What makes this diagnosis compelling is that it identifies a real pedagogical inversion: students are often taught to suspect, unmask, and demystify before they have first been given anything substantial to inherit. A humanities education cannot survive as a permanent exercise in deflation, because critique presupposes acquaintance; otherwise it produces posture rather than judgment.
The deeper problem may be institutional as much as intellectual. Once the humanities justify themselves primarily through negation—myth-busting, exposure, subversion—they begin treating transmission as embarrassment rather than mission. At that point, students are not being initiated into a tradition so they can evaluate it; they are being trained to perform distance from something they were never seriously taught to know.
So the “third way” matters because it restores an older but essential sequence: encounter before critique, inheritance before revision. In any durable culture, contempt is a poor substitute for formation.
This is a great essay, which will inspire me to become a paying subscriber.
One thought: if the humanities are indeed "a practice of self-cultivation" then in order to achieve personal liberation one doesn't *necessarily* need to be active within an organization; one simply needs to engage in a lifelong pursuit of reading and reflection. However, I grant that "simply" is doing a lot of work in that last clause, and that a broader community of inquiry and encouragement - because yes, courage is required - can be enormously helpful (although in my experience that can take the form of reading with friends rather than under the tutelage of yet another non-profit corporation).
That seems like a very important distinction to me: self-cultivation doesn't strictly need an institutional setting, but it flourishes within a „community of inquiry and encouragement.“
The discussion of gender in this piece could be interpreted in such a way that gives a foothold to transphobia (and anti-LGBT positions more broadly). The characterization of contemporary gender studies is misleading at best. I am also not fond of this sort of discussion around "postmodern Marxists" / hermeneutics-of-suspicion academics. Those two things make me hesitant to share this, but there's a lot that's worth thinking about here.
It is false that there are hardly any humanities majors left. What is true is that they are in quite sharp decline as a proportion of US students. But given the expansion of higher education that leaves the absolute numbers higher that they were historically. And in other countries such as the UK the proportionate decline has been less marked.
Sorry to have been dismissive in my first reply. I think I really do prefer substantive engagement with the main lines of an argument, rather than discussing the interpretation of an ambiguous quanitifier (“not many”), whose absence would have made no real difference to the whole piece. By “not many” do we mean total numbers, or do we mean percentages? Either way we agree the humanities are in decline, numerically speaking; the more important issue for me is that they are in decline qualitatively.
Agree with much of this, especially pedagogically. Starting from a standpoint of critique, when students have no idea why they're in the classroom in the first place (in many cases), is such a bad move! Especially when academics are so beat down by each other and by the culture at large they don't actually fundamentally believe they're teaching much of anything besides maybe teaching STEM people about racism and to appreciate poetry a bit.
One thing I will say, though, is that I find it rather tedious that no one on this website seems to have the intellectual guts to actually face up against the actually-stated anti-canon arguments (and arguments for alternative canons, plural, which is where my own heart lies)--as well as more generally the history of why we're here in the first place. This Declaration goes further than basically anywhere else I've seen in touching on it, and maybe the issue is that this conversation is more inside ball than public-facing and people seem most concerned with recruitment, but just asserting "there is a canon! go read it!" isn't particularly helpful. "But undergrads and laypeople will like it more and see the point" is a better argument, but not by much, and only for a strategic shift.
If there is value in thinking of the humanities as a sort of Great Conversation--and I believe there is; I had a Great Books undergrad, and I'm largely very grateful for it--the last fifty years were not a blip. That work was done for good reason. I'm as tired of reading poststructuralists as anybody and think it was a dead end, but I can concede that when looked at soberly, there are some very sharp points to grapple with there, often points whose nuance was lost in the tides of academic trendiness (both pro and against). I think there is good *intellectual* work to be done consolidating the best the last decades have to offer with a different approach, and I wish people were more willing to do it.
Thank you for this piece. I got out of the academia game before I was ever really in it, but stayed academia-adjacent for most of my adult life. I deliberately chose not to pursue a PhD because I saw that all PhD scientists around me were managing grad students and begging for alms rather than doing the research they were trained to do. I especially appreciated the nod to STEM also being pummeled by the "business-school-ification" of higher ed.
