The March 2026 issue of The Atlantic published an article describing “the humanities in their death throes.” I was shocked because the article seemed to blame the death on the A. W. Mellon Foundation, the largest donor to the humanities and funder of my own postdoc. Is the article fair? Is it correct?

Every few weeks, another story surfaces claiming that the humanities are going extinct. The tone may be dramatic, but the underlying data are real — and not new. By several measures, the humanities have been flailing since the mid twentieth century.

Across the United States, undergraduate enrollment in humanities courses has morbidly declined. According to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, bachelor’s degrees in English, history, philosophy, and related fields fell roughly 30–40% between 2012 and 2022.

English majors alone (my tribe) declined by more than 40% during that period and, of course, they’re still sinking. Nothing is happening to reverse the trend.

Meanwhile, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities has fallen from about 17% in the late 1960s to roughly 10–12% today. And English majors in particular? They dropped from 7.6% of all degrees in 1971 to roughly 2.8% in 2021.

Faculty lines have followed. Tenure-track hiring in literature, languages, and history has slowed or reversed at many institutions. Adjunctification has intensified. Moreover salary disparities between humanities faculty and colleagues in technical or professional schools have grown larger.

These are not imaginary trends. But sickness is not the same as death.

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The Case for Decline

Let’s take the skeptical case at full strength.

Market Pressure. Students and families are acutely aware of tuition costs and student debt. Majors perceived as vocational — business, nursing, engineering, computer science — promise clearer economic pathways. Humanities departments rarely if ever make such promises.

Institutional Retrenchment. Departments shrink. Programs merge. Some small colleges eliminate humanities majors altogether. The university’s center of gravity has shifted toward STEM and professional education and away from the balanced liberal arts.

Opacity of Scholarship. Much humanities research is written for specialists. Jargon and theoretical abstraction can create the impression that the humanities exist primarily for themselves — an inward-looking guild rather than a public-facing service profession.

Taken together, the humanities can resemble a rudderless dinghy cut loose from a great sailing ship — adrift, carrying a few distinguished officers who are rowing into uncertain waters.

That metaphor captures something real.

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The Case for Persistence

And yet the obituary becomes less persuasive when we widen the lens.

The Numbers Are Smaller, Not Vanishing. Even after declines, humanities fields still account for hundreds of thousands of course enrollments annually in U.S. higher education. Writing, history, ethics, and literature are still embedded in the curriculum at most colleges and universities.

Migration Rather Than Disappearance. Humanistic inquiry has not vanished; it has migrated. For example ethics courses tied to artificial intelligence, medicine, and public policy have grown. Programs in digital humanities, environmental humanities, and public history have expanded. The scholarship continues, even if the departmental labels change.

Public Engagement Is Growing. Museum attendance, historical documentaries, literary and film festivals, podcasts, and online archives draw millions of participants each year. Digital platforms have dramatically increased access to primary sources once restricted to research libraries.

Labor Market Evidence. The stereotype that humanities graduates are economically doomed does not fully withstand scrutiny. Longitudinal studies from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce show that while humanities majors often start with lower early-career earnings than engineering graduates, their mid-career earnings frequently narrow the gap.

Moreover, surveys from the National Association of Colleges and Employers consistently rank communication skills, critical thinking, and adaptability among employers’ most desired attributes.

Will artificial intelligence reshape communication-heavy professions? Certainly. But AI systems themselves are trained on human language, narrative, and cultural memory. They do not eliminate the need for interpretation; they intensify it.

As automated communication expands, the capacity to distinguish nuance from noise, rhetoric from reality, and history from distortion becomes more — not less — valuable.

The humanities have declined, yes. Gone extinct? At least not yet.

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A Deeper Question

Perhaps the question is not whether the humanities are dying, but whether their twentieth-century institutional form is exhausted.

For decades, the humanities were anchored in the residential research university: tenure lines, print monographs, specialized journals. That ecosystem is under pressure.

But core questions addressed by the humanities persist:

• What is a self?
• What is justice?
• What is beauty?
• How should we live?
• What can we learn from the past?

Artificial intelligence is sometimes regarded as a panacea. But AI generates prose. It cannot decide what is worth saying. Biotechnology extends life. It cannot determine what makes life meaningful. Markets allocate resources. They cannot produce moral equity.

There definitely is a crisis in the humanities, but it may lie less in people’s indifference than in institutional inertia:

• Translation Failure. Too little humanities scholarship is written for the educated public.
• Technological Lag. Many departments are slow to adopt digital tools for preservation and access.
• Narrative Hesitation. Humanities leaders have often been reluctant to articulate their civic importance in plain language.

The humanities dinghy is drifting, for sure. The question is whether those aboard will atttach a rudder and hoist a sail.

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A New Horizon

At Resurgam, we believe the humanities are not a relic but a renewable resource.

Digital technology allows us to:

• Preserve and publish complete literary legacies.
• Make primary sources searchable and globally accessible.
• Use generative AI responsibly to illuminate historical voices.
• Invite readers not merely to consume texts, but to interact with them.

Though undergraduate humanities majors decline, and adjunct professors proliferate, those are not the final measures of vitality. The humanities live wherever texts are read deeply, histories are interpreted, art is examined, and human experience is rendered intelligible.

The urgent question is not are the humanities dead, but who will create and cultivate the next form they take?

The dinghy has indeed left the old vessel. Its purpose is not to drift, but to discover a new world.

At Resurgam, that is the voyage we have undertaken.

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Bob Becker (25 February 2026)