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Want to know why John Guillory’s Professing Criticism has attracted such widespread attention? Because it’s widely read as a eulogy for a discipline that has lost its audience and lost its way.

There’s a pervasive sense among many adults with humanities degrees that In the wake of deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernism, semiotics and the cultural, linguistic and discursive turns, literary studies, in particular, like other core humanities disciplines, is in deep trouble.

The challenges that literary studies faces are evident to anyone who cares to look.

1. The field has fragmented. There’s now affect studies, animal studies, cultural studies, diasporic studies, disabilities studies, the digital humanities, ecocriticism, Indigenous studies, the New Historicism, the medical humanities, performance studies, postcolonial criticism, women’s studies, post critique and more. As the field has fractured, its mission and purpose have grown increasingly unclear.
2. The number of majors has declined severely and apparently irretrievably. Over the course of a single decade, core humanities disciplines have lost half their majors, which has led growing numbers of campuses to reduce the full-time, tenured faculty.
3. The discipline now focuses more and more on the relatively recent present at the expense of the past. English departments find it harder and harder to justify professors with a specialty in Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance or even 18th- and 19th-century poetry and the novel.
4. The field is besieged. It’s attacked from the right as too political, too jargon ridden, too theoretical, from the left as too apolitical, too insular and too ethnocentric and from all too many members of the general public as insufficiently skills-oriented and career-aligned. These criticisms are aggravated by businesses’ claim that too many college graduates can’t write well.
5. At the same time, readership of academic critics and of literature itself has plummeted. Readership of literature has become a niche activity. The cultural cachet associated with literature has faded. No longer is a degree in English regarded as a signal that a student is exceptionally literate culturally, a superb writer and superior intellectually.
6. The field feels increasingly marginalized inside the university. It’s treated by many administrators as essentially a service department, while colleagues outside the humanities increasingly dismiss the field as lacking rigor and as cinema studies lite, ethnic studies lite, Indigenous studies lite and women’s studies lite.

What happened? Were the wounds self-inflicted? I don’t think so.

1. The humanities golden age was relatively brief and reflected conditions that won’t return. The number of humanities majors soared in the 1950s and 1960s largely because the number of women in the academy rose and many didn’t feel like they had many other attractive options.

The rapid expansion of knowledge and the emergence of new fields of study like artificial intelligence, biomedical science, brain science, data science and machine learning made it inevitable that the core humanities would shrink, at least relatively.

As undergraduates become more career and vocationally oriented, many mistakenly believe that the optimal path to financial success lies in the STEM fields or prevocational majors in business, communication, engineering, hotel and restaurant management, and marketing.

2. Within the humanities and the interpretive social sciences, alternatives to the traditional disciplines attract more and more students. Not just Asian American studies, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, Latinx studies and women’s studies, but arts, technology and communication, environmental studies, linguistics and sustainability.

3. Some of the discipline’s most vibrant scholarship now takes place outside the discipline’s traditional subfields. It lies in English language literature in Africa, the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, South Asia and other areas apart from Britain, Ireland and the United States. Given fixed or shrinking faculty numbers, something’s got to give.

4. Nation-based fields strike many humanities scholars as too narrow, too insular and too provincial. National literatures are challenged by global literature and comparative literature, much as history is challenged by the growing emphasis on Atlantic studies, diasporic studies and world history.

All this said, there’s a great irony that I think has been insufficiently appreciated. For all the talk about the humanities retreat and the decline of English as a discipline, high theory, critical theory and cultural studies have had an extraordinarily powerful impact of public discourse. We’re all deconstructionists and postmodernists now. Command of the language of critical theory signifies one’s status as knowledgeable and up-to-date.

In other words, supposedly arcane literary critics and philosophers with impenetrable prose actually succeeded in bringing a host of ideas into the cultural mainstream.

These included the Foucaultesque notion that power and hierarchy can be found everywhere: for example, in language, in cultural categories and narratives and in representations as well as in economics or politics.

There’s the concept of performativity and the cultural, social and political dimensions of performance.

There’s postcolonialism—the study of the cultural, political and economic legacies of colonialism and imperialism—and narratology, the study of the structure and function of narratives and their themes, conventions and symbols.

Especially influential is critical identity studies—the study of how identities are formed, constructed and perpetuated historically, politically and sociologically; how gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, dis/ability, nation, non-/religiosity and region influence identities; and how identities are shaped by structures of inequality and systems and practices of power.

