“So what? Who cares?” said the apathetic sophomore linebacker slouched in the back of my Intro to Theatre class. “The Nazis who took Anne Frank away probably went to the theatre that same night.” That evening, I watched Real Time with Bill Maher, where the ever-sardonic Fran Lebowitz echoed the same sentiment: “Culture cannot make up for a society.”
Why are the Arts and Humanities in decline? Fascism. No, not the goose-stepping, book-burning, swastika-waving kind. I mean economic fascism—the kind where social Darwinists dominate, and government exists primarily to serve corporate interests. As economist Karl Polanyi observed, fascism reduces people to the point where “only the economic life remains.” Universities are no exception—students, professors, and entire disciplines have been commodified.
Case in point: the following week, my CEO-run, factory-style university ordered all Humanities professors to submit an “impact statement” demonstrating how our teaching “benefits the financial needs” of the state. We were to “show accountability” and prove our “return on investment.”
Ah, the age-old question: What’s the dollar value of an idea? How do you quantify the way studying Impressionism inspires a nursing student’s creativity—sparking an invention that doesn’t yet exist? How does performing in a college play instill empathy in a future mathematician—helping her connect with a child she hasn’t conceived yet? Did the student who danced under Nutcracker’s snowflakes gain a deeper understanding of snow? And, more importantly, how do we convert these experiences into cash?
I played along. My impact statement pointed out that the arts contribute over $760 billion to the U.S. economy—more than agriculture or transportation—and employ nearly 4.9 million people (National Endowment for the Arts). It had no impact. A month later, the administration announced cuts to Arts and Humanities programs. The new battle cry? STEM. At first, I thought the issue was their obsession with “job-specific skills.” But then it hit me: I was the problem.
Poet John Ashbery once said, “I don’t want to read something I already know, or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch…” Today, we live in a dangerously crunch-free culture. Algorithms serve us curated versions of ourselves, partisan media locks us into echo chambers, and the Arts and Humanities—once a lighthouse of complexity—have followed suit.
Writer Verlyn Klinkenborg described studying the Humanities as “standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience.” Instead, he argues, people have retreated to “tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, peeping out at a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank.” (New York Times). Too often, Humanities classes don’t teach the “coastline”—they micro-focus on identity. Philosopher Justin E. H. Smith puts it bluntly: “The preoccupation with identity that has taken over social media and much of academia demands that we remain within the ever-shrinking boundaries of our public identities and acknowledge no shared life with those outside our narrow intersection.”
A colleague, a playwriting professor, recently told me his graduate seminar had become a “Me” class—students wanted to write only about their personal experiences and only for people who empathized with them. When he offered feedback, he often heard, “You can’t understand my play because you’re not (fill in identity).” Brie Loskota, director of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, warns: “Love that’s reserved only for people who agree with you isn’t love. It’s narcissism.”
Imagine if math majors were forced to take a course on coal-fired power plant engineering—without any context or relevance to their lives. They’d push back. Just as math students often ask, “Why do I need to take a theatre class?” Humanities students should also ask: “How does this apply to the larger human experience?” Zoom in, yes—but then zoom out. A transformative education doesn’t just reflect the self; it bridges the self to the world.
We are in the middle of a cultural revolution that has divided us into warring tribes of groupthink. In this environment, it’s only natural that one faction attempts to silence the other. That’s why those in power (the fascists) are slowly choking the Humanities. They don’t see us as educators of the human experience—they see us as Maoist re-education camp leaders. They see us the way we see Fox News: narrow, partisan, and polarizing. And if the roles were reversed, let’s be honest—we’d probably be cutting their funding too.
After two decades in academia, I know exactly two things that are true about teaching: PowerPoint is a sleep aid, and The Humanities need crunch. The Humanities should challenge us but also bridge us—blurring the line between where you end, and others begin. If we want to revive the Humanities, we must return to that mission.
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