Humboldt’s gift

In 2010, the historian Tony Judt wrote that the best thing about America was its universities—above all, its public universities, which had no equal in his Europe. He described what it was like to come upon one:

You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears … a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

Today, American universities are cutting back—pushed by state legislatures, their own administrators, and the federal government. Last year, Indiana University Bloomington began consolidating or closing more than 100 academic programs—many of them in the humanities—to satisfy a new state law that sets minimum thresholds for how many degrees a program must produce. The same logic has gone federal. A new U.S. Department of Education rule, finalized in June, will strip federal student loans from programs whose graduates don’t out-earn a worker with only a high-school diploma.

Harvard has done the same to its graduate ranks. Last October it moved to cut Ph.D. admissions in its Faculty of Arts and Sciences by more than half, the arts and humanities down about 60 percent and the German department projected to lose every one of its Ph.D. places.

Last year, too, the chancellors of Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt University convened a commission to examine what they called “the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials,” along with “the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards” in those fields. The commission reported back that humanistic scholarship had indeed been corroded by “politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”

What’s going on?

Chad Wellmon is the Commonwealth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia and the author of After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work. Wellmon says most humanistic scholarship isn’t incurably politicized—you can always pick out an egregious example, but the bulk of it is neither poor nor brilliant, just ordinary and a little dull. And the humanities are too small a part of American higher education, he argues, to carry the blame for what’s gone wrong across the whole system. That’s not to say the field hasn’t had its share of stridently political faculty; but the deeper point, Wellmon says, is what the complaint about politicization exposes—a university no longer able to shield its scholars from political pressure while still convincing the public that their work serves it. The scholarship is being squeezed inside the university, and that squeeze may be pushing intellectual life out of it altogether—which might not be a bad thing …

Gustav Jönsson: What do you make of the report’s claim that the quality of scholarship in the humanities has declined?

Chad Wellmon: It’s an odd document, I have to say. A committee report, so the authorship is vague by design—and it has a strange form of address. Two university chancellors convened the committee, and the report is addressed explicitly to them; then it reaches further and says it’s meant not just for those two but for every president, chancellor, and administrator in America.

Wellmon: And it’s riddled with anxiety from the start. The authors stand by their claims, then plead that the report not be used in practice. So it’s an administrative document, addressed to administrators, that says: Please don’t administer with this. The committee seems genuinely worried its own propositions might turn into action—real unease, inside the report, about the report’s political consequences. The committee knows exactly what situation it’s in.

Jönsson: And on the substance—has the quality of scholarship actually declined?

Wellmon: The claim isn’t only that scholarship has declined. It’s that there’s some causal link between that decline—especially in the humanities—and the broader collapse of trust in higher education.

Maybe the quality has declined. But scholarship falls in a distribution: A little of it is bad, a little is very good, and most sits in between—my own included. You can find egregious examples of almost anything; most of it is just prosaic and boring, which is what the modern university’s compulsion to publish produces.

And the report approaches all this with blinkers on. I went to grad school in the early 2000s, and I’d heard of the Sokal affair—the physicist Alan Sokal’s 1996 hoax, when he slipped a deliberately nonsensical article past a leading cultural-studies journal to test its rigor—but I’d heard of it as ancient history. It belonged to the 1990s, when there were maybe some excesses. The Yale “deconstruction” school—the literary critics and theorists who took up the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s method of reading texts for their buried contradictions—had gotten out over its skis, sometimes almost comically. But the humanities have spent every year since wrestling with exactly the big questions the Sokal affair came to stand for. What is a fact? Where do the sciences end and the humanities begin? People took all of it seriously—the historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison even wrote a book, Objectivity, on how the scientific ideal of a neutral fact has its own history. Read this report, though, and it’s as if none of it ever happened.

The university was meant to be a combination of big science and big education.

Jönsson: When I was an undergraduate, my sense was that there was a lot of moral certainty floating around, not relativism.

Wellmon: That points to a contradiction inside the report. As it goes on, it narrows in on an ever more tightly defined “relativism”—yet in the same breath it’s decrying hyper-politicized faculty. And I don’t see how you hold a hyper-politicized, hyper-committed, activist stance while standing on the wishy-washy, ever-shifting ground of a thoroughgoing relativism. The strident activism is real—especially this past decade, in certain corners of the academy, there’s been a real turn toward it, and we can talk about that. But it doesn’t square with the picture of relativism the report keeps making its master problem.

Jönsson: Have the humanities been taken over by stridently political faculty members?

Wellmon: The report’s biggest blind spot is its stubborn refusal to reckon with the institution the humanities have lived inside for the past 150 years: the modern research university.

These fights over what counts as properly scholarly and what counts as properly political are fundamental to that institution. It emerged to mediate—between the guild-like community of scholars, with their distinctly scholarly interests, and the demands of an increasingly powerful administrative state. The research university took shape over the 19th century, first in Germany and then across the U.S., precisely as that mediating force: the place where the boundary between the state’s interests and the scholars’ interests was to be drawn and defended. For two centuries its broad social function has been to straddle that fault line.

So if you see the university as the institution that translates goods internal to scholarship into political and social goods, the real question becomes: At what point do these tensions harden into contradictions—where the university can no longer hold the line between scholarship and politics, can no longer present itself as the neutral arbiter between the two? Why has the pressure grown so great that it can’t keep playing that role?

Jönsson: Can you give an example of the university mediating that kind of conflict?

Wellmon: Take what’s often called one of the first modern research universities: the University of Berlin, founded in 1809–10. There was great enthusiasm in that first decade for establishing a university in Berlin, which had never had one—but also real skepticism about calling it a universitas, because the word carried the connotation of the old guild. The universitas was an inward-facing guild: protected by the state, but overwhelmingly devoted to its own members’ interests, as it had been since twelfth-century Paris or Oxford.