Nor was the impact of critical theory and cultural critique restricted to literature departments. In my field, history, evidence, unitary conceptions of the nation state, master narratives and claims to objectivity were increasingly viewed as problematic. Within history, the most atheoretical of disciplines, more and more prominent scholars embraced not just revisionism but cultural critique, border studies and critical identity studies.

All of this raises truly difficult questions:

1. Are traditional disciplines, departments and fields the best way to organize teaching and research within the humanities? For example, should English remain siloed from other literatures and languages? Should history place even more emphasis on transnational linkages and interconnections and treat the nation state and national histories more problematically?
2. How do we balance the humanities’ traditional role with its more recent emphasis on inclusion, power, discourse and identity? For a century, the humanities were the disciplines committed to the preservation, study and interpretation of humanity’s history, artistic, cultural, literary, musical and scientific achievements and the development of its moral and political thought. How, in a time of shrinking faculties and a political backlash against approaches that some dismiss as trendy and faddish approaches, do we continue to what we once did while embracing new areas of study and new analytical and interpretative schema?

Here’s my response to these two questions.

1. We should recognize that departments and disciplines need not be synonymous—and that’s not necessarily a problem. Departments are administrative units that can encompass a wide array of faculty, methodologies and modes of interpretation. Some function effectively—as do many departments of modern and classical languages. Some are deeply riven, like many Spanish departments that face bitter divisions between specialists in linguistics and peninsular and Latin American and U.S. Latinx literature and culture. Whether a department should be restructured hinges on its ability to function effectively. We should think of departments as big tents that encompass multiple approaches and points of view.
2. Administrators should encourage more cross-disciplinary and thematic linkages not as substitutes but as supplements to existing departments. To take my own case, much of my scholarship contributes as much (if not more) to family studies, childhood studies and museum studies than it does to history as it is typically defined. I think it makes sense to foster stronger connections between individual humanities faculty members and pre-professional fields, whether in business, law, medicine, public policy or technology. There’s nothing wrong with dual loyalties in scholarship and teaching.
3. The humanities should encourage their campuses to rethink the gen ed curriculum. The humanities disciplines dominate the core curriculum. That’s also where the core humanities departments get the bulk of their enrollment. How about radically reimagining the required courses that the offer humanities departments offer? How about offering classes on the “art of living”—which was the original purpose of the humanities? Or replace discipline-specific surveys with more pan-humanities classes, for example, on the development of the notion of rights or identities or equity or freedom or the idea of progress? Or with courses that deal with various aspects of the human condition, like bereavement, evil, intimacy or tragedy or that adopt global and comparative perspectives? Each of these approaches, I’m convinced, would better connect to an undergraduate student body that finds many traditional core classes high schoolish and irrelevant.
4. The humanities disciplines must achieve a better balance between teaching substance and skills. We don’t typically think of the humanities disciplines as skills focused except in their stress on critical thinking. But as our campuses face more and more pressure to do a better job of teaching writing, public speaking, research, evidence evaluation and argumentation, the humanities need to raise their game.

Like it or not, we in the humanities are largely in charge of teaching students to express themselves clearly, whether orally or in writing. That’s a responsibility that has been ceded largely to composition courses taught almost exclusively by graduate students or instructors off the tenure track. I think it’s fair to say that no one is very satisfied with the results and AI text generating applications may well augment the problem. Teaching students to speak and write more clearly, stylishly and analytically is a responsibility we shouldn’t dodge.

We also need to do a better job of teaching students to conduct research, evaluate, analyze and interpret sources and make persuasive evidence-based arguments that acknowledge opposing points of view. History, my discipline, also needs to do much more to teach students how to use, dissect and visualize data.

As scholarship evolves and new fields of study proliferate, the humanities must adapt. That process won’t be easy. Tough, extremely contentious decisions lie ahead about coverage and hiring. Many of us worry a lot that as core humanities departments shrink, attention to the more distant past will diminish and some subjects central to the disciplines will disappear. Some also fear that in their eagerness to sustain enrollments, their humanities will embrace fads that will soon peter out.

The days when my department had 72 tenured or tenure-track faculty are already long gone, and my colleagues and I must think long and hard about whether to emphasize disciplinary breadth or specialization, whether to maintain a national focus or shift toward a more regional perspectives or whether to hire potentially popular classroom teachers or promising scholars irrespective of their teaching ability. Bitter battles lie ahead.

