduates can “win bread”. And breadwinning is a very desirable prospect! This resulted in an increase in demand for STEM subjects among students, and thus, the supply for STEM subjects increased alongside it. 

This logic seems wonderfully practical. However, within this reasoning lies a fatal flaw. Education becomes a marketplace, and students become shoppers wandering the aisles stocked with promises of stability. The humanities sit on the shelf like bruised fruit. Sweet beneath the skin, still nourishing, yet they are overlooked in the active rush toward shinier futures. Their value has not dimmed; instead, our ability to perceive such value has been clouded by the glitter of utility. 

This has resulted in a further decline of the humanities. The study of history, for instance, is being forgotten and phased out by mainstream media. And of course this is the case: there is no practical application of, say, the study of early Marxist rhetoric. And the most intuitive employment prospect for a historian is in museum cataloguing. Of course, there is not much money to be made, and not much bread to be won. Similarly, to fully realize an English degree, most go on to work in law or finance. Another path is academia; however, this has taken a fall because of the previous reasoning of defunding. 

This downfall exists not as a linear waterfall, but as a cycle. If one were to read, say, realist literature that critiques the Enlightenment Project and its formulaic systems (think of the “crystal palace” as a symbol of rational perfection, or the dominance of Apollonian order over human instinct), one would quickly see how our obsession with efficiency has long been treated as both a promise and a trap. No wonder anti-intellectualism is on the rise! There is a decline in public readership (corresponding to the decline of the English department): the state of public literacy is thinning, with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted to the extent that half the population reads less than one book for pleasure per year. To revisit the previous economic reasoning, the decreasing relevance and public sentiment of the humanities have led to a decrease in their public demand. I’d say that the whole of the humanities has lost cultural influence precisely where and when society needed them the most.

I’d also not be surprised if humanities students fall into existential crises once in a while; after all, those who study the human story must occasionally feel its weight. So what is there to do? Perhaps nothing grand, nothing sweeping, only to notice the wound and refuse to look away. We must choose, deliberately, to read more deeply, to think more slowly, to question more bravely, letting complexity settle. The humanities may be bruised, but they are far from revival, as even bruised fruit carries sweetness. And so we defend these disciplines, those quiet, stubborn keepers of memory and meaning, not merely so we may move through the world, but so we may truly understand the world we move through.