In 2023, West Virginia University cut 28 majors, including art history, foreign languages, and performing arts. SUNY Potsdam discontinued programs in Philosophy, Art History, two foreign languages, three performing arts, and two foundational sciences. Others like the Missouri Western State University and Eastern Kentucky University made similar cuts. In 2024, Boston University suspended admissions for numerous humanities and social science PhD programs. Just recently, the University of California, Irvine laid off over 20 lecturers in the School of Humanities. The trend continues internationally, notably at Cardiff (England), Fudan (China), Leiden (Netherlands), ANU, and Macquarie (Australia).
Administrators are dealing with budget shortfalls and declining enrollment in the humanities, Stateline reports. With rising tuition, stagnant wages, and heavier debt burdens, consideration about the financial returns of college becomes inevitable. Since humanities degrees are stereotyped (and often statistically shown) to yield lower starting salaries and less direct career paths, students and families under pressure tend to choose other majors that promise more secure employment. Moreover, many humanities departments struggle to sustain themselves financially. According to a study in Public Humanities, approximately 1% of all university research budgets goes to the humanities. Governments are diverting more funds to STEM and career-oriented fields, both in an attempt to secure global tech leadership and to save their own ailing economies. In doing so, they affect the career prospects, public narratives, and societal expectations influencing the choice of major for countless individuals. Given the long trajectory of events that led to today, including the global economic recessions in 2008 and the COVID years, the pressure on both the country and the individual is real. And viewed in this light, the program eliminations are reasonable, if not unavoidable.
What is not reasonable, however, is the larger societal psychology at play. “We are going to be much more oriented toward listening to the people who pay our bills — parents, students, legislators and others. And they very much want to see universities, particularly land grant institutions like ours, become engines of creativity and economic development,” said then-West Virginia University President Gordon Gee. Here “creativity” is a coded expression for innovation with market value, and the real keyword is “economic development.” It marks that universities have shifted their identities from missionaries of humanistic inquiry to “land grant institutions” and “engines” — both culturally loaded expressions with capitalist and utilitarian undertones. Gee’s rhetoric frames the shift as universities benignly “listening” to the people, while in reality, administrators like him actively shape the priorities of the institution. And what control do the students and families have over their major and career choices, when our excessively economy-driven society strongly favors one field and not another? Historically, part of universities’ role has been to hold ground against such narrow utilitarian demands and maintain intellectual autonomy. This is not just a tradition but also a society’s protective mechanism, because intellectual freedom begets cultural vitality, resilience, and mutual understanding. But now, why have we forgotten this facet of society? Why do our very words stealthily encode value in economic terms?
“Are there spirits?
We see what we
see—because we have
eyes constituted as they are
What are we?
—A gathering of force
in motion—a light
which burns—with a wick…” (Edvard Munch, private journals)
The biological nature of our eyes made it so we only see the physical exterior of things. And that has formed a dynamic, almost paradoxical relationship with our yearning for what is inside. In a primal way, we burst out, “What are we?” Munch’s answer is full of hope and passion. Curiously, such abstract feelings also find themselves in the visual representation of a candle. The visible bear the invisible, yet one cannot live without the other.
This journal entry is illuminating today, because in some ways, things like career, wealth, and technology are like our biological eye, and the humanities are like our yearning. In the past thirty years, technology has transformed our lifestyles and urban spaces. But the humanities let us see the invisible: under these exterior changes, have we become kinder, more understanding? Has our social structure become better? Technology projects the hand that wields it. Used unwisely, we risk it becoming a tool of systemic oppression, wealth accumulation, violence, and ultimately a reinforcement of existing social inequalities. Technology may advance. Wealth may increase. But none of these will matter if we stopped questioning “What are we?” The polar tension between our “visible” and “invisible” desires will keep on existing, pulling on us from two different directions, just like they always have throughout history. What we humans can do, is find our standing and balance within our hearts.