As we all know from our personal lives, adapting to change is hard. So as humanities departments confront a shifting environment, we have a lot to learn from the advice literature on coping and resilience:

1. Accept the necessity of change. Heraclitus had it right: all is flux. Nothing stays still. The pressures for change are relentless. As Emerson supposedly quipped in response to Margaret Fuller’s declaration “I accept the universe,” she’d better.
2. Consider change an opportunity, not a threat. We must conquer our fear of change and reframe our thinking. I know, this cliché sounds a bit like Monty Python in Life of Brian: “Always look on the bright side of life.” But change, however unwanted, does offer an opportunity to rethink tradition and adjust to new realities.
3. Act intentionally. Embrace the change process. Acknowledge the challenges and consider options. Be an activator of change not change’s passive victim.
4. Strive for balance. When faced with difficult decisions or options, it often makes sense to strike a balance between competing interests and priorities. That doesn’t necessarily mean achieving a compromise or finding a middle ground. But it does require acknowledging the costs of change and acting accordingly.

The history of the humanities is a history of change. The humanities have shifted, over time, from a process into a body of knowledge and then into a series of technique and methodologies that emphasize interpretation. The humanities are poised to change yet again. My recommendation is that we draw upon the past as we chart our path into an uncertain future.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Second thoughts about John Guillory’s sociological critique of the English profession—and its implications for other humanities disciplines.

Objectivity and balance aren’t plausible, attainable, or desirable academic goals. But scholarly debate over interpretations is.

We mustn’t flinch when tough issues or heated controversies arise.

Count on The New York Post to come up with the tabloids’ most incendiary headlines and news article leads. We all recall “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But what about some other headlines that are much more inflammatory or offensive.

Regarding disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo: “At the End of His Grope” and “Handsy Andy.” Or Alec Baldwin: “Dolt 45.” Or Tiger Woods: “I’m a Cheetah.” Or Eliot Spitzer, another shamed New York governor: “Ho No.” Or a tarnished member of Congress: “Hide the Weiner.” Or about French and German reluctance to support the Iraq war: “Axis of Weasel.” Or an especially objectionable headline using a hateful vulgarity about a purportedly gay Mafia boss: “Fairy Godfather.”

Then there’s this lead in a hot-off-the press Post article entitled “SUNY makes new racial equity class mandatory for graduation at all schools”:

“The 64-campus SUNY college system is turning into the Woke University of New York — ordering incoming freshman at all of its colleges they will have to pass a new ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Social Justice’-themed class to earn a diploma.”

Woke University? According to SUNY documents, for a class to meet the new requirement, it must not only “describe the historical and contemporary societal factors that shape the development of individual and group identity involving race, class and gender.” It must also:

• “Analyze the role that complex networks of social structures and systems play in the creation and perpetuation of the dynamics of power, privilege, oppression and opportunity,” and
• “Apply the principles of rights, access, equity and autonomous participation to past, current, or future social justice action.”

The Post then quotes a political science professor, who claims that the requirement portrays “the US as ‘inherently racist’ and tries to undermine the American identity that unifies all citizens by ‘creating groups and pitting them against each other.’”

Of course, most colleges and universities that I’m familiar with have a cultural diversity requirement. What sets SUNY apart is the stress on the networks, systems and structures that create “power, privilege, oppression and opportunity” and the requirement’s emphasis on “social justice action.”

I, perhaps like you, have heard several negative responses to the SUNY requirement:

1. That at a time when institutions are having trouble teaching students to write well or achieve a basic level of scientific literacy or master essential math, statistical and data analysis skills and become civics knowledgeable, such a requirement will serve to reinforce conservative fears that universities are prioritizing political indoctrination over basic skills and content knowledge.
2. That this requirement is the mirror image of those initiatives that Florida governor Ron DeSantis seeks to push through in his state: dictating course content with a political slant.

We probably shouldn’t worry overmuch. The idea that any college or university, other than a handful of religious institutions, can run itself in a top-down manner, push out a particular point of view (academic or otherwise), achieve coherent learning objectives or force faculty to teach or think in a particular way is almost certainly impossible. As anyone who teaches or administers at a college and university knows firsthand, campuses are far more contentious environments than either the public or politicians imagine.

