The Humanities as Canary: Understanding this Crisis Now

You can pick your metaphor. Is humanities research the dog in the burning house meme, or just a feature of the current dumpster fire of the academic-government-world order? Maybe both and more, but most importantly and usefully for understanding where we are and how we got here, the humanities have always been the canary in the coal mine of the full knowledge industry. A truly catastrophic decline in permanent academic jobs in the Humanities will not be left at the Humanities (depriving all of us of the research that fully employed expert scholars would have produced); the winnowing of research support even for fully employed scholars, and the narrowing of venues for the public benefit of the work impoverishes us all. But how can we get our brains around the enormity of what’s happening/ happened?

Read more: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/02/the-humanities-as-canary-understanding-this-crisis-now/