One of New Yorker’s 25 most popular online articles of 2023 tracked the huge decline of humanities studies at American universities. “The end of the English major” Ironic because: “Most institutional-opposition movements of the past sixty years, from Vietnam protest to today’s defund-the-police efforts, have been amplified on campuses. That’s partly because fields like literature and history teach close, fact-based study and critical analysis with the goal of pulling up the rug to understand what’s going on beneath. When students graduate and seek changes in broader society, they carry those practices with them. If they’re young, their language is still the current language of the university, so the causes bounce back to professors and students at a convivial angle. That feedback loop is partly how youth movements grow.”