The numbers on humanities enrollment are bad and getting worse. English majors are down roughly 50% since 2009. History, philosophy, and modern languages have all collapsed by similar amounts. The standard explanation from inside the field blames external forces: neoliberalism, the corporatization of universities, students prioritizing earnings, anti-intellectual political culture.
There’s truth in some of that. There’s also a less comfortable explanation that the field doesn’t engage with: humanities departments made specific choices over thirty years that drove away the readers who would have been their best students.
Theory ate the discipline
Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 2000s, humanities departments increasingly framed undergraduate teaching through the lens of theoretical apparatus borrowed from continental philosophy and critical theory. Foucault, Derrida, Butler, and their descendants became required reading in introductory courses where students might previously have read Hawthorne or Dickens.
The shift wasn’t inherently destructive—theoretical literacy has its uses—but the practical effect was to filter literature through frameworks that students often found alienating. A class that previously asked “what does this novel mean and how does it move you” became one that asked “how does this text reproduce structures of power.” Both are valid questions. The second one, taught poorly to undergraduates with no background, killed enthusiasm at scale.
The field internally celebrated this shift as sophistication. Externally, it read as a dialect that you had to learn before you could participate, which is exactly what most prospective majors weren’t willing to do for a degree that was already losing economic value.
The political gatekeeping problem
By the 2010s, many humanities departments had become politically homogeneous to a degree that made open inquiry difficult. Surveys of academic political affiliation in English departments found Democrats outnumbering Republicans by ratios of 25-to-1 or higher. This wasn’t unique to the humanities, but the discipline’s subject matter made the effects more visible. Reading lists narrowed, debate atrophied, and students who didn’t share the consensus learned to keep quiet.
Students notice this. The complaint that humanities classrooms had become indoctrination sites was overstated by political opponents but not entirely fabricated. Conservative-leaning students self-selected out. Independent-minded students of any politics often found the experience constraining. The discipline lost not just enrollment but variety in the students it attracted.
The professionalization spiral
Humanities programs increasingly trained graduate students for academic careers that were vanishing. Tenure-track positions in English have collapsed alongside undergraduate enrollment, and yet PhD programs continued admitting students at rates calibrated to a labor market that hasn’t existed since the 1970s. The result was a credentialing pipeline producing more highly trained scholars than the field could absorb, mostly into adjunct positions paying less than retail.
The effect on undergraduate teaching was downstream and worse. Adjuncts teaching survey courses for $3,500 a section can’t sustain the kind of mentorship that builds majors. Departments that once recruited students through inspiring introductory teaching lost that pipeline.
The takeaway
The humanities decline is real and partly self-inflicted. Blaming students for choosing more practical majors mistakes effect for cause. The field made itself less appealing through theoretical opacity, political narrowing, and a credentialing system disconnected from labor reality. Recovery is possible, but it requires honesty about what was done to drive readers away.
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