It's sad to think that left-leaning humanities profs have talked for decades about the need for publicly funded humanities scholarship and education, only to be ignored by Democrats who just want education to be job training. Then the right-wing just goes ahead and does publicly funded humanities.

saw a post on IG the other day that said something like "you don't have to write silly poems! you can and should write serious poems too" and. like. where are the silly poems. give me the silly poems

Even when civic centers hire excellent scholars - which they do - they are incorporating them into a conservative political project that is designed to undermine faculty governance and intellectual freedom. There's no getting around that fact.

Many civic centers have indeed hired excellent scholars, but the question to ask is why the existing history and political science departments were not given those faculty lines? And that's where the civic center game begins to reveal itself: it's not about simply hiring more humanists.

Antonia Alksnis@antoniaalksnis.bsky.social · yesterday

Agreed, a lot depends on which civics faculty are in charge of hiring new people. Lots so far have been scholars just excited to hire excellent scholars regardless of personal politics. Others may be interested in indoctrination. It’s a precarious situation.

The decline or end of the humanities specialist - and, indeed, entire disciplines - will happen because people decided to end them. Technology is not the cause, but rather the justification.

omg “AI” is “delivering” no “deathblows” to “literary specialists”!?! For one thing, that’s because “AI” cannot stand as a grammatical agent in any sentence accurately describing the priorities or funding structures of higher education; you’d need “trustees” or “provosts” or — if you want— +

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2d ago

If AI delivers the deathblow to the literary specialist, it's because of choices we as a society have made that were far from inevitable. Hist of science 101: political and ethical choices about technology (not its mere appearance) shape its social effects. www.chronicle.com/article/am-i...

It would be great to see some politician articulate this clearly - what needs to be rebuilt isn't just a federal science infrastructure but a federal <knowledge> infrastructure that includes the humanities and is tethered to democratic, public interest ends rather than corporate or military ones.

A reconstructed federal knowledge infrastructure in which the NEH resumes its former marginalized, underfunded role doesn't actually serve the public interest.

Building both a new scientific and humanities federal funding infrastructure means embracing peer-review, curiosity-driven research, and decoupling the pursuit of knowledge from instrumental motivations like commercialization across the board.

It's more accurate to speak of "Trump's war on knowledge" rather than "Trump's war on science." This captures the fact that federal humanities funding and federal science funding have both been attacked for the same sets of reasons: alleged 'wokeness,' connection to higher ed, profit-motive etc.

"Humanistic inquiry is valuable" is a full sentence! And we need, as OP says, to find ways to mobilize that fact towards power in the university rather than playing games about revenue/majors/ROI/instrumentalized skills with people who NEVER meant them as anything other than justification for cuts

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3d ago

Once humanists confront the fact that more majors and more enrollments will not make a whit of difference in how they are treated by admin, they can focus their efforts on figuring out & investing in what will actually help them build political power within their institutions.

Once you recognize that the majors thing is a con game, you can stop worrying about it, stop catering to it, and just support good research and good teaching without the gimmickry of marketing.

It's refreshing to just admit this. It would be refreshing for humanists to accept this, admit this to themselves, and stop pretending like increasing majors and enrollments makes a whit of difference in how they are treated by administrators who don't want them there anyway.

Dr. Michael A. Urban - isopalyecopaleobotanist@mesosuchus.bsky.social · 3d ago

This might surprise you but education is not the highest priority for university (big A) administrators. Skimming off the top of million $$ grants is more tangible to them than butts in seats.

The difference in the end is that CS like other STEM disciplines is seen as producing knowledge, which justifies tenure lines. Humanities fields are not seen as producing knowledge but just teaching “skills” / bildung to undergrads, and institutions don’t believe you need tenure lines for that.

I predict that CS won’t be punished for losing majors in the way humanities departments are, which will expose that the majors thing is a con game.

Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · last wk.

