https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/the-true-crisis-of-the-humanities/
The Humanities are in crisis, as readers of Quadrant will be only too aware. What was once the jewel in the crown of scholarship in Western Civilization has become a pedagogical sheltered workshop in our universities, totally dedicated to promulgating anti-Western, anti-Liberal, anti-Democratic, and (literally) anti-Human ideologies. This situation has recently attracted the attention of the media and the Federal government, which has proposed changes to course fee structures that are intended to dissuade students from enrolling in what have become useless if not in fact pernicious degrees in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences – sending students into the streets instead of into careers.
Unfortunately, the intensity of the reaction to this appalling situation has obscured the true nature of the Humanities and their once illustrious history as the scholarly arm of Humanism, stretching back seven centuries as a field of study, and over 2000 years as a project to lay claim “to the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” (to quote Edgar Allen Poe’s famous words from To Helen).
This heritage has been forgotten in the increasingly furious reaction to the ideological coup that has taken place over the past 50 years. What has happened in the Humanities is that the field has been ‘hollowed out’, leaving only a shell; the traditional disciples have either been driven out or completely debauched intellectually, and a whole range of new ideology-infested subjects have set up home in their place. Perversely, while living comfortably in this ‘Humanities’ shell the tenured practitioners of these subjects have adopted as their mission the complete denunciation and destruction of the Humanities and Humanism, along with Western Civilization in general. This is the true crisis of the Humanities.