What, me worry? Why the “death of the humanities” may be overstated. From the editorial:

[W]hen you look outside the gates of the university, the fate of the humanities doesn’t look so bleak. When it comes to the wider American public, there has been no apparent decline of interest in humanistic pursuits. A Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of Americans who read print books has fallen slightly, from 71% in 2011 to 63% in 2018; over the same period, however, more Americans read e-books and listened to audiobooks. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that attendance at arts activities increased by 3.6% between 2012 and 2017, while the number of Americans who reported reading poetry increased by an amazing 76%, more than doubling among readers aged 18 to 24.

This disconnect suggests that talk of the death of the humanities is founded on a certain confusion about what the humanities are and where they live. Pursuits such as literature, art and philosophy are fundamental expressions of human nature. While they have taken very different forms in different times and places, no civilization has been without them, and there is no reason to think that ours will be the first….

Universities are not responsible for, or capable of, creating a living humanistic culture. Scholarship is an important part of that culture but not its engine; if anything, it is a lagging indicator, where cultural developments that have been generated elsewhere turn up for formal examination….

As The Journal reported in 2017, the highest-earning majors are all STEM fields. With the average cost of tuition at a four-year private college now more than $35,000 a year, perhaps a degree in the humanities is perceived as an unaffordable luxury. Has humanities education turned off students by becoming too ideologically monolithic?… Or maybe the humanities have simply lost confidence in their mission….

Much of what students of the humanities learn may not be directly applicable to their lives or careers—very few of us need to know how to identify a school of painting or interpret a poem—but a humanistic education is supposed to teach us how to read critically and think independently, skills that are crucial to democratic citizenship. This is what the critic George Steiner once referred to, skeptically, as the idea that the humanities humanize—that studying literature, art and philosophy makes us better people. Historically speaking, this is a difficult argument to make….

More broadly, it is hard to argue that the health of our body politic relies on college-level study of the humanities when only a tiny fraction of the population has ever held a humanities degree….

The real connection between culture and the academic humanities is harder to trace. The terms “humanities” and “humanist” arose in the West during the Renaissance, when scholars of ancient Greek and Latin literature and philosophy called what they were doing studia humanitatis—studies of or befitting a human being—to distinguish it from traditional academic subjects like theology.

Humanistic scholarship fertilized European culture in profound ways, yet the best of that culture was not itself produced in universities. The humanists often preferred to write their works in Latin, seeing it as the most appropriate language for serious writing; today, such Neo-Latin works are known only to a few experts. Meanwhile, Renaissance writers who addressed popular audiences in vernacular languages, like Shakespeare and Cervantes, became the founders of modern literature. Shakespeare famously knew “small Latin and less Greek,” in the words of Ben Jonson’s elegy, and his knowledge of the life of Julius Caesar or Mark Antony wouldn’t pass muster in any history department. But it is only through Shakespeare’s imagination that Caesar and Antony live for most people today….

When the university comes to be seen as the sole custodian of the humanities, both the humanities and the university suffer. Most scholarship in the humanities is directed solely to other scholars and has little or no effect on the culture at large. (In 2005, the average history book from a scholarly publisher sold 200 copies.) There are exceptions—important thinkers whose work changes the way we see the world and ourselves—but these are as rare inside the academy as outside it.