We Need to Build Actual Political Support for the Humanities (Guest Post)

From Tunnel Mtn, Banff on June 6, 2026

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

 

This is the second of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. Chris Nealon’s is here, my introduction to the panel is here.

Society needs the cultural knowledge that the humanities produces in its research and disseminates in its scholarship and pedagogy to make sense of the crises of the present. Chris has written about this need and convincingly argued for it, so I don’t have to. Instead, today I want to talk about politics: how do we make this happen?

                          

Society has a need for humanistic knowledge. But there is no political movement in support of the academic humanities. There is a political movement about the humanities in the US-- on the political Right and it is deeply destructive to the project of democracy. While the Right over the last decade has built institutions and invested in undermining us by stealing our resources, destroying humanities programs and departments, and sowing doubt in our scholarship, the Resistance has not responded with anything near the militancy required. We need something different.  I want to begin a discussion about what building a political movement looks like. The political structure of democracies is partisan: parties are the central vehicle through which politics happens. In the US, the ideologies of “Right” and “Left” are not exact correlates to “Republican” and “Democrat.’ These parties are, however, the only way that ideological visions get enacted in public institutions through legislation and bureaucracy.

 

My remarks will proceed in three parts. First, I will describe the political Right’s movement to supplant the academic humanities and why it is threatening to the work we do. Second, I will turn to the political Left in the United States and explain why it, in its own way, is anti-humanistic in important respects. The point of the first two parts is to argue that there is currently no meaningful political support for building the present we want. Third, and finally, I want to end on a hopeful note, by thinking about what it would take to build political support on the Left for robust publicly funded humanities research.

 

So to begin: the political Right has a project for the present and future of the humanities in higher education – the creation of parallel institutions to traditional academic departments that teach courses and sponsor research in humanities fields, though especially political and economic thought, that aligns with various center-right policy objectives. In the US, while there were early predecessors, like the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University (founded 1961; part of GMU since mid-1980s), and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (2000) at Princeton University, these are so-called ‘civic centers’ that began to proliferate around 2015, often funded by right-wing state legislatures and/or right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers. Their creation was co-extensive with a renewed assault on higher ed’s institutional autonomy.

 

These civic centers, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida (initially funded by $3 million in taxpayer dollars by the Florida legislature), the Chase Center at Ohio State University (initially funded by $24 million in taxpayer dollars by the Ohio legislature), and the Civitas Institute (now School of Civic Leadership) at UT-Austin (funded both by the state and private donors), work within universities in the same way that tobacco and tech companies work to subvert publicly accountable, democratic knowledge structures and institutions.  As Alondra Nelson pointed out in her keynote lecture, they do this by casting doubt on the humanistic knowledge produced in universities, attacking it as “woke,” “political,” invalid, and unserious. They create parallel institutions that exist to produce politicized ideology disguised as “objective” scholarship and often cast in the rhetoric of “civics” that is squarely aimed at destroying the departments and cultures of teaching and scholarship in the humanities and the very idea of public funding for what we do.

 

Through civic centers, the right-wing is seizing on the crisis of funding and adjunctification in our universities for counter-majoritarian ends. As the historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd has written of these centers, “The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.”

 

None of the rhetoric is new, of course; if the ‘culture wars’ of the late 20^th century was the ‘new McCarthyism,’ this is the Red Scare 3.0 - the political right has not had a new idea about universities since Joe McCarthy. It  is the political right’s fixed vision of the future of the humanities in higher education go at least since Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967. You may know that, during a press conference in 1967 after being elected governor of California, and in the context of his push to introduce tuition into public higher ed in California, Reagan stated “we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without for a year or two without hurting the cause of education.” Pressed to define these “intellectual luxuries,” Reagan pointed to only two examples: first, he referred to a course at UC Davis “where they teach you to hang the Governor in effigy.” Second, Reagan referred to “a state back in the Midwest where they discovered that a state university was offering a master's degree in the repair of band instruments, and I thought that this was sort of subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” We cannot give any concession or quarter to this continuing tradition of blanket hostility: it is completely dangerous and invalid. It is actually worse to have right-wing humanities than no humanities at all.

 

So far so retro culture war. Turning from the right’s attacks, I note that we have increasingly lost the center-left, the professional-managerial class (PMC) that once embraced what we do in public higher education.

