Liner Note 52. Fighting for an Interdiscipline: The Humanities' Future

New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026  

I gave this talk at the 45^th Anniversary Conference of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University,  April 17, 2026. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, audience, and my co-panelists.

I’m going to talk about humanities ambition in a time of diminished authority for its fields,  and I’ll say we need big increases in our ambition in response.  But I have to note that the humanities won’t get enough help from their universities, and in many cases will have to fight them.  The Trump administration’s systematic efforts to erase people of color from the American past and present has been translated on campuses as quiet acceptance, via, in particular, the deletion of DEI programs and the merging or closure of departments associated with ethnicity, sexuality, or countries and cultures MAGA America dislikes.

Last year, UCLA eliminated small courses in 2 East African languages, saying they had no funding for them.  The instructor, who had created them, offered to teach out the remaining students voluntarily or for $1; UCLA refused.  Something similar is happening with cuts to medical research that focuses on racial disparities in treatments and outcomes; successful lawsuits have come from groups of faculty and not from their universities. The same goes for student affairs: two weeks ago, the University of Missouri “stripped the Legion of Black Collegians—its historic Black student governing body—as well as at least four other minority affinity groups of all annual designated funding,” claiming orders from the Dept of Justice. “The organizations argued the memo was merely advisory: no matter.” The academic freedom scholar John K. Wilson has described the pattern well. Referring to the antisemitism settlements, he wrote, “It is common to describe these agreements as a surrender to the Trump regime, but it’s actually much worse. This isn’t capitulation; it’s collaboration. This is complicity, not compulsion.” So someone like me, preaching radical humanities revival, needs to remember that we have to build our allies from the ground up, and one at a time.

My main feeling about humanities scholarship is that our disciplines have produced really good research that actually matters to people’s everyday lives.  Regular people need more cognitive power than ever, and interpretative methods applied to complex information have kept the national knowledge crisis from being even worse than it is.  Everybody thinks about the struggles of personal identity, their own and others, and criticism, queer studies, comp lit, ethnic studies, feminist studies, history, philosophy, etc. have generated abundant, useable knowledge about them.  The national democracy, such as it was, has gone down the tubes, while the humanities analyze the affects and the interpersonal relations that help explain why, and what to do. Most people are upset about the absurd concentration of wealth that spreads deprivation in a rich society; literature and criticism has exceled since the start of industrialization at showing how consciousness exceeds economic motives and builds non-capitalist perspectives.  There’s widespread opposition to forever wars in both major political parties, and the humanities generate deep knowledge about the psychic life of aggression and about how to steer it away from violence, even as we can all see that this is all too rare.

So, a pride moment.  Do I think the world would be better if it were run according to the findings of the scholarship of my copanelists and of the people gathered in this room, and of our colleagues in these fields? I do think that! Of course, humanities scholars also do bad work, can and do produce crappy racist and variously phobic stuff, and we are dubious enough human beings to use the university to torment each other in our working lives. But I urge us never to minimize the amazing research, the portraits of adversity, of self-development, of subaltern knowledges made central, of new cultural pathways, of survival in the Gaza rubble, of human powers: collectively our work addresses anyone interested in a hidden present and a transformed future.  New knowledge is the humanities first job, and we have been doing it. 

We’re also good at inserting a “however” right about now, and here comes mine. Faculty members actually have three jobs to do, via a longstanding settlement between the university and society; however, the humanities disciplines have in general really only been doing one of them.

We’ve done this first job of self-reflexive knowledge creation. The second job is substantial control of—real influence over-- the material and institutional conditions of knowledge creation-- university governance, finance, and ongoing processes of reconstruction. This job of institutional-fiscal engagement is not going so well.  Decades of an expanding non-tenure track faculty is one symptom of this failure of faculty control. Shrinking or pausing doctoral programs is another. 

Very bad research funding for the humanities is a third—the humanities rule of thumb is to get 1% of total extramural research funding, and in many contexts much less. Federal data for FY2024 show that Yale spent $433 million of its own “institutional” funds supporting research across all fields (on top of what the sponsors paid). $119,000 of that went to humanities fields for research, which thus received one-third of 1% of the University’s internal research funds.

FIGURE 1

 

The inability of humanities faculty to shape their public image is a fourth symptom of our struggles with the institutional job.   Widespread administrative and board misunderstandings of teaching and research on common humanities topics is a fifth.  

