A version of this was delivered as a graduation address to the Carnegie Mellon University English Department’s 2026 Diploma Ceremony on May 9th.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her 2024 book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities described how “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance…a world-wide crisis in [humanistic] education.” A generation before, Robert Weisbuch writing in a 1999 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education observed that “Today’s consensus about the state of the humanities – it’s bad, it’s getting worse, and no one is doing much about it – is supported by dismal facts.” The 1964 report of the National Commission for the Humanities, convened by President Lyndon Johnsona and leading to the establishment of the Mellon Foundation, had concluded that “Increasingly during the past few years… concern has been expressed about the conditions, in this country, of those field of intellectual activity generally called the humanities.” We can go back far earlier – Erasmus in his 1511 In Praise of Folly says of scholars that the “more they are known, the less they are loved,” while 375 years before the Common Era Plato in the Phaedrus claimed that increasingly men are “filled not with wisdom.” You may notice a pattern.
My intent here is neither glib nor cynical in noticing the tendency of our profession to fret about the crisis in the humanities. There are, as all of you are abundantly aware, genuine material issues affecting the humanities that may range from the merely concerning to the existentially catastrophic. Declining enrollment rates across literature, history, philosophy, and so on, a veritable collapse in funding, a public perception about the supposed utility of STEM education over the liberal arts, and ongoing attacks from an increasingly authoritarian government. All of this is real and has been exacerbated by the corporatization of the U.S. university over the last two generations, but as my litany of examples from Nussbaum back to Plato demonstrates, there is a manner in which the humanities have always been in crisis. Ian McEwan in his 2025 novel What We Can Know writes that “I no longer believe this is an institutional matter – it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis.” What I’d suggest is, whether or not this is good, it’s at least inevitable, and that there is – I think – a certain strength that comes from this predicament.
In part, beyond legitimate material and economic concerns, the humanities are always in crisis because the nature of the humanities is self-referential, we are tasked with continual asking “What are the humanities? What are they good for?” in a manner that scientists, for example, don’t ask the same things of their disciplines – in fact those equivalent questions are themselves humanistic queries. More than a positive body of knowledge, though the humanities include that, our discourse is one of continual interrogation and problematization, to bandy about lit seminar terms that are nonetheless useful. Self-referentiality is appropriate as a strategy of surivial, but more importantly as an ethic which foregrounds the core of these disciplines, which is to say the question of the human, because the humanities if they are anything are not static.
There are for certain more than three lessons which the humanities can supply, but that’s the number which I’ll focus on. Many of you are no doubt aware of the celebrated remark of the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold in his book Culture and Anarchy when he claimed that the purpose of humanistic study was to perseverate on the “best that has been thought and said,” a meditation upon the “sweetness and the light.” For many there is an understandable sympathy afforded to such a view, maybe even among those of us who disagree with Arnold, and yet it seems obvious to me – as for most scholars today – that this is an incomplete, even immature, perspective. For what is sweet to one is bitter to another, where some thrill at the light others desire darkness. It’s a perspective that tells us everything about the critic and nothing about the text.
Better to embrace the position of Terrence, writing a century before the Common Era, and thus the far older and deader of canonically approved writers when compared to Arnold, when he declared that “I am human and let nothing which is human be alien to me.” The parameters of humanistic inquiry then aren’t just that which is imagined to be great, but anything – which is to say everything – that is filtered through the experience of humanity. So, the first lesson of the humanities is that all is worthy of observation, analysis, interpretation, argumentation, whether George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Malcolm in the Middle, George Orwell’s 1984 or Taylor Swift’s 1989. The proper contours of humanistic study are canonical literature, academic philosophy, and grand history, as well as Marvel movies, top 40 pop music, chain restaurant menus, and subway graffiti. Memes, TikToks, and algorithms as well.
The second lesson of the humanities, which I imbibed in my graduate training in cultural studies right up from us in Baker Hall, is that everything has a history. There is no category of human experience which is absolute and universal, everything – how we define individuality, social relations, family, and even love – has a contingent and evolving, if not mercurial, genealogy. If there is one inviolate rule it’s that there are no inviolate rules. The popular understanding of what proper humanistic discourse should be – that Arnold chestnut about the sweetness and light – can only be embraced through denial, for the rigorous accounting of history and texts only serves to demonstrate how gloriously diverse and ever-changing our understanding has been. Dismissed since the seemingly never-ending Culture Wars by some as “fashionable nonsense,” as mere “postmodern relativism,” this position is actually estimably obvious, even old-fashioned in its own way, for it’s simply the scholarly acknowledgement that as with Heraclitus at his river we can never read the exact same book twice, for time and culture and politics and economics always intercedes. The canon is a non-sequitur because there is no canon, or rather it’s always shifting and shimmering, even how we interpret the standards is ever changing.
Finally, from those two observations – that our concern must be with everything human and that all things have a history – comes a lesson that is as a variety of humility, where is we’re squinting might even appear as a type of wisdom. Because even if the most enshrined and elevated of literary works can shift their meanings with time, then the humanities can function as a memento mori, as a means of comprehending that like all things this too shall pass. There is a popular anecdote which maintains that when triumphant Roman generals would parade through the streets of the Eternal City an aide was made to continually whisper in their ear “You too shall die.” Maybe this is an unconventional defense of the humanities, but I can’t help but believe that at their best they inculcate a humility which makes us aware of our own limited perspective, our own finitude, andI think it not incidental. In our current moment, constrained by the unimaginable power and fabulism of fantastically wealthy and powerful men, how much better would our society be if the virtues of a studied humility were emphasized rather than that of an individualistic hubris?
Questions of the utility of the humanities are no doubt important, personally and professionally as much as anything, and I’m certain that all of you have thought and will continue to think about solutions to those issues, so I’d rather end with an offer of something different. That is from my own humanistic study, I’ve certainly acquired some positive knowledge along the way, I’ve been able to discover a few answers, but in a far more precious way, I’ve gained a multitude of questions. More than basic knowledge, what I’ve been able to ascertain is some scope of the sheer amount of that which I do not know. The glorious depth of our ignorance is the mother of curiosity. Whether or not our current crisis is rectified, there will – hopefully – still always be a crisis, because it is in that ever-churning flux where the humanities themselves will blessedly always exist.
