I’ve never known a time when the humanities weren’t in crisis. As an undergraduate student at McGill University, I switched my major from political science to English just two years before the 2008 financial meltdown—the hinge point, when economically anxious students began abandoning the humanities in droves. I’ve made my teaching career in the aftermath of that supposed catastrophe. When, in 2017, I got my first course in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at the University of Toronto (where I still teach), there were roughly 170,000 students enrolled in humanities programs in Canada—30,000 fewer than there’d been a decade before. Since then, those numbers have declined by an additional 30,000, even as enrollment in business, science, and engineering has soared.

Across the anglosphere, schools are reeling from the consequences of this shift. In 2024, Goldsmiths, University of London, announced plans to reduce staff in its storied English program by 50 percent. Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent—the school where Abdulrazak Gurnah, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start—has ceased granting English degrees entirely. The University of Chicago is arguably North America’s most storied humanistic institution, more prestigious, among scholars, than even Harvard, but this year, it announced that it’s reducing PhD admissions in some humanities programs, like English language and literature, and freezing admissions in others, like classics.

The landscape is similarly bleak in Canada. At seemingly every postsecondary school in Nova Scotia, humanities instructors are wondering if their jobs will survive a new government bill that requires universities to focus on three research areas—life sciences, energy, and infrastructure—none of them particularly humanistic. Elsewhere, Simon Fraser University recently killed off its English Language and Culture program, and York University paused enrollment in 18 humanities- or language-related majors.

The crisis is real. But is it existential? Two years ago, in a panicked op-ed for The New York Times, Bret C. Devereaux, an historian at North Carolina State University, wrote that “the steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training.” On my worst days, Devereaux’s words still haunt me. The situation in Canada is similar to the one he describes in the United States, and I worry that the greatest joy of my life—that of reading alone and then hashing out what I’ve read in a classroom with fellow humans—is disappearing from the culture.

At other times, I find myself bristling at Devereaux’s condescending attitude toward vocational schools, and I wonder if he’s misjudging the moment, seeing indications of flux and turbulence in higher education and interpreting them as apocalyptic portents. In my own classroom, I’ve encountered surprising signs of renewed life in the humanities, which suggest that a renaissance could be possible, at least if people who care about this stuff can rise to meet the moment.

To understand what might be done, it helps to consider what went wrong. To that question, there are three common answers. The first, favoured by conservative intellectuals, puts the blame on a culture of ideological narrowness. These critics point out that great works of literature, from King Lear to Don Juan to Anna Karenina, are polyphonous. Within their pages, differing ideological viewpoints coexist. Those viewpoints may compete, but the competition is always dynamic, and victory provisional and temporary: there is no Final Truth. Historically, instructors in literature have sought to replicate this humanistic impulse in the classroom, fostering an atmosphere where all kinds of ideas—conservative, liberal, reactionary, revolutionary—are taken seriously and where students are empowered to think for themselves.

But, conservatives contend, our world has polarized, and humanities departments have turned into progressive monocultures. Social-justice norms—hostility to commerce, nationalism, and family values—have become dogma. If, in the past, students were encouraged to explore how works of literature can expand and destabilize their worldviews, today they’re encouraged to assess literary works narrowly, based on whether those works uphold, or fail to uphold, progressive ideals. This is a profoundly boring task. And so, finding the work uninteresting and the political culture stifling, students have quietly departed for other disciplines.

A second explanation for the crisis in the humanities, favoured by progressives, puts the blame on capitalism and its neoliberal turn. In the postwar era—the Golden Age, when the humanities occupied pride of place in the varsity ecosystem—students believed that literature was ennobling. Encounters with the Great Books could make you more reflective or compassionate or civic-minded or…something. The written word was assumed to be a force for good, even if its benefits couldn’t be measured or named.

But then came neoliberalism, which is obsessed with metrics. Data can be quantified, so it matters; the salutary effects of the humanities are intangible, so they don’t. Suddenly, professors were having to justify their work to skeptical politicians, granting bodies, and university administrators. What content did they teach? What was the content good for? What skills did it build? What economic opportunities did it create? People started denigrating the humanities as “useless.” Worse, students imbibed this notion. And so they abandoned literature for more “useful”—which is to say, lucrative—pursuits.

A third explanation puts the blame not on progressivism or neoliberalism but rather on technology. What’s killing the humanities? It’s the internet, stupid. According to this theory, the digital assault on the humanities arrived in two waves. First came social media and the smartphone, which turned us into twitchy dopamine fiends incapable of the sustained attention that humanistic work requires.

Then came AI, a robot army invading what used to be sacred humanistic turf. If ChatGPT is like a calculator that writes sentences, why should you invest in writing at all? Why should you bother reading for that matter? Large language models (LLMs) can summarize any novel, play, or poem in roughly the time it takes to crack open a book, and if you still don’t understand the texts, they can generate essays for you in prose good enough for a B+ grade. For the bookish among us, the cumulative effects of technological change have been devastating. First the internet robbed us of our attentional capacities. Then it made those capacities obsolete.

If you believe (as I do) that a more diverse, democratized university system is preferable to a rarified, elitist one, then you have to consider how the humanities might thrive in this world, rather than pining for a mythologized past.

These three theories are often presented as rivals, but they’re not mutually exclusive. And they’re more than mere diagnoses. Each contains a grain of truth. To think about them closely is to envision what a revival in the humanities might look like—and what it might require.

When conservatives talk about wokeness on campus, they often succumb to hyperbole, imagining Soviet-style re-education camps. That’s hardly the case. Not all humanities professors are card-carrying progressives, and no two are aligned on every issue.

