Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 12.1% (29 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 7.1% (17 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 4.6% (11 hits)
• Framing Effect - 2.9% (7 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

The Crisis in the Humanities Is Not About Money

Did the humanities go woke<em>&nbsp;because</em>&nbsp;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&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/mellon-foundation-humanities-research-funding/685733/?

ref=quillette.com">recently made this case</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<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&nbsp;new&nbsp;<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>&nbsp;on&nbsp;the&nbsp;state&nbsp;of&nbsp;scholarship&nbsp;in&nbsp;the&nbsp;humanities&nbsp;and&nbsp;humanistic&nbsp;social&nbsp;sciences&nbsp;now makes a similar point from inside the academy.&nbsp;The report&nbsp;is careful.&nbsp;It rejects the crude&nbsp;claim&nbsp;that&nbsp;the&nbsp;humanities&nbsp;are&nbsp;simply&nbsp;corrupt&nbsp;or unserious.&nbsp;But it&nbsp;nevertheless&nbsp;finds, across&nbsp;every&nbsp;field&nbsp;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.