Quillette64%
The Crisis in the Humanities Is Not About Money 60%
By Abraham Wyner0%
6/25/2026, 5:45:09 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Recency Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Unattributed Quote, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 36.3% saturation with 87 hits. Analysis detected 762 faulty-reasoning hits from 240 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 56% and a BS Rank of 60% (8,824 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 59.70% of the article peer group.
Did the humanities go woke<em> because</em> they went broke?
That scenario has become one of the more persuasive explanations for the present crisis in the humanities.
As their enrolments declined and federal funding shrank, and universities began sending money (and, thus, prestige) toward STEM and professional programs, the humanities went looking for support wherever they could find it.
If serious funders wanted academic work to be framed in the language of social justice, then scholars were willing to adapt accordingly.
Tyler Austin Harper <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/mellon-foundation-humanities-research-funding/685733/?
ref=quillette.com">recently made this case</a> in <em>The Atlantic</em>, arguing that what looked like ideological capture may, in fact, be economic desperation.
But this account, while helpful, lets the humanities off too easily.
The humanities did not simply have politicisation imposed on them by administrators or market logic.
They helped create the intellectual conditions that made politicisation attractive, prestigious, and, eventually, routine.
A new <a href="https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship-Report.pdf?
ref=quillette.com">report</a> on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences now makes a similar point from inside the academy. The report is careful. It rejects the crude claim that the humanities are simply corrupt or unserious. But it nevertheless finds, across every field studied, evidence of declining scholarly standards, the drop driven, in part, by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones and by a weakening of older ideals of rigour and objectivity.
But the report is mostly diagnostic.
What still needs explaining is why those habits became so powerful, and why they proved so professionally useful.
My answer is that critical theory did not merely politicise scholarship.
It also made scholarship easier to produce.
Speakers
1speaker9.2%attributed speech218writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageTyler Austin Harper
22 attributed words100% of attributed speech100% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.