And the worry—for someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philologically trained Prussian bureaucrat—was that a guild like that wasn’t up to serving the emerging Prussian state. So even as he worked to drum up support in the bureaucracy, he avoided the word “university”; he called it an “institution of higher learning.” It became the University of Berlin in the end, of course. But Humboldt’s premise, in those founding memoranda, was that an institution calling itself a university would be neither a mere community of scholars nor simply an arm of the state—it would sit between them. It would press the guild of scholars to serve a common good beyond their own parochial interests, and in return it would promise to shield them from the mounting demands of the modern state.

Jönsson: Why do American universities struggle to hold those tensions today?

Wellmon: Jump to the 1950s and the postwar American university. Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, spelled out its role as a settlement: The university would supply the state with research and with human capital—trained graduates who’d go on to serve the state’s interests, in the civil service and across the economy—and in return the state would pour capital into libraries and labs and faculty.

Kerr was a labor economist, and in 1953 he told his Berkeley faculty to understand this plainly, as a wage relationship: They were laboring under a contract with the broader state—California’s and the federal government’s both. It took real faith on the faculty’s part to believe the university was strong enough to set aside its own interests—or had none of its own—so that it could protect them from these outside demands. And it took real faith on the state’s part, and the public’s, that the universities would deliver what they’d promised if tax dollars backed them.

That settlement has collapsed over the past 30 or 40 years. Scholars no longer trust that the university is fundamentally aligned with their scholarly interests. And the public no longer believes the university is delivering the goods—because here’s the crucial difference between the University of Berlin in 1810, or the University of California in the 1960s, and the University of Virginia today: The midcentury American university promised not just knowledge but upward mobility. It promised to transform lives, to lift people up the economic and social ladder.

The capture of intellectual work by a single institution is recent—a blip, in the long span of things.

The university was meant to be a combination of big science and big education. In the U.S., at least, that promise changed what the university had been—no longer just a place that distributed knowledge and shared scholarly goods, but an engine of economic and social transformation. And yet by the end of the 1960s the sociologists already had the data: The vast expansion of the University of California and the wider U.S. system was not, in fact, delivering that upward mobility. So the tensions we’re seeing now—the erosion of that liberal settlement—run much further back than people think.

Jönsson: I saw figures from the U.K.: Only about 8 percent of undergraduates take humanities degrees, while something like a fifth are in business and management.

Wellmon: Exactly—and it sounds like the U.S. is in much the same place. The most recent numbers I’ve seen, from 2024, put 19 percent of all U.S. bachelor’s degrees in business or business administration. Another 15 to 19 percent are in the health professions—not medical school, but undergraduate technical and professional health degrees. So business and health together account for something like 40 to 45 percent of American degrees. The humanities sit between 6 and 8 percent.

Over the past decade, the number of humanities students has plateaued—and the steep fall came before any of these recent worries about the “hyper-politicized” humanities. So it’s hard to blame the humanities for the problem of American higher education; the numbers just don’t add up to the institutional reality. Which raises the real question: Why do they make such a convenient target?

Jönsson: Why do they?

Wellmon: For me it crystallizes how fragile the settlement has become. The humanities have always stood for the pursuit of questions of value and beauty—the kind of knowledge long treated as useless as against useful. So it stands to reason that as the space outside the university for those questions shrank, the humanities became the target: They looked like the last refuge of that whole form of intellectual life.

Jönsson: People who’ve considered doctoral study tell me they were warned to pick a “marketable” subject if they wanted an academic career. Have the humanities been opened to a cutthroat competition that’s hurting scholarship?

Wellmon: Absolutely. But that’s been a feature of the modern university from the start. You had the same fights across the 19th century, when faculty posts became competitive, market-based positions. Berlin paid a star like the philosopher Friedrich Schelling a fortune to move there; universities competed for marquee professors. That was part of turning institutions built on guild relationships—masters and apprentices—into market-based research universities.

The transformation did real good. It pushed the university to see itself as a public institution serving public goods. But it also opened the door to market pressure—and universities can be strikingly inept at keeping market and bureaucratic values out. The encroachment of administrative and bureaucratic values isn’t 20 or 30 years old; it goes back to the first research universities.

So the pressure to write a marketable dissertation is just one recent expression of a very old trend. And the real question is why these long-running tensions have lately hardened into outright impossibilities. Because by now it hardly matters what you write your dissertation on—in many fields there are simply no jobs.

Jönsson: How do you see the state of intellectual life outside the university today?

Wellmon: Imperiled everywhere. The demand to produce immediate use value—to convert any moral or intellectual capacity into human capital that’s instantly fungible, cashable as market value—isn’t peculiar to the humanities, or to the university. This isn’t a problem of literature departments. It’s the condition all of us are living in.

And yet that’s exactly where the opportunity is. The collapse of the “humanities market” in the U.S. over the past 20 years has gone hand in hand with a flourishing of little magazines—always broke, always on a shoestring, always imperiled, but flourishing. It’s thrown up all sorts of ventures: a whole new crop of online projects where people gather for things like “great books” discussions. The threats to intellectual life haven’t extinguished it.

One reason I keep stressing the timeframe of the modern research university is to remind myself that the capture of intellectual work by a single institution is recent—a blip, in the long span of things. Intellectual life has been sustained for millennia by all kinds of institutions: monasteries, libraries, museums, academies, laboratories.

In a way, the research university may have turned out to be a black hole, its gravity pulling all intellectual work and life into its orbit. I’m not celebrating the end of the university. I’m saying that the erosion of this liberal settlement has already opened room for other kinds of intellectual community, other forms of intellectual life. The university gave us historically unmatched resources—but its grip on everything “intellectual” also bred a monoculture. And that’s where the real possibilities are now.