After walking away from an academia-adjacent career, I transitioned to secondary ed. The tendrils of the pragmatic mindset that result in b-school being the highest achievement exists here, too. I suspect it all stems from late-stage capitalism grinding everyone down; my students live in a high CoL area in a high CoL state, and we don't even have poor-houses anymore, so falling behind or through the cracks results in dying of a fentanyl overdose in a trailer park (in their minds).
I love my subject (and most subjects, to be honest), and I try to teach such that they have "world in a grain of sand" moments. Some are receptive and become aware of a glorious world within the world, and start to think about how to orient humanity within it. Many just want to get an A so they can get into a top b-school and become quants.
While I applaud the idea behind para-educational initiatives, they still have to exist in the system that values productivity. I hope that the people who most need it find it, but I suspect they're mostly busy being middle-managers and prepping their offspring for the machine that produced them.
As an "insider-outsider" myself, I’d like to express a wish: May The Hinternet always im part be a place for exploring the latitudes possible within conventional higher education institutions. With a sharp eye on economic-political conditions and ideological constraints, but also a kind and generous eye for those who still believe in the system, or are caught in it, or are simply trying to make the most of things. Humanistic inquiry is too important to give up even a single place where it might flourish.
This is very interesting and perceptive: how to recoup the value of the humanities, to relish the real greatness of the canon, to appreciate the real, substantial achievements of Western Civilization (no scare quotes required as far as I am concerned) without giving in to the caricatures and abuses of the radical right? .... I don't know, but let me recommend one young man who is cultivating a free-lance approach to the humanities that seems promising ... Adam Walker, whose Versed youtubes and paywalled courses are interesting, substantial, humane and hopeful. Meanwhile, I've been reading Paradise Lost ... you can write "Trump" in the margins quite often!
What makes this diagnosis compelling is that it identifies a real pedagogical inversion: students are often taught to suspect, unmask, and demystify before they have first been given anything substantial to inherit. A humanities education cannot survive as a permanent exercise in deflation, because critique presupposes acquaintance; otherwise it produces posture rather than judgment.
The deeper problem may be institutional as much as intellectual. Once the humanities justify themselves primarily through negation—myth-busting, exposure, subversion—they begin treating transmission as embarrassment rather than mission. At that point, students are not being initiated into a tradition so they can evaluate it; they are being trained to perform distance from something they were never seriously taught to know.
So the “third way” matters because it restores an older but essential sequence: encounter before critique, inheritance before revision. In any durable culture, contempt is a poor substitute for formation.
This is a great essay, which will inspire me to become a paying subscriber.
One thought: if the humanities are indeed "a practice of self-cultivation" then in order to achieve personal liberation one doesn't *necessarily* need to be active within an organization; one simply needs to engage in a lifelong pursuit of reading and reflection. However, I grant that "simply" is doing a lot of work in that last clause, and that a broader community of inquiry and encouragement - because yes, courage is required - can be enormously helpful (although in my experience that can take the form of reading with friends rather than under the tutelage of yet another non-profit corporation).
That seems like a very important distinction to me: self-cultivation doesn't strictly need an institutional setting, but it flourishes within a „community of inquiry and encouragement.“
I have skin in this game as a former tenure-track professor who's building the para-academic field right now. I wrote about this last year: https://elftheory.substack.com/p/para-academia-is-the-future
The discussion of gender in this piece could be interpreted in such a way that gives a foothold to transphobia (and anti-LGBT positions more broadly). The characterization of contemporary gender studies is misleading at best. I am also not fond of this sort of discussion around "postmodern Marxists" / hermeneutics-of-suspicion academics. Those two things make me hesitant to share this, but there's a lot that's worth thinking about here.
It is false that there are hardly any humanities majors left. What is true is that they are in quite sharp decline as a proportion of US students. But given the expansion of higher education that leaves the absolute numbers higher that they were historically. And in other countries such as the UK the proportionate decline has been less marked.
Sorry to have been dismissive in my first reply. I think I really do prefer substantive engagement with the main lines of an argument, rather than discussing the interpretation of an ambiguous quanitifier (“not many”), whose absence would have made no real difference to the whole piece. By “not many” do we mean total numbers, or do we mean percentages? Either way we agree the humanities are in decline, numerically speaking; the more important issue for me is that they are in decline qualitatively.