Still, whatever you may think of the specific SUNY DEISJ requirement, might it not make sense for colleges to offer interdisciplinary courses that deal explicitly and systematically with the nature of power—classes that don’t simply reflect the perspectives of sociology, psychology and political science, but tackle the topic even more broadly and inclusively?

Among the most striking developments within the late 20th and early 21st century academy is the broadening of our understanding of power: what it is, where it lies, how it is exercised and how it functions. In addition to the more traditional understandings of political, military, diplomatic and economic power—the power that resides in authority, coercion and influence—we now speak of soft power, systemic power, police power, informational and ideational power, emotional and affective power, and referent power (that is, the power derived from identification with an authority figure), as well as discursive and epistemic power. Today, we speak much more openly about the power of connections and the power of incentives and rewards than in the past.

We now recognize that power is manifest in a host of ways: through culture, expertise, labels, representations, expectations and language as well as through the more traditional vehicles of law and public policy. Although fewer scholars refer to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony than was the case half a century ago, his basic idea—about how society’s dominant ideas are disseminated and internalized and how relations of domination and exploitation are socialized, naturalized and achieve consent—persists. There is widespread acceptance of the role of nonconscious beliefs, feelings and attitudes in reinforcing power structures and arrangements of authority, wealth and status.

You might well say that power is far too broad a topic to be treated outside of specific disciplinary contexts. After all, isn’t much of human history about struggles over power, resources and dominance? How can one satisfactorily combine, within a single course or even a course cluster, macro-sociological forces, trends and processes, political power, economic power, institutional power, the psychology of power, and the power of discursive and epistemic categories of thought, symbolizations and linguistic conventions?

Or you might argue that a Foucaultesque stress on the manifold manifestations of power is reductionist: that by seeing power everywhere, we blind ourselves to the complexity of ideas and behaviors and other phenomena.

Or you might worry that an undue focus on power, privilege, stratification, inequality and societal and cultural hierarchies is little more than political and ideological indoctrination and a way to induce feelings of guilt, shame and discomfort in the interest of driving certain partisan agendas.

I take these concerns seriously. But power and its multifarious manifestations are topics too important to evade. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that issues of power lie at the very heart of humanities and social science scholarship today and are evident across the arts as well. The key challenge is how to teach about power in ways that are responsible, fair-minded, respectful and unbiased.

So how can we do that? Here’s my advice. Recognize that:

1. A liberal education should not, indeed must not, avoid the tough stuff or controversial questions. Colleges, in my view, need to be the place where the hottest, most contentious political and cultural controversies are subjected to rigorous analysis and contextualization. If not there, where? If we don’t address these topics, then crude, simplistic, unsophisticated points of view will inevitably prevail.

In today’s society, no issues are tougher or more contentious than those involving inequalities, whether rooted in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, religion or cultural stereotypes. Rather than evade these debates, be willing to academize the controversies. Dodging and ducking may be OK in the hockey rink or on the soccer field, but these stances are unfitting within the academy, where it’s essential to acknowledge differences of opinion even as we subject ideas and perspectives to critical scrutiny.

2. A liberal education must eschew indoctrination and propagandizing no matter how high the stakes may appear. In a pluralistic society and certainly in colleges and universities, all truth claims, explanations and conceptual and theoretical frameworks must be treated as problematic and all instructors must be willing to engage with multiple, conflicting perspectives. Orthodoxies are the enemy of a liberal education, an education that befits a free person.

As Noam Chomsky, the great linguist and political activist, has put it, a higher education should never be about brainwashing, indoctrination or propagandizing. Indoctrination is education’s antonym. “The purpose of education,” he has said, “is to help people learn how to think for themselves.” Its great goal is to teach people “to question.”

As Charles Audino, an editor, has recently written, as access to information through the click of a key or the tap of an app has surged, it should be obvious that a college education ought not be a synonym for the acquisition of knowledge. With information omni-available, a genuine higher education consists in the ability to process, analyze and apply information; rigorously evaluate competing claims and opinions; and make evidence-based decisions and implement solutions grounded in critical thinking.

Perhaps most important of all, a college education should involve what the classical Greek philosophers called askesis—which my prolific and extraordinarily perceptive past colleague Robert Zaretsky (citing the philosopher Pierre Hadot), described as a process of self-transformation that involves defining a sense of purpose and transcending one’s narrow point of view.

A college education that avoids disagreement under the guise of civility or that evades contentious, complex, difficult or taboo issues under a veneer of mutual respect isn’t a liberal education at all. It’s pablum.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.