Three hundred. That's how many students graduated with a humanities major from the University of Texas at Austin last year, out of roughly twelve thousand. Three hundred people, out of an entire graduating class, chose English, History, Philosophy, Art History, or any of the other disciplines that once formed the beating heart of the Western university.
Let that number sit for a moment. Three hundred. It's a nice, round, tragic figure. The Spectator essay I just read notes that it echoes the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, men who stood in a narrow pass, facing a Persian army a thousand times their size, and died because they loved their city more than their lives. There's a grim poetry in the parallel. The humanities are now doing their own last stand. The difference, of course, is that the Spartans died fighting. The humanities are just decaying, quietly, room by room, like a mould problem nobody wants to acknowledge.
I can't find it in myself to mourn. Not much, anyway; not on my birthday today.
The Spectator piece lays out four drivers, and honestly, they're hard to argue with. Let me walk through them, because each one is a nail in a coffin that was sealed a long time ago.
The price tag. College costs more than a luxury car now, in the US, and a decent car for Australia. Students and parents look at that number and do the maths: not about "enrichment," not about "becoming a well-rounded citizen," but about whether the degree will pay back the loan. A philosophy degree doesn't. A history degree doesn't. An English degree, statistically, barely does. So students look at the bill, look at the job market, and choose something that ends in "-engineering" or "-science" or "-nursing." That's not a moral failing. That's rational economic behaviour.
The content rot. This is the one that stings if you actually love the humanities, because it's the humanities that did it to themselves. Department after department got colonised by ideology, Marx, queer theory, post-modern nihilism, the endless parsing of power dynamics and oppression matrices. The syllabus became a political catechism, and grading became a reward for abject adherence. Students who just wanted to read Great Expectations or study Shakespeare found themselves in a forced march through ideological terrain they never signed up for. So they voted with their feet. You can't blame them. If the English department wants to be a cult, the students will find somewhere else to be educated.
The scarcity of actual value. There's enormous, legitimate interest in biosciences, computation, and AI. Those fields are transforming the economy and the job market, which is to say, there's enormous legitimate interest in skills that pay. When the humanities stopped offering either intellectual nourishment or economic utility, they lost both audiences at once. The kids who wanted money went to STEM. The kids who wanted meaning found the syllabus had been replaced by ideology. Nobody was left.
The collapse of standards. Grading inflation has turned the average into a joke. When everyone gets an A, the grade means nothing, the course means nothing, the standard means nothing. And the faculty, the people who once defended the idea of a liberal education, lost confidence in it. They lost the nerve to impose standards, because imposing standards requires believing in something, and belief has been in short supply in the faculty lounge since the late sixties.
Here's where I'm going to part company with the Spectator essay, because it ends with a plea to save the humanities, reintroduce basic courses, trim the ideologues, expose all students to "the best that had been thought and said."
I say: it's too late, and moreover, it deserves to die.
You cannot resurrect a discipline by adding a requirement to it. Mandating that every student take an English literature course is like forcing people to attend the funeral of a religion they no longer believe in. The moment something has to be compulsory to survive, it has already lost. The humanities were great when they were sought. When students chose them because they loved them. When they were a mark of genuine curiosity and intellectual ambition. When a young person read Plato and Shakespeare and Mill because those works spoke to something in them. That's gone. And it isn't coming back by bureaucratic fiat.
The humanities had a glorious run. For centuries, they were the intellectual inheritance of the West, the great conversation about what it means to be human, conducted across millennia. But the West stopped believing in that inheritance, and the humanities stopped believing in it too. The professors who should have been the custodians of the flame spent fifty years handing it over to ideology, to relativism, to the corrosive idea that there's no truth, only power. You cannot transmit a great tradition you no longer respect. You cannot teach young people to love what you secretly despise.
The rot came from within. The ideologues didn't conquer the humanities; the humanities invited them in and gave them the keys.
There's a kind of peace in accepting death. Let the humanities expire. Trim the departments, or better yet, let them hollow out naturally, as students keep choosing not to enrol. Redirect the money to actual student services: advising, psychological help, internships, career placement. Fund the things that genuinely help young people find their way in the world, rather than propping up departments that became ideological apparatchiks and now can't even attract a crowd.
And yes, maybe keep a few great books around, for the ones who still want them. Not because we've instituted a requirement, but because some kid, somewhere, will always pick up The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and be changed by it. That transmission doesn't need a university to happen. It never did. The university just happened to be a good place for it, once, when it still believed in itself.
The Spartans died defending something they loved, and their sacrifice meant something. The humanities are dying of contempt for their own legacy, and that's a sadder thing, in a way, not a glorious last stand, but a slow, self-inflicted decline that most people barely noticed and fewer still will mourn.
Three hundred students at UT Austin; might be three hundred Spartans at the pass. But these ones aren't fighting for anything. They just decided, sensibly, that there was nothing left worth defending.
Let the humanities die its unnatural death. Pour a drink for what it used to be, and spend the tuition money on something that works.
https://spectator.com/article/anybody-still-major-humanities-college/