Thanks for the data!
Agree with much of this, especially pedagogically. Starting from a standpoint of critique, when students have no idea why they're in the classroom in the first place (in many cases), is such a bad move! Especially when academics are so beat down by each other and by the culture at large they don't actually fundamentally believe they're teaching much of anything besides maybe teaching STEM people about racism and to appreciate poetry a bit.
One thing I will say, though, is that I find it rather tedious that no one on this website seems to have the intellectual guts to actually face up against the actually-stated anti-canon arguments (and arguments for alternative canons, plural, which is where my own heart lies)--as well as more generally the history of why we're here in the first place. This Declaration goes further than basically anywhere else I've seen in touching on it, and maybe the issue is that this conversation is more inside ball than public-facing and people seem most concerned with recruitment, but just asserting "there is a canon! go read it!" isn't particularly helpful. "But undergrads and laypeople will like it more and see the point" is a better argument, but not by much, and only for a strategic shift.
If there is value in thinking of the humanities as a sort of Great Conversation--and I believe there is; I had a Great Books undergrad, and I'm largely very grateful for it--the last fifty years were not a blip. That work was done for good reason. I'm as tired of reading poststructuralists as anybody and think it was a dead end, but I can concede that when looked at soberly, there are some very sharp points to grapple with there, often points whose nuance was lost in the tides of academic trendiness (both pro and against). I think there is good *intellectual* work to be done consolidating the best the last decades have to offer with a different approach, and I wish people were more willing to do it.
Thank you for this piece. I got out of the academia game before I was ever really in it, but stayed academia-adjacent for most of my adult life. I deliberately chose not to pursue a PhD because I saw that all PhD scientists around me were managing grad students and begging for alms rather than doing the research they were trained to do. I especially appreciated the nod to STEM also being pummeled by the "business-school-ification" of higher ed.
After walking away from an academia-adjacent career, I transitioned to secondary ed. The tendrils of the pragmatic mindset that result in b-school being the highest achievement exists here, too. I suspect it all stems from late-stage capitalism grinding everyone down; my students live in a high CoL area in a high CoL state, and we don't even have poor-houses anymore, so falling behind or through the cracks results in dying of a fentanyl overdose in a trailer park (in their minds).
I love my subject (and most subjects, to be honest), and I try to teach such that they have "world in a grain of sand" moments. Some are receptive and become aware of a glorious world within the world, and start to think about how to orient humanity within it. Many just want to get an A so they can get into a top b-school and become quants.
While I applaud the idea behind para-educational initiatives, they still have to exist in the system that values productivity. I hope that the people who most need it find it, but I suspect they're mostly busy being middle-managers and prepping their offspring for the machine that produced them.
(Sorry for being verbose)
John Pistellis Invisible College is a great para academic venture, not sure if it's on your radar but it's been incredible imo
Oh thanks, I’ve been seeing Pistelli’s name around, and slowly developing a sense that I should figure out who he is. Now I’ll do that!
And add to that Adam Walker's Versed
The anthropologists have spoken!
Love this; love the Burkean close about tradition. Du Bois’s winces not comes to mind. Terrific.
L
As an "insider-outsider" myself, I’d like to express a wish: May The Hinternet always im part be a place for exploring the latitudes possible within conventional higher education institutions. With a sharp eye on economic-political conditions and ideological constraints, but also a kind and generous eye for those who still believe in the system, or are caught in it, or are simply trying to make the most of things. Humanistic inquiry is too important to give up even a single place where it might flourish.
This is very interesting and perceptive: how to recoup the value of the humanities, to relish the real greatness of the canon, to appreciate the real, substantial achievements of Western Civilization (no scare quotes required as far as I am concerned) without giving in to the caricatures and abuses of the radical right? .... I don't know, but let me recommend one young man who is cultivating a free-lance approach to the humanities that seems promising ... Adam Walker, whose Versed youtubes and paywalled courses are interesting, substantial, humane and hopeful. Meanwhile, I've been reading Paradise Lost ... you can write "Trump" in the margins quite often!