The collapse of university-based humanism has become undeniable. 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 increasingly "late-Soviet." No one wants to be the first worker on the assembly line to acknowledge that the factory is not meeting production quotas. But enforced identification with a collapsing system eventually becomes unbearable.
The arrival of generative AI pushed many university-based humanists over the edge, suddenly compelled them to name the problem in lucid language. Yet AI was not so much a new threat to humanistic inquiry as the final decisive blow dealt by a many-fisted menace that had been stalking the humanities for years. A combination of technological, economic, political, and cultural forces, at work both within and without the university, had by the early 2020s effectively pummeled the tradition of universitarian humanism into unconsciousness.
The Crisis in Practice
Humanities professors could still "report for duty" in a narrow sense; like administrators in post-Soviet confusion, they could show up for work and collect their greatly devalued paychecks. What they could not do is fulfill their duty—they could no longer guide students from beacon to beacon of a millennia-long tradition of reflection and discovery that represents the greatest hope a person has for achieving true freedom.
The collapse is confirmed in both data and anecdote. But it is already a symptom of total domination by a non-humanistic spirit to suppose that data have more power than narrative description. Consider instead, unashamedly, some anecdotes.
An American student on a semester-abroad program in Florence—Florence—who, when told just a thing or two in passing about Michelangelo or Dante in an introductory Italian class, complained to the program director that precious class time was being wasted simply to indulge the professor's eccentric interests. From the student's perspective, the entire purpose of learning Italian is exhausted by ordering panini. This student's "major" did not exist prior to the present century, involving some ad-hoc concatenation of terms like "leadership," "innovation," and "sustainability." On such a course of study students can end up in Florence rather than Barcelona—where they will spend the weekend, thanks to EasyJet—as the result of a choice as hasty as between "Innovation Mindset" on Mondays and Wednesdays or "Team Building for Social Impact" on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The simple truth is that students have no idea why they're in Italy; they barely know they're in Italy. There is some dim awareness that they should be there, eventually to put "Italian" among their "languages" on LinkedIn. But this "Italian" is separated from history, literature, and culture; and this should is an imperative entirely imposed from outside, unconnected to a student's exercise of freedom.
One feels for the student whom the system has so tragically betrayed; and for the professor who simply cannot come good on their true life-calling under these circumstances. But what about the humanities majors? If you check the data you'll see there aren't that many of them left.
The Business-Schoolification of Humanities
Have humanities departments responded to falling enrollment by renewing their commitment to the great tradition, helping students wake up to the wonder of the human mind as manifest in its most enduring monuments? They have not. Instead, like hoverflies that found their niche inside beehives through Batesian mimicry of hymenopteran morphology, the humanities are undergoing rapid "business-schoolification"—as Tyler Austin Harper called it.
The blame is not to be heaped entirely on professors—though we'll give them their share soon enough. The real explanation involves top-down economics, decisions made by administrators whose primary function is to raise money, an enormous portion of which now comes from corporate partnerships.
A California-based specialist in medieval cosmology spent decades gaining expertise necessary to teach his courses; these have been replaced by courses on "video-game ethics." He's been told he's welcome to stay on, and teach these if he wishes. One can roughly guess, given Silicon Valley's proximity, what sort of deal explained this change in curricular priorities.
We have spoken with countless young Ph.D.s who squeezed through with dissertation topics from an ancien régime—beautiful topics, universe-in-a-grain-of-sand topics, on Vedic ritual and Hildegard of Bingen and Ptolemy's Almagest and Navajo verb tenses and Mexica calendars—who are now desperately bouncing from place to place, adjunct-teaching fake courses for paltry sums on topics fundamentally unworthy of their attention: "Critical Thinking for Executive Leaders" and "Philosophy for Public Impact" and all those other confabulated subjects that fall within the genus of what is ultimately an irremediable oxymoron: "Business Ethics."
One feels for these precaritized intellectuals whom the system has so tragically betrayed. But the time has come to do more than feel for them.
The Case for Independent Initiatives
The time has come to see whether something might be done for them—not just stringing them along in a system that is plainly no longer their natural home. The time has come to think about how we might salvage their beautiful spirits intact, and enable them to carry forward to the next generation the things that really matter.
It is plain that if this is going to happen, it will not be the result of an intra-university change of priorities. Universities are not going to reform themselves without significant external pressure from independent para-academic initiatives capable of modeling how the humanities are actually done. The present moment is ripe for flourishing such initiatives. We see them burgeoning all around us, and this fills us with hope.