 

As bad as the right has continued to be since 2020, I would argue that their attacks are not actually the politically worst for us: the center-left attacks have been far more damaging. Since the racist backlash to Black Lives Matter, followed by the backlash to campus protests opposing Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, the center-left has joined this campaign. Deeply influential institutions within American political liberalism like The New York Times and The Atlantic have peddled a version of the right-wing narrative aimed at casting doubt on the project of the university and indicting the humanities in particular as the source of the university’s now-dubious project. They are reshaping PMC opinion against the idea of publicly-funded humanities teaching and scholarship.

 

There is so much to say about this; I can talk more about how this is happening in the Q & A. As for higher-ed media, an event earlier this week encapsulated everything wrong with it: the Chronicle of Higher Education just re-published an essay that originally appeared at the right wing outlet Persuasion, arguing, and I am not making this up, that humanists should stop doing and publishing research because what we produce is trash. The literal title of the article is “Most Humanities Research Should Stop.” I’ll say it again: this is in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Maybe we need a panel at the next CHCI about why the media coverage of humanities research and teaching is so bad and destructive.

 

So the center-left has, in its own way, abandoned the idea of robust public support for curiosity-driven humanistic education and scholarship and has fully embraced neoliberalism. Where do they think the humanities fit in our educational landscape? The center-left has decided that the purpose of public higher education is to supply workers for the economy, not citizens to participate in democracy. The value of any public investment in public education – whether from the teaching side or the research side – must be justified in terms of “return on investment” where “return” is defined in purely monetary terms, with all the non-monetary returns rendered illegible according to neoliberal reason. According to this vision, the humanities are fine in private institutions but their role in public education is less clear. This is important: Democrats do not have any problem with, and indeed support, the teaching of the humanities in private colleges and universities.  This points to the center-left having no problem, per se, with adjunctification and contingency in humanities instruction in private institutions, and especially highly selective ones – look at the reliance on contingent faculty in core curriculum programs at UChicago and Columbia, or in History & Literature and Social Studies at Harvard; look, perhaps most egregiously, at contingent faculty in college writing programs, again, especially private ones. Do any private college or university writing programs have tenure-line appointments?

 

Whether the center-left supports research for the humanities in private colleges and universities is a more muddled question.  What is clear is that in public education, the Democrats post-Reagan have emphasized STEM above all. The Clinton administration began this with its pivot to STEM education as the focus of its priorities and public investment. Barack Obama famously quipped in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” The Obama administration proposed reductions to NEH and NEA funding in 2011 and 2012. Joe Biden was better, but still, annual NEH funding even under Democratic administrations has never been anywhere near $1 billion. Prior to DOGE, the NSF spent 17.5 times more on undergraduate research than the Congressional funds available to the NEH for individual fellowships to scholars.

 

In 2022, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardonna, tweeted, “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.” Note the language here: the purpose of the public education system is to train workers for industry. Whatever industry demands, the taxpayer should supply. An echo of this came again in the context of the debate over student loan forgiveness during the Biden administration. In 2023, when the US House of Representatives voted to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program, the Democratic congresswoman and Reed College graduate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, explained why she supported overturning the Biden student loan forgiveness program:

 

“Expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar-for-dollar with investments in career & technical education. I can’t support the first without the other. The severe shortage of trades workers needs to be seen & treated as a national priority. It’s about respect.

I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much & the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it & the system needs a total overhaul.”

 

Let me underscore again that Congresswoman Perez went to Reed. She had the humanities experience we want students to have. But that experience does not seem to have led her to believe in the value of publicly-funded intellectual curiosity. There is no necessary correlation between classroom exposure to what we do and the willingness of either the college-educated public or college-educated politicians to then go out and support the university we want to build.

 

This is not because pedagogy is not important; far from it. It is because pedagogy in itself is not enough: we need politics – and we need politicians – to make political change happen. 

 

Now for a very brief part three. The construction of a robust public infrastructure for funding humanities research depends in the United States on winning political support. We don’t have that now. But I strongly believe we have a chance right now, even though things are so bad, to build this political support: the next Democratic administration will need to rebuild the federal government knowledge infrastructure, completely and totally. It’s time for us, as humanists, to lay out what we need in terms of public support.

 

We need to be talking to the administration in exile. Media is a huge part of this: the turn by center-left media outlets that influential Democrats read, like the New York Times and The Atlantic, against humanistic scholarship and teaching, is a big problem. The retreat of private funding for university-based humanities research is also a big problem, one that I have written about, but of course in electoral democracies, private foundations are not accountable to publics in the same way as state institutions are, and while we can and should say things about the retreat of private funding (and I have) we actually have an opportunity right now to articulate what a reconstructed NEH should look like and how much it should be funded. The center-right will not let this serious crisis go to waste; neither should we.