One of the best analyses I have read of what happened to the now collapsed academic humanities—and one which spares none of the gravedigger-scavengers behind this collapse, from craven administrators to the self-defeating professoriate who degraded their object of study to today’s right-wing philistine “defenders” of a tradition they don’t in any way understand—by Justin Smith-Ruiu and the Hinternet.

It is also a call to arms—offering us a blueprint for those alternative modes of humanistic education that inspired our upcoming classes on romanticism at Romanticon:

“And today, with practically no one around in our institutions to defend such a generous approach to the human past, the past itself is left undefended from the invading barbarians who imagine themselves, likewise in classic cargo-cult fashion, as the brave upholders of civilization. There is no one around to articulate, to the likes of Christopher Rufo, the real reasons why the humanities cannot be subordinated to the purposes of national myth-making or patriotic indoctrination. And so the campuses fall to these ignorant marauders, like paper tigers, while true humanistic inquiry remains just as homeless as it had been under the reign of the administrators with their vision of the university as one giant business school; of the donors, with their demand for ever more programs in AI ethics and other oxymoronic whitewashing schemes; and of the post-humanist faculty, with their self-indulgent me-search and their strained and anxious appeals to ‘the literature’.”