A Third Way for the Humanities

A Declaration

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“WHITHER THE HUMANITIES?”,
taking place in August, 2026. Application deadline June 1.

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The Current State of Things

It is perhaps in the nature of academics to fret about declining standards, especially as these academics age and become ever less attuned to the always-evolving expressions of the innate ingenium of youth. But even an eternal complaint can be truer in some eras than in others. With each passing year since the economic crisis of 2008, the familiar response to complaints of decline —that we must not let our spirits flag, that we must not retreat into cynicism and defeatism— has come to sound, to those who have not lost their hearing, ever more “late-Soviet”.

No one wants to be the first shock-worker on the assembly line to acknowledge that the factory is not meeting production quotas. But at some point enforced identification with what is obviously a collapsing system grows so strained as to become unbearable, and the change that had been coming slowly for a long time now comes all at once.