The Professors' Share of the Blame
Most academics who are not yet retired or dead are young enough to have spent their entire careers in a milieu dominated by some strain of "myth-busting." The principal purpose of what has passed for humanities education has been to convince students that the humanistic tradition is not what they think it is. This is a peculiar pedagogical goal, since typically at the outset students do not have any idea what the humanistic tradition is, or even that it exists at all. They are being rushed from ignorance to contempt without serious effort to familiarize them with their contempt's object.
This is a tragedy in the literal Greek sense: it is a blindness as to the nature and consequences of the professoriat's own choices that ultimately contributes to their own downfall. For nothing has been more useful to administrators seeking to transform the entire university into a business school than to hear from humanists themselves that their tradition is really only the propaganda wing of white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. Imagining themselves as occupying a site of resistance to capitalism, they end up among its most obedient running-dogs.
In the 1980s and '90s many powerhouse intellectuals had a hand in promoting what Paul Ricoeur called the "hermeneutics of suspicion." Even today you're hardly much of an intellectual if you feel no frisson in your encounter with what cultural reactionaries classify as "postmodernism" or even more imprecisely as "postmodern Marxism." Much of the work these reactionaries ignorantly dismiss is indeed exciting stuff, and it has uncovered real truths about our reigning ideological order, because all the leading figures of its first generation were extremely well-educated and knew the objects of their critique inside and out.
But revolutionary movements almost always degenerate into mediocrity once they pass into the institutions, where the succeeding generation preserves little memory of what the revolution had defined itself against. The particular flavor of our current mediocrity results precisely from the collision between this now-institutionalized, half-educated spirit of contempt, on one hand, and vastly more powerful forces of financialization and hyper-quantification on the other.
It is as products of this collision that we must understand the delirious proliferation of ostensibly peer-reviewed articles—if their reviewers read them, they will almost certainly be alone in having done so—on what are plainly topics best investigated through personal or literary essay. Their authors fail to understand, or pretend not to understand, that what interests them is best pursued through cultivation of an individual expressive style rather than through weak semblance of argument and flimsy citational apparatus.
And thus young humanities professors maintain a cargo-cult-like system for publishing reflections on their personal motivations for adopting non-binary avatars when playing video games—shoehorning a question really ought to be explored through the cultivation of a personal authorial voice into the ill-fitted, incongruous frame of abstracts, keywords, works cited, and so on. The results cannot fail to be laughable.
If those who participate in this cargo cult are unable to see this, it is because they preserve no real memory of a humanistic tradition that brought its practitioners out of themselves onto a horizon much larger than their gaming screens. Unlike the cultural reactionaries, it is not at all our purpose to ridicule anyone in particular. We sooner feel for them whom the system has so tragically betrayed.
But that this current way of doing things is ridiculous—that this strange skeuomorphic vestige of the formerly flourishing Geisteswissenschaften needs to be abandoned by any serious person—of these conclusions there can be no question.
The Literature Problem
Those who uphold this absurd system—the junior academics excited to add an editorial-board membership to their CVs, grad students eager to glean some likes on social media by sharing their first "accepted" email as screenshot—can often be found criticizing their critics for having criticized them in ignorance of what is called "the literature." But by this they invariably mean only the narrow productions of the particular academic community in which they've found a home. Upon investigation, these productions never turn out to exhaust the range of what might legitimately be said on a given topic.
This wagon-circling is particularly common in theoretical reflection on gender—a field regarding which we are here taking no substantive position whatsoever (though many of us involved in writing this Declaration do find particular satisfaction in the myth of the primordial androgyne). What does it mean to tell someone they have not adequately consulted "the literature" on gender? That they have not read the Rig Veda? The Talmud? That they have not sufficiently familiarized themselves with the role of the Tungusic shamaness in mediating between the Upper World and the Middle World? That they don't know enough about twin symbolism among the Congolese Lele?
There is not a single human society that has not had significant, fascinating, important ideas about what gender is and how it structures our reality. It would be surprising indeed if the infinitesimally small sliver of these ideas influential in Anglophone gender-studies departments in the early 21st century were to happen to be the final definitive account of how gender works.
These people do not cite, or understand, the key works of social and cultural anthropology that have been done on this subject. They preserve no memory of what might legitimately be said about gender from outside their particular silo. And in their failure to consult these works, they reveal something more fundamental: they have lost the capacity for thinking altogether.
Critics might note that this framing oversimplifies; academic disciplines and their practitioners are not monolithic, and many scholars in these fields maintain rigorous methodological standards regardless of institutional pressures. Still, Smith's core argument stands: the humanities' strategic focus doesn't match where its traditions actually point.