The humanities are falling. Universities across the country are phasing out degree programs and closing departments.
Indiana University’s main campus is eliminating 40 majors in the humanities. Sonoma State in California is shuttering its art history and philosophy departments. Graduate programs in the arts and sciences at the University of Pennsylvania are having to rescind informal offers of admission. And except for philosophy and music composition, the University of Chicago will not admit doctoral students for the 2026–27 year in the arts and humanities.
This is news to shock any lover of the liberal arts. How did we get here?
Is it the fact that university budgets are tightening under the Trump administration’s funding cuts? The result of a clash between conservative lawmakers and liberal professors? Or is it simply that interest in these majors is cratering, with the American Academy of the Arts reporting 35% and 32% declines in degrees awarded in history and English, respectively, between 2009 and 2020?
These causes are not unrelated. The draconian cuts to the humanities are the answer to a question that has puzzled observers of higher education for decades: how much longer will anyone — students, parents, alumni, the states, or the federal government — be willing to keep paying liberal arts professors to saw off the branch we’re all sitting on?
To employ a more fashionable metaphor, our humanities departments are simply wearing the skin suit of the liberal arts, which they long ago gutted and flayed.
What is being taught in our humanities departments generally bears little resemblance to the liberal arts. By and large, their project is inimical to the pursuit of truth and the appreciation of beauty — and to the sources of our flourishing.
This has been increasingly obvious since 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr. demonstrated in “God and Man at Yale” the modern university’s contempt for faith and freedom. It was certainly clear by the 1987 publication of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” that the rot had reached the core of the intellectual enterprise — free inquiry in pursuit of truth.
Just a few years after that, I was teaching freshman English at the University of North Carolina and realized that my fellow graduate students considered it their mission to detach their students from the beliefs their parents had taught them.
Around that same time, I found myself at what can best be described as a come-to-Marx revival meeting in a graduate course, where a charismatic professor of English made a guest appearance and spent the entire class meeting urging us to quit dabbling in different ideologies and commit ourselves to Marxism alone.
What, I wondered, would North Carolina taxpayers think if they knew they were paying for his sermon and altar call?
Yes, college students should be reading Marx — but they should be reading him critically, not buying his revolutionary philosophy wholesale. And not just because it has killed approximately 90 million human beings, and counting. Also, because criticism is — or was — essential to the liberal arts project.
It is not, however, the only attitude essential to that project. Through a process of critical thinking and open debate, the liberal arts ultimately aim at the discovery and cultivation of positive goods, beauties, and truths that are conducive to human flourishing.
“The Communist Manifesto” is one of a tiny handful of real classics of Western thought that appear in the top 50 most assigned works, according to Open Syllabus. That list also includes Plato’s “Republic.” But books by gender theorist Michel Foucault and anti-colonialist Edward Said are assigned more often.
And where are Aristotle and Augustine? Homer and Virgil? Aquinas and Dante? Where are the classic works that can help the students discover any truth, good, or beauty that might contribute to their happiness and the health of the society they belong to?
In what now passes for the liberal arts, propaganda has replaced the search for truth. Today, no good is recognized except for power.
For a time, there was some comfort in hoping that the indoctrination in hard-left politics at our colleges had only a minority appeal. Then the George Floyd riots demonstrated that even a tiny minority committed to violent revolution can cause significant mayhem. And developments in the wake of October 7, 2023, suggested that the professors’ radical politics have broad appeal after all. The pro-Palestinian demonstrations are the largest mass protests on campus since the Vietnam War.
Socrates was innocent of corrupting the youth. The philosophers, scholars, and critics who staff our liberal arts departments are guilty as charged. The beliefs they inculcate are intellectually dubious and personally immiserating. Communism, hatred of one’s own country, and racial and gender resentment are not tickets to personal happiness.
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Nor is the damage confined to the students. Our entire society has been fundamentally transformed by the leftist politics disseminated from university humanities departments, from gender theory and repressive tolerance to the notion that Western civilization is the root of all evil.
If our young people are going to get a real liberal arts education, it will be at institutions of higher education that have held out against the flood of leftist ideology: Hillsdale, St. John’s, or any of a number of Catholic and evangelical Christian colleges. Or — and this is the really hopeful trend — it will be in a secondary education with a “classical curriculum.”
On a family vacation this summer, I was surprised and delighted when a young cousin, making a point about her personal life, brought up Socrates’ argument that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it. She had read Plato at Westminster Academy in Memphis, Tennessee, a small Christian school founded in 1996. Lots of homeschoolers are also reading the classics — with open minds, ready to learn from Caesar and Shakespeare, not to dismiss them as patriarchal relics of white supremacy.
Relentless politicization has fundamentally transformed America over the past few decades. History tells us that this level of polarization often leads to violence and unrest. We’ve seen rumblings of such unrest in recent months, especially in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Something must be done.
We can start by turning off the spigot of Robespierres and Trotskys from our universities. Or at least we can quit paying the water bill before we drown in the flood.
Elizabeth Kantor is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