Computer science lost about 53,000 majors last academic year. But veterans of the field see a familiar cycle, not necessarily a collapse. What’s different this time: AI is reshaping the entry-level jobs students once counted on. https://chroni.cl/4ssyblC

that's my colleague, that's us "austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime toward ultra-elite profit+cascadingly away from literally anything else we need unions more urgently inside this moment of accelerated dismantling than at any other time since the 50s" lithub.com/how-austerit...

How Austerity is Killing Higher Ed (and What We Can Do About It)

Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similar…

lithub.com

I say this as an intellectual historian of 17th- & 18th-century Europe who teaches the Enlightenment and has taught (and loved!) Great Books courses. Familiarity with a canon gives a shared frame of reference! It can be vital to understanding many things! It remains limited, changeable and relative!

and, finally, this: a fixed canon can only be the corpse of a dead tradition; not in spite but *because* of my interests, I can hardly endorse such a thing.

there are many good reasons to study particular traditions in which particular canons play outsized roles. All of these reasons are more specific and more delimited than “reading books” or “knowing history.” Every canon is constructed (over and over again) relative to a specific purpose or question

it’s about engaging a “canon” of philosophical and literary works in roughly the same way that a “this is what they took from us” twitter meme is about engaging a “canon” of early Nintendo games or whatever. Signing on to it to promote “reading” is like signing on to MAGA to promote “women’s sports”

the right-wing position on the Western Canon is not coherent and is not meant to be; it’s not about reading and thinking with a body of writing but about stabilizing an onanistic image of The West. The same project that demands reverence for Plato to build the image bans reading Plato to maintain it

The lefty humanities professors on this website are yelling “we need to get the kids reading Shakespeare and Homer” and yet the far right says that they need to take over the university because it’s abandoned Shakespeare and Homer, which makes me think the right’s claim is a pretext for something.

And finally please look at Devin’s ( @devingarofalo.bsky.social) amazing quote here, and how it got these superb student journalists to look up a few of the stats — such as that full professors at GU make someting like 4-5x our adjunct colleagues— which now appear in GU’s paper of record. / end 💖💥🙏

And Victoria Chen, a now-PhD-student who copyedited the book as a senior, was able to describe the poverty of instrumental thought & explain the alternatives Johnson’s work helps model— positions rarely articulated in student publications,+ 💖💥

Because it turns out —so we got to say in a newspaper—that the material conditions for knowing and thinking shape what it is possible to know and think. +

Thanks so much to student journalist Brendan Fijol, who allowed what was supposed to be a fluff piece on a new faculty book to instead highlight the catastrophic state of academic labor at GU & beyond, and the coordinated attacks on thought since 2020. + @devingarofalo.bsky.social

English Professor Coedits Book Celebrating Literary Critic, Intellectual Freedom

A new book coedited by Georgetown University English professor Nathan Hensley addresses freedom of thought amid a period of falling appreciation for academics.

thehoya.com

Some of the analytical framing in this study is questionable (I don't buy the "power"/"aesthetics"/"identity" categorization), but the finding that there has been a massive contraction in humanistic knowledge is significant: a consequences of under-funding and poor academic employment chances.

Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · 2w ago

Humanities dissertations have fallen by 49 percent since 2015, compared with a drop of 4.5 percent in the social sciences, according to a new analysis of nearly 445,000 dissertations in these two fields over 65 years. Explore the data: https://chroni.cl/4yxUZ4S

The main thing that this study shows is that because of underfunding and underinvestment in the humanities, we as a society have less and less research knowledge about culture and history. That's a significant finding. academysciencesletters.org/wp-content/u...

The idea in here that business schools inherently train people to devalue labor reminds me that the same critique was made when the first business schools in America were started, which I mention here: www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-int...

The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for Th...

elizabethspiers.com

Today, @electricliterature.com's "The Commuter" brought me these two brilliant poems by James Allen Hall @jamesallenhall.bsky.social, so what I'm saying is you should subscribe. electricliterature.com/category/lit...

Creative Writing at NEIU@neiu-cw.bsky.social · 3w ago