Of course, no one faculty member can reverse any of this, but the issue is that there’s no organized humanities movement to change these conditions coming from groups of departmental chairs or humanities deans, or from professional organizations like the American Historical Association or the Modern Languages Association.  Meanwhile, we compete with –and would sometimes like to work with—disciplines from economics to medicine that do work tirelessly to maintain their working conditions. To be a bit dumb about it, I’d give the humanities an A for the first job and a gentleman’s D for the second.  

The third job, as for any academic discipline, is the construction of fields like history or criticism or philosophy as disciplines that address public needs for knowledge. This job is activism, yet it’s mainly intellectual activism. Often these knowledge needs are tacit or implicit. An example is the public need to be able to interpret how war affects one’s own life in America beyond raising the price of gas. Another public need for knowledge is how to read everything, from a ballot proposition to a novel about post-colonial Zanzibar without cognitive offloading to an AI tool.  Reading and writing are more important than ever in an incoherent and duplicitous world of discourse that is falsely streamlined by chatbot services; we need brain-only reading and brain-only writing now more than ever. 

Most of us would much rather be writing about early modern poetry than politely pressuring administrators to send the missing budget documents. I know I would. So Job 1, our research, generally feels better than Job 2, institutional-fiscal engagement.  And Job 3 has often been banalized as public engagement, so that seems like pure duty too. 

But for knowledge that comes from universities, the authority and resources flow from the last to the first, 3-2-1 on this job list.  Perceived social value controls a field’s funding and status, through complex pathways, and that includes tenure-track jobs, which in turn control’s a field’s scale and effects.  Producing great scholarship isn’t enough, and we have 50 years of experience with this.  To survive, and especially to change the knowledge order, we need to do all three jobs.

The main alternative to doing these three things is to accept an itinerant humanities, where most of the work is done outside institutions mostly by freelancers.  This is where things are currently headed, and excellent work is being done in podcasting, digital journals, substacks, you name it. But nearly all deep scholarship, like most basic scientific research, needs the university system.   And if the fields are to stay in universities, then their members need much more control over universities, and that means humanities faculty, staff, and students doing all three jobs at once, though not as individuals but through organizations.  That will involve, to repeat, Job 3, openly addressing big public problems, where our knowledge is in fact powerful and important, which supports Job 2, rebuilding our working conditions (rebuilding the tenure track job pipeline and undergraduate majoring); which in turn underwrites the first job we already do so well, which is scholarship and teaching.  The public and institutional practices will not dilute or overextend our research, but allow it to carry on, and expand their power and connection to other knowledges.  No individual has to do all three jobs, but collectively they must all be done.

∞∞∞

About this third job: I have time to give just one example of a gigantic public issue where criticism can produce original knowledge to help move the issue into a new state. We face the “grand challenge” of getting to a different kind of economy, one much better than today’s plutocratic, unjust and eco-cidal capitalism. 

The topic of ending capitalism naturally triggers the critic’s modesty impulse. What do critics really know about asset valuation, private equity, tax policy, volatility trading, and the other often mathematicised systems that run the world? How are we supposed to help with the design of, say, government guidance funds for green industrial policy or democratically-elected investment boards that would operate a new kind of “multi-criteria economy,” as Aaron Benanav has outlined it?

Well, any big problem has to be broken down into smaller, solvable parts. One part of the current failure to mitigate climate change is that the big investment decisions are mainly in the hands of private investment firms that invest to maximize returns on their own funds rather than to maximize climate effects.  Orthodox economists call this “market failure.” Why is planetary health or survival in the hands of a financial industry organized as a sultanistic oligarchy?  In part, because our society consents to it, which is a fact about our culture. In one sentence: we consent, often unintentionally, to insulating economic logics from society and culture, allowing a small group of people to run it as a falsely homogenous decision space.  A main climate goal is getting public control over the allocation of climate capital, and that will require a change in culture as much as in economic practice.

Let’s speculate a bit. Say there’s a large consortium devoted to putting climate investment in public hands: they need institutions to do this, and democratic structures, and a public that is ready and willing to participate. This consortium has plenty of engineers and climate scientists and of course economists. They have good ideas about which technologies need how much money and how to make and distribute them.

