Contemporary discussions of the humanities tend to focus either on its perceived decline in status (conceived mainly with respect to numbers of majors and the economic value of its degrees) or, by contrast and often by means of counterargument, on its importance to cultural and political life, to educational breadth and self-cultivation, and to facing the critical challenges of our time. What goes unremarked in this defining duality are the effects of a discursive condition in which the individual fields of the humanities are swept up into a generalized category which then starts to take on a life of its own, where what presumably began as an amalgamation begins to transmute into forms of reduction. While the other traditional divisions of the university – the sciences and the social sciences – are also subject to this sort of globalizing rhetoric (this is true especially with respect to politicized media discussions of science at present), there are specific dynamics at play in the case of the humanities that serve to cloud some of the more interesting intellectual developments within humanities disciplines.
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A broad set of conditions characterizes both historical and more recent debates around the humanities: the enduring conflict of the faculties, through which divisions of the university vie for prominence; the impulse toward a language of justification in the face of imputations of crisis or decline; and a consolidation of the various forms of justification, which tend to move between a focus on method or skills, on the one hand, and ethos or value, on the other. In its most general formulation, the argument that the humanities help to provide training in methods and skills highlights critical thinking and communication, while the argument on behalf of ethos and value emphasizes forms of self-cultivation critical to moral growth and civic engagement.
The first thing to note is that a pervasive irony surrounds those media representations of the humanities that participate in the generalizing move that obscures discipline-specific understandings of the humanities. In principle, there is nothing wrong with general claims. But in the media context, assertions about the decline of the humanities can take place in a journalistic venue which at the same time carries long-form historical and literary essays, as is the case with The New Yorker’s publication of “The End of the English Major” by Nathan Heller in February of 2023 (an article about the decline of the humanities as a whole). This irony is also manifest in the newspaper sector as well, where book reviews, arts sections, and historically and culturally contextualized framings of the news are an ongoing part of the reader’s fare. While of course articles on the decline of the humanities may present as restricted to the health of enrollments and majors at universities and colleges, any discussion of the extensive humanist inquiry and analysis present in the media culture, and sustained by practitioners many of whom studied the humanities, goes missing.
This overall situation arguably amounts to a species of disinformation, or even gaslighting. At the very least, it promotes what communications researcher Sanne Knudsen refers to as “frame spillover,” defined as “the phenomenon in which the framing and attitudes toward a given well-known phenomenon spill over, taint, or simply mix with another related but lesser known or anonymous phenomenon. In this case, such a spillover of frames is from humanities education to humanities research.” In other words, the repeated assertion that the humanities is in decline conveys the sense that not only the desire to study the humanities but also the fundamental practices of the humanities – thoughtful inquiry, close reading, study of historical archives, analysis of aesthetic form – are themselves waning in the culture, or seen to be of little value. To the extent that one might be aware and appreciative of humanities’ practices as they take place in journalism and other media, the decline narratives give the impression that the continued health of those practices doesn’t depend upon anything that is going on within the university.
Media representation of the humanities, as studied in the US, the UK, and parts of Europe, is not simply worthy of analysis in its own right. It is crucial to understanding developments within the humanities. I have already foregrounded the most important feature, which is a language of decline. Other features come into clearer view in studies that compare media discourse on the humanities with media discourse on the sciences and social sciences. In these studies, a number of key contrasts are pointed out. To begin with, it is confirmed that articles on the humanities tend to generalize across an unspecified terrain of disciplines, while articles on science tend to speak concretely of disciplines and researchers located within them. Secondly, research in the sciences tends to be presented directly, as “findings” or “discoveries,” while the humanities are either talked about in generalities or presented in mediated form. What this means is that, for example, college and local newspapers might report on a humanities lecture or class, conveying what was said and how it was received, rather than granting the content the authority of confirmed knowledge. As communications researcher Angela Cassidy puts it, the humanities have “a lower epistemic status than STEM.” Humanities scholarship is thus viewed as subjective and less definitive than scientific research. While scientists might present findings as uncertain, highlighting the inability to predict whether their projections will prove to be accurate or how research might move forward, this hedging is seen as expressive of currently existing limits rather than epistemic deficiency. It helps to lend credibility to their statements rather than to diminish their truth-value.
This divergence in presentation between the two forms of knowledge requires significant refinement, however, before we can begin to judge the public reception of work in the humanities as opposed to the natural sciences. The sense that work in the humanities is subjective or ungrounded in relation to the sciences occludes the more fundamental distinctions between the two forms of research. Science relies heavily on causal explanation. The human sciences, by contrast, to the extent that they do produce forms of causal explanation, must incorporate the internal and reflexive properties of human action into their analysis. While such elements are also in play in some studies of animate life beyond the human, the key confounding issue in the case of the human sciences is the distinctly human element, which requires an acknowledgment of perspective and context. Most generally, the human sciences engage in interpretation, while the natural sciences advance and aim to confirm explanatory models. This distinction explains why words such as “findings” and “discovery” appear with such frequency in reports of scientific research. What the communication researchers identify as “a lower epistemic status” is better understood as an acknowledgment of situated knowledge and interpretive method. The larger problem is the failure to grant humanities research the same level of cultural authority and importance as scientific knowledge.
There is an irony here because what is lost to view in this debate is the status of the normative as opposed to the empirical. In these analyses of media representations, science is broadly associated with truth (I here note but leave to the side the political attack on science and on truth), and the humanities are associated with opinion. And yet key to the forms of inquiry internal to the humanities are not mere proffered opinions, but also judgments of value. In assessing historical events, cultural self-understandings, or literary works, scholars typically make interpretive arguments relating to the values that underlie those objects of study, not necessarily to simply endorse or condemn them – though that does occur – but to illuminate and better understand them. Normative frameworks guide scholars in the humanities, to greater or lesser degrees of explicitness and awareness, just as they inevitably come into play in scientific priorities and practices. But what makes the humanities distinct is their investment in a deeper understanding of the ways in which individuals and collectives have chosen to live, or the manner in which they view the world or parts of the world. In this sense they inhabit the realm of normative commitment and clarification, which is why, for example, the concern with ethical AI has prompted so many researchers within the realm of data science and computing to reach out for collaboration with humanists.
Adapted excerpt from Amanda Anderson and Simon During, Humanities Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).
© Amanda Anderson and Simon During 2025