But to say that the conservative critique of higher education sometimes tips into paranoia is not to say that it’s wholly wrong. In the United States, surveys of professors, and studies based on survey data or reviews of course syllabi, have helped establish, empirically, what most people who teach already know: humanities departments have a pronounced left-wing tilt. I’ve known instructors who openly boast about evaluating student essays based on whether they uphold progressive ideals, and I’ve met students who feel compelled, in their writing, to affirm whatever left-wing shibboleths their professors favour. In my other career as a journalist, I sometimes interview cabinet ministers, political strategists, lawyers, religious leaders, think-tank fellows, and activists on issues ranging from housing reform to parental rights. I’ve come to love Canada for its political diversity. There’s a sense of ferment, tension, and possibility in this country, which I rarely feel in the comparatively tranquil halls of academia.

My point is not that humanities departments should start aggressively hiring conservatives, but rather that a revival in the humanities will happen, if it happens, in spaces where political diversity is cultivated and encouraged. In my own courses, which focus on creative nonfiction and literary journalism, I teach all kinds of writers—socialists, feminists, social-justice progressives, liberal humanists, libertarians, populists, constitutional conservatives, and religious traditionalists.

I teach only thoughtful writers (hacks like Jordan Peterson are a waste of everyone’s time), and I encourage students to take them seriously. The primary goal is to understand: How do people arrive at their viewpoints? How are their arguments constructed? What are the underlying principles? The conversations are often electrifying.

My students are surprised to discover that sophisticated thinkers, regardless of their political leanings, are ideologically promiscuous: in critiquing the U.S. carceral system, the socialist writer Elizabeth Bruenig draws on pre-modern Catholic thought, and in calling for a return to the traditional, pre-nuclear family, the conservative intellectual David Brooks points to queer culture, with its chosen families, as a contemporary model to emulate. In the humanities, right and left converge. Ideologies mutate and reconfigure, like molecules or strands of DNA. I’ve realized that, for students, this discovery is thrilling. It’s one of the unique pleasures that a humanities education used to offer—and could offer again.

But, one might ask, do students want thrilling intellectual experiences anymore? Or do they want hard skills and well-paying jobs? If neoliberalism is the real enemy attacking the humanities, then cultivating a politically dynamic classroom isn’t going to fix things. Here, I’ll confess that I’m not totally bought in on the “blame neoliberalism” viewpoint. Perhaps it’s true that students today are more careerist than students six decades ago, but an argument about students now versus students then isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

If you attended university in Canada in the early ’60s, there’s a good chance that you were white, Canadian born, and affluent—part of a well-connected cohort, whose members had little reason to worry about hireability after graduation. (As recently as 2001, the proportion of students identifying as visible minorities was a third of what it was in 2022.) In the postwar era, you went to school to acquire the affectations and cultural capital that would help you get by in the clubby worlds of finance, law, or public administration. An English degree was a suitable way to achieve those ends, so you had good reason to major in English. To be sure, this characterization doesn’t describe every student in the early ’60s, but it’s far more representative of that moment than it is of ours. University then was a more elite indulgence. As a percentage of the national population, the entire student body in late-Diefenbaker-era Canada was a fifth as large as it is today.

Everything’s changed since then. New schools have proliferated. Legacy schools have ballooned. Among Canadian students—according to data from the consultancy Higher Education Strategy Associates—women now outnumber men, and the proportion of white versus non-white people is quickly approaching parity. In 2010, there were twice as many students working part-time jobs while studying as there were in the 1970s. Outstanding student loans in Canada currently total $41 billion; compared to that hefty figure, the national total in the mid ’60s was basically a rounding error above zero. That’s hardly surprising. In a world where university isn’t mainly the purview of the affluent, you’d expect levels of debt to rise. And if students today are concerned with their future career prospects, that’s not because they’re captive to neoliberal ideology; it’s because they have a great deal to lose.

Maybe, in an era when seemingly everything—including thought itself—is mechanized, people will feel compelled to fight for the humanistic tradition because they can more clearly see its value.

My problem with the “blame neoliberalism” argument isn’t that it’s totally wrong, per se, but rather that it’s rooted in nostalgia for a postwar era that’s never coming back—and wasn’t particularly great to begin with. If you believe (as I do) that a more diverse, democratized university system is preferable to a rarified, elitist one, then you have to consider how the humanities might thrive in this world, rather than pining for a mythologized past. And you have to take students’ economic anxieties and career ambitions seriously, rather than wishing them away.

Is there a path forward? When people talk about the crisis in the humanities, they often refer, as I did earlier, to declining enrollment in literature programs. But perhaps this is the wrong metric. Perhaps the salient question isn’t Are students still majoring in English? but rather, Are students being exposed to humanistic thought in whatever course of study they choose?

The answer doesn’t have to be no. As campuses have diversified, so too have course offerings. Today, you can find interdisciplinary programs—Peace, Conflict, and Justice Studies at U of T; Law and Society at York; Social and Political Thought at Western—that didn’t exist in postwar Canada. As precursors to careers in law, policy, planning, or diplomacy, these programs are understood to be more vocational than a straightforward English degree. Yet they still require humanistic work—reading closely, weighing up competing ideas.

My own courses are taken as electives, often for students majoring in social sciences and STEM. The subject is creative writing, but I also focus on analytical and conversational skills. I want my students to emerge as better readers, more generous thinkers, and lovers of the written word. This is a choice that instructors in other programs can make too. Relative to the student population, there are fewer literature majors today than there were even a decade ago. That’s unlikely to change. But it doesn’t follow that humanistic thought must go the same way.