The Humanities Aren’t Dead Yet
September 10, 2025 at 04:30PMAfter reading a series of articles lamenting the death of higher education and critical thinking in the age of ChatGPT, I tempered my despair with Simon Lewsen’s somewhat hopeful essay on the humanities in The Local, which is part of its higher education issue. With the reduction and elimination of humanities, classics, English, and language-related programs across North America, the academic landscape is bleak. But Lewsen, a writing instructor at the University of Toronto, wonders if we’re “misjudging the moment,” mistaking the “flux and turbulence” in higher education for an existential crisis. “In my own classroom, I’ve encountered surprising signs of renewed life in the humanities,” he writes, “which suggest that a renaissance could be possible, at least if people who care about this stuff can rise to meet the moment.” Our world has polarized, yes, but Lewsen suggests that politically dynamic classrooms and a more diverse, democratized university system could electrify places of learning again.
My students are surprised to discover that sophisticated thinkers, regardless of their political leanings, are ideologically promiscuous: in critiquing the U.S. carceral system, the socialist writer Elizabeth Bruenig draws on pre-modern Catholic thought, and in calling for a return to the traditional, pre-nuclear family, the conservative intellectual David Brooks points to queer culture, with its chosen families, as a contemporary model to emulate. In the humanities, right and left converge. Ideologies mutate and reconfigure, like molecules or strands of DNA. I’ve realized that, for students, this discovery is thrilling. It’s one of the unique pleasures that a humanities education used to offer—and could offer again.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/10/death-of-humanities/
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