But they also know that many good technical ideas are missing, and that’s because many communities and kinds of people are missing. They realize that top-down imposition of tech solutions is not only unethical but also dysfunctional: green post-finance will involve the democratically-voted allocation of climate capital. They know that once you make economic decisions along multiple criteria you need to use different kinds of complex consciousness.  And that complexity will require new cultural capabilities coming to the fore.

How does an economy run when it has multiple criteria for success—not only good returns on capital but also deep environmental sustainability, decent economic equality, a politics of mutual respect, tremendous artistic creativity, basically having a much better time than societies are having right now? Our consortium knows that John Maynard Keynes thought about multiple criteria for economic practice—and he was a classic case of literature and economics overlapping. They may know Otto Neurath’s “socialist utility calculation” model from Austria in the 1920s that analyzed how society could address a whole range of valid goals at once—cultural goals as much as economic.  The group realizes that there will be no socialist or democratic economic planning of climate transition without a culture of economic planning, something like a culture of planning consciousness. They know climate policy always fails when it is not connected to everyday consciousness and people’s experience. Suddenly the engineers and economists say, call the humanities people!  They summon everybody in this room.

What do the critics bring to the meeting about green democratic economic planning?   We of course first stare despondently into the epistemic abyss, and then we gather our resources. 

A first big resource is that literature and criticism know that subjectivity or consciousness far exceeds the economic self. This may seem absurdly obvious to us, but Anglo-American policy has operated for hundreds of years on the different model of homo economicus which marginalizes nearly all of psychic life from economic calculation. That’s an economic mistake critics would help to correct, building on literature’s refusal of the economic capture of subjectivity since the Romantics of the late 18^th century. 

A second resource is that literature and criticism endlessly chronicle the quest for capability to achieve all of one’s aims in the face of overpowering economic forces. One traditional name for the process of creating a set of capabilities is Bildung.  The traditional name for its plot is the Bildungsroman, which narrates the gradual gaining of some power over economic logics that are, in literature, wholly entangled with race, gender, sexuality, and other modalities of subjectivity.

A third resource is the critic’s knowledge that transformation regularly comes from the excluded and the ignored—from the orphan, the domestic, the slave.  A fourth is the plot: how one tells the stories of climate funding and climate action so that people are fully involved.  A fifth is a capacity for what psychologists awkwardly call mentalization—we now know literary reading does a better job than non-fiction reading for seeing others as having different minds, that one can learn nonetheless to understand. A sixth is that the humanities fields do not model societies, even small communities or families, as homogenous latent spaces to which rules can be applied uniformly.  Being in the world, via humanities fields, means capacity with navigating multiple, different, conflicting, yet interacting systems whose assumptions change and contradict each other as we hurtle from one to the next.  These seem like humble resources to us, and yet their full presence would help integrate climate finance into climate consciousness, bringing the public into climate capital allocation and thus creating a culture of real sustainability.

I realize this feels very over the horizon. But this feeling, in my view, reflects the fact that our profession doesn’t regularly link our knowledge to the social horizon.  And yet, essential public change comes from the culture; the humanities fields are those that are closest to understanding how culture works. As societies try to replace an economics that is currently failing at green transition (and other things) within a highly diverse and emotionally fragile culture like our own, humanities knowledge of subjectivity will be a massive help. Only a fraction of humanities scholars would undertake a project like this.  But its visible effects on public crises would stabilize humanities disciplines overall, link them to other disciplines, expand their ambitions, and make human inputs into complex systems better than they are right now.

We can think of this as the humanities helping to build a new culture. Nearly forty years ago, the Jamaican-British cultural critic Stuart Hall correctly diagnosed Thatcherism as a civilizational movement. Hall saw it as a campaign to redefine Britain’s entire way of life by creating a new sensibility, a new definition of British identity. For Hall, this meant that Thatcherism wasn’t only about cutting taxes and empowering private corporations, but also about building a new British culture. Thatcher’s movement (like Reagan’s, like Trump’s) did this not by segregating economics and culture, but by bringing them together. Hall insisted that the political left needed to do the same thing, not simply in reaction but by advancing its own common purposes. Hall called on the left to build “a new cultural order.” The left’s choice, he wrote in 1988, is “between becoming historically irrelevant or beginning to sketch out an entirely new form of civilization.”    The humanities fields have been creating the pieces for this in our research, and the next step is to help build the new civilization that will, among other primal things, allow the massive acceleration of the climate transition that orthodox science and social science have not and will not achieve on their own.

The humanities are dead. Long live the humanities.

 

 

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