Much of the trouble in my opinion, having known many undergraduates in the Comparative Literature program at Columbia ~15 years ago, was that these students were among the most downtrodden, pessimistic, and negative people I had ever met.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.
Curmudgeonly professors are part and parcel of universities. These are intellectuals, by default they don't fit into normal society. Universities are where they thrive.
Don't worry be happy, is that what you're saying?
What's hilarious about this is how short sighted and stupid universities are. Their cash cow programs are the ones DIRECTLY TARGETED by AI. What's going to distinguish some grade seeker that walks through Uni looking for 4.0 atop a pile of AI generated crud, and a real thinker?
It's going to be humanities. It's going to be the "liberal arts".
Not that I'm saying humanities won't need to adapt. The take home term paper will probably need to be replaced by verbal argument and defense, so they can prove they actually understand without an AI.
Humanities and actual intellectualism, as opposed to degree rubberstamping, is how universities will survive AI.
It's also amazing to me that as college costs have skyrocketed 10x higher than they used to be, humanities require almost none of that increase. Nor does it need the administration.
You can't afford humanities? I know "where is the money going" has reached comically Kafkaesque levels in modern "education", but this takes the cake.
I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really nails it:
Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with difficult texts—they were the living embodiment of institutional melancholia.
The faculty—and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring even Enigma would envy—presided over this misery with what can only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was not to be remarked upon.
Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely demoralize students—they actively corrode the very institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants too much awareness of cause and effect.
Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find themselves unable to justify continued investment in these programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having replaced them with something else entirely—a cargo cult version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to fund its own negation indefinitely.
You aren't talking to ChatGPT. I agree with you that the humanities would be "fixed" ideally. I don't know how you do that, though. I never said you should get rid of them. Just that I can't really blame UChicago et al. for not supporting what's going on. There are so many other issues with contemporary humanities departments I am not even touching on. Also, no one is "getting rid of the humanities" writ large -- in this case, we're talking about a particular program at a particular institution. Seen another way, retracting support from a broken branch is a good way to redirect resources to better-functioning departments at UChicago and elsewhere.
Faculty that administered the program held, in my view, strong anti-Western and anti-elite biases -- eg Gayatri Spivak. The attitudes of said faculty were corrosive to the same conditions that allow the humanities to exist in the first place. I don't think we can blame institutions for struggling to support such programs, which practice a different version of "The Humanities" than ones before.