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The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit, COVID-19 was still a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan, and I was a Ph.D. candidate in a dying field: comparative literature. I was getting ready to Zoom interview for a tenure-track job near Boston that I almost certainly wouldn’t get (and didn’t). Sardined with me in a Greenwich Village coffee shop in December 2019, one of my faculty mentors talked me through, for the thousandth time, the questions I should expect the hiring committee to ask me and dispensed advice about how I should answer them. Then we walked back to his office, lined in handsome foreign-language editions of various novels and works of philosophy, where I would sit for the interview. There, he offered a final piece of wisdom: “Don’t be nervous. It’s just Harvard,” he said, grinning. “It’s not like it’s Chicago.”
A joke, but not entirely. For as long as I can remember, and certainly much longer than that, the University of Chicago has been widely viewed as the destination for humanities students and scholars. Some other elite schools might have the coveted Ivy League branding, or a few more famous faculty members, or a couple more dollars to tack onto the salaries of its professors and graduate students. But perhaps nowhere is the study of literature, philosophy, the arts, and languages more valued, their spirit more authentically preserved, their frontiers more doggedly pursued, than at Chicago. The university has had several household names on its humanities faculty, including the firebrand critic Allan Bloom, the novelist Saul Bellow, and the ethicist Martha Nussbaum, as well as scholars who may be less well known to the general public but whose work has been deeply influential in their fields, including the brilliant literary critic Sianne Ngai and Fred Donner, the pathbreaking and Guggenheim-winning historian of early Islam. In short, Chicago is a place for scholars’ scholars. At least, that’s the reputation. And Chicago’s reputation is no doubt why, when the university announced recently that it was reducing Ph.D. admissions for seven departments—among them art history and English language and literature—and outright freezing admissions to others, including classics, the decision was met, in some quarters, with fury and disbelief. “Chicago!” as one stunned academic friend put it in a text to me.
In an August 12 email to faculty, Deborah Nelson, Chicago’s arts and humanities dean, said that the changes were necessitated by “this moment of uncertainty” and “evolving fiscal realities.” These bits of bureaucratese appear to be allusions to both the Trump administration’s war on higher education and Chicago’s homegrown financial troubles, which include an eye-popping $6.3 billion in debt and a bad bet on crypto. “To be anything but cautious at this moment,” the dean’s email continued, “would be irresponsible.”
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Chicago’s social-sciences division has also announced doctoral-admissions pauses, primarily in humanistic-leaning programs such as anthropology and social thought, where towering figures including the philosopher Hannah Arendt once taught. What’s happening at Chicago is a particular gut-punch to the humanities, not just at the university itself, but nationally and even globally. The school is, as the classics professor Catherine Kearns put it in a message to me, “a singular center for the pursuit of humanistic knowledge and intellectual growth.” Of the nearly 30 Chicago humanities professors I spoke with for this article, many emphasized that the stakes are much higher than the fate of prospective graduate students or the professors who might teach them. Chicago has long helped to keep alive tiny fields and esoteric areas of humanistic study, particularly in the languages. Without the university’s support, and the continued training of graduate students who can keep these bodies of knowledge going, entire spheres of human learning might eventually blink out.
Of course, some might view these comments as self-serving complaints. But the primary fears of the people I spoke with were not about their own careers or futures, but instead about their fields—about knowledge that, once lost, cannot be easily regained. “If you allow a field to die, there’s a loss to something like humanity,” Clifford Ando, a Chicago classicist who has been outspoken about the administration’s maneuvers, told me. “There’s also a real practical risk that a field simply cannot be re-created just because you have books.” I heard this sentiment echoed over and over. “If we stop producing people who are trained or educated to help undergraduates understand the most important things thought or written or painted in human history,” the renowned philosopher Robert Pippin said, “we might not be able to recover that.” Elaine Hadley, an emerita professor of English, told me, “Part of what we do is we’re conservators, keeping a body of knowledge going. We want to innovate and we want to think new things about it, and, you know, we want to make it relevant to the present day, but we’re also trying to keep this knowledge alive.”
These responses emphasize the cultural costs of shrinking the number of people trained in humanities fields, rather than focusing on the question of whether universities should be calibrating the production of Ph.D.s to the academic job market. No one I spoke to was insensitive to the pressures their grad students face when confronting the vanishing opportunities for tenure-track employment. But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.
These faculty perspectives also stood in stark contrast with the reigning image of elite higher educators in right-wing media outlets: that humanities professors are “woke” activists whose primary concern is the political indoctrination of “the youth.” Most of the Chicago faculty I spoke with saw—and defended—their disciplines in terms that were, if anything, conservative. Implicit in their impassioned defenses was the belief that the role of a humanist is to preserve knowledge, safeguard learning from the market and the tides of popular interest, and ward off coarse appeals to economic utility.
Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university’s humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration’s assaults, to transfer resources away from “impractical,” unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university’s senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and “innovation”). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. “Let no good crisis go unleveraged,” Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. “You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, ‘Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?’”
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When I emailed Nelson and asked whether the changes were part of a plan to kill off the paused departments, she said, “A one-year pause is exactly that—a discrete decision that applies merely to a single admissions cycle.” She seemed to acknowledge, however, that a divisional reorganization could happen. “My goal is to sustain the full scope of our faculty’s research and teaching,” she said. “To do so, we must be open to new ideas and structures.” She added, “There’s no magic number of departments in the arts and humanities.” In the meantime, Chicago’s humanities professors appear largely determined to resist being evaluated in terms of expediency. In a meeting with Nelson a few days after the announcement, 14 out of 15 chairs in the humanities division told the dean that she should pause enrollment in all of their departments or none of them. Targeting some and not others was unacceptable, they argued, because it sent the message that some fields matter and others do not.
The department chairs’ wager seems to be that acting as a unified bloc will make reorganizing the division and cutting programs more difficult, even if the division-wide pause causes short-term pain for the next academic year. As anyone who has served on a faculty anywhere can tell you, this degree of cross-department solidarity and willingness to sacrifice for less-favored colleagues is remarkable, and even moving. Last Wednesday afternoon, the dean announced that the chairs had gotten their wish: With the exception of philosophy and music composition (owing to previous pauses in those programs), doctoral admissions will be frozen across the humanities for the 2026–27 academic year.
It’s a bittersweet victory, of course, one that will result in fewer doctoral students in the short term and is not guaranteed to strengthen the division in the long term. And it does not settle the most pressing question raised by all this turmoil. If even Chicago is not willing to support and protect American arts and letters, who will? One Chicago administrator, in an attempt to defend the university’s admissions pauses, pointed out that other prestigious peer institutions were expected to make similar announcements about their Ph.D. admissions in the coming weeks, and noted that Harvard is cutting nearly $2 million from its own humanities division. I would like to think that my (and others’) alarm about the future of the humanities is overblown. But the evidence doesn’t give me much hope.
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