From broke to woke to broken: How the humanities lost their way

The study of the humanities is now largely devoted to turning out activists rather than scholars, writes Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic.

Federal funding has declined. Private foundations have moved that once funded the humanities have moved to other causes, such racial-justice-movement building. In 2024, when the National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $540 million in grants from its $8 billion endowment.

In June 2020, Mellon announced that it would be “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking,” writes Harper. "This new paradigm seems to find value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes."

Students and their parents are increasingly concerned with “practical” college majors that offer a strong “return on investment," writes Harper. "Unable to compete with STEM or business-adjacent fields" in future earnings, humanities professors found an alternate pitch: Your English or history or philosophy degree "will help turn you into A Good Person." The payoff will be "political and moral."

The promise of moral superiority hasn't proved very effective. Far fewer students are choosing to major in English or history. Conservative critics say it's a case of “go woke, go broke,” writes Harper. "According to this theory, ultraprogressive faculty coalesced around an unpopular liberal orthodoxy, turning off undergraduates (and the public) and accelerating the humanities’ collapse." Students who might have been inspired by Shakespeare were turned off by "settler colonialism."

That "gets the causal arrow wrong," he writes. "The humanities aren’t broke because they went woke. The humanities went woke in large part because they were broke." The only way to get funding for research, fellowships and new professors was to give Mellon what they wanted.

Harper became a tenure-track humanities professor in 2020, and saw Mellon's shift to trendier, more political projects. Professors told him they'd refocused their work on race to get grants, twisting research in to a "social-justice pretzel." One professor said a foundation official coached his team on how to rewrite a rejected proposal to qualify for a grant. Adding "social-justice jargon" won the money.

In the 2010s, when Harper was studying comparative literature, Mellon fellowships helped graduate students studying a diverse array of topics from 15th-century women’s devotional literature to Descartes’ conception of infinity, he writes. That's been replaced by grants reserved for "scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” All of the 2025 grantees work on "issues of identity or social or environmental justice."

Majors such as English, philosophy, and theater belong to an ever-shrinking number of fields that are not squarely devoted to job-market preparation or “skill building,” fields that aspire to do something loftier than clearing the brush from students’ career pathways. The merging of humanistic work and activism represents a surrender to the utilitarian logic that measures the worth of knowledge by its direct impact on “the real world.”

Mellon's Humanities for All Times project, launched in 2021, has offered money to liberal-arts colleges that develop social-justice-aligned curricula, including "revising an institution’s entire general education program." These are courses all students are required to take, not just humanities majors, Harper points out.

Meanwhile, the academic humanities are in their death throes, he writes. The University of Chicago, known as "a place for scholars’ scholars" in the humanities is reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments— among them art history and English language and literature — and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics." It's the money.

Mellon has the right to spend its money as it wishes, he concedes. "No, it is not Mellon’s job to be the humanities’ piggy bank. Yes, Mellon is the humanities’ piggy bank."

The Trump administration's canceling of federal humanities grants may give progressive donors even more power over American arts and letters. Harper suggests that anti-woke, college-bashing billionaires should put their money into funding the study of the classics.

Mellon is funding a class at San Diego State that seems likely to make ethnic and gender studies students completely unemployable, writes John D. Sailer of the Manhattan Institute in City Journal.

The foundation is funding “Ethnic and Gender Studies in the Workplace,” which will teach students to approach internships from a “decolonial perspective” and to challenge the “colonizer logic of work.”

The university's ethnic and gender studies graduates are often underemployed, the grant proposal says. Employers see them “as inherently unwilling or uncapable [sic] of participating in the hegemonic workforce.” To solve that problem, San Diego State will teach students to "interrogate" capitalism while “challenging and resisting white supremacy, racism and hate, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, imperialism, and contemporary colonialism that are deeply entangle [sic] with professional workplaces.”

Who on God's green earth is going to want to hire these kids?