There Is No Fate

Sisyphus by Titian, 1549

If you believe what you read, all over, then what we call “the Humanities” are done for. The evidence of a decades-long shift in college students’ majors and their earnings-driven career ambitions all attest to it. If you identify as a humanist and you listen to those students’ indifferent or dismissive estimations of humanistic study, your heart will fall farther than the status of a college English department. STEM rules. Tech is the godhead. Even our most humanistically-oriented president of recent decades, Barack Obama, in his leadership role as national economic fuel rod, sold STEM and its well-paying jobs to the young masses like the latest fashionable pharmaceutical. When I was an undergraduate, English departments bestrode the campuses like giants. Philosophy departments offered estimable intellectual heft to a university’s reputation. There actually existed classics departments.

I taught through the change. Over the course of my career, I threw wrenches…