Corporate coup: that business seeks to subdue the humanities for its own ends. From the editorial:

There is much concern among ‘intellectuals’ that the decline in the support of the humanities in institutions of higher learning is evidence that we are becoming a more technocratic society. That concern is well-founded but it does not go far enough.

In very simple terms, the assault on the humanities is part of the larger effort to make America more and more hospitable to corporations and their allies.

In a world without Socrates and Shakespeare, without Rembrandt and Bach, without history and analyses of social institutions, there is little to guide citizens-of-the-future toward considering the ethical implications of societal imperatives. It is the arts and the humanities that create, in us, the possibilities that the initiatives of corporate America, and an authoritarian state, might be profoundly destructive of our humane-ness….

Forgoing the arts and humanities does not automatically create good human beings. For humans always depend on a repository of narratives and deep-seated values to balance off against the needs of the state or massive corporations….

While English and social science and history have lost 26,000 majors over the past ten years, computer science, engineering, and business majors have increased by over 140,000. Health professions, biological sciences, and psychology have increased by almost 200,000. Technical education is supplanting the humanities and the arts. Universities are both listening to that shift, and creating it. Overall, there has been a 17% decline in those majoring in the humanities….

Seen from a very broad historical perspective, the shrinking of the arts and the humanities is part of the effort by dominant interests to train a populace to adhere to a narrow and unquestioned set of values. Numbers and efficiency, not a sense of social ‘good,’ are what count in this sort of university. Students are trained to supply answers to practical problems, not raise questions about what choices are ethical.