Stop Trying to Make the Humanities 'Relevant'

"Humanities departments seem to be in perpetual crisis. Fewer students are enrolling in them. The Trump administration is cutting their funding. Smartphones and social media are hastening the collapse of reading and attention spans, even among students at elite schools. Americans are becoming more skeptical about the economic value of any four-year degree, let alone one in comparative literature. In answer to these and other challenges, many colleges are trying to make the humanities "relevant.""

"But such adaptations and compromises only exacerbate perhaps the most insidious threat the humanities face, and one that's not often discussed. Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap-a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless."

Humanities face declining enrollment, funding cuts, shrinking attention spans due to smartphones and social media, and growing skepticism about their economic value. Colleges respond by emphasizing practicality, assigning excerpts instead of books, and restructuring departments to appear more 'relevant.' Those accommodations risk worsening a deeper problem: the perception that knowledge is cheap and easily procured, intensified by large language models. The humanities prioritize rigorous, difficult inquiry as an intrinsic good. A visiting humanities professor at Bard College teaches core books and ideas with the mandate to preserve intellectual difficulty rather than adapt to ease.

Read at The Atlantic