A Fundamental Reckoning Awaits the Humanities. It Shouldn’t Alarm Us.

For nearly the past year, I have devoted myself to studying the rise and fall of classical education in the American university in general, and at Harvard in particular.

I am not an alarmist about the state of my field, and I reject the claims of those who say the humanities are “dying.” Nor is this a plea to the STEM fields professing some eternal utility of a humanist education. However, I do believe that the next decade will prove to be one of the most consequential in shaping the humanities.

The humanities will not die, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kill them ourselves.

Latin and Greek, which were once so important to a university education that near-fluency in them was required even for admission to Harvard, found themselves relegated to freshman classes and electives by the end of the nineteenth century.

University administrators, many of whom knew no other system than the classical one, first pushed the ancient languages aside for lectures on modern European languages (you can thank George Ticknor, the namesake of Boylston Hall’s lounge, for those). Later, the tongues of Caesar and Socrates had to make room for the ever-increasing list of required STEM classes. By 1870, a Harvard undergraduate was required to take physics, chemistry, hydrostatics and hydrodynamics, optics, and acoustics. By contrast, only one year of Latin and Greek was required in Charles Eliot’s “liberal programme,” a forebearer of modern liberal arts education.

But I am hardly the first to write about the continuation of this phenomenon into the twenty-first century. Almost fifteen years ago, the Editorial Board confidently and controversially announced that they were “not especially sorry to see the English majors go,” welcoming the decline of humanities majors at Harvard. Although the board later changed course, other recent commentators continue to assert that the status of the humanities in higher education is in decline. Some schools have even cut entire programs.

Over the next ten years, universities will be forced to contend with declining applicant pools, attacks on higher education, and the continued refinement of generative artificial intelligence.

For students, the ebb and flow of a volatile job market will make the jump to more profitable concentrations that much more appealing. For faculty, the ever-increasing ubiquity of AI in assignments will force changes that would turn even President Eliot into a Luddite. For administrators, constant financial pressures will further stretch their already tight resources, making it seem that a total reorganization of many departments is the only correct answer.

To these fears, many of which I know all too well (believe me — I’m going to be a high school teacher), I say: we must meet these head-on. However, the best course of action will ultimately be to let these things happen. The humanities must be able to sort themselves out.

As an example of what not to do, a proposal at the University of Chicago seeks to consolidate many of its smaller humanities departments, potentially subjecting departments with fewer than 15 tenure-track faculty members to mergers.

Harvard has not gone so far, but appears to be responding to similar pressures, as seen by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ recent proposal to group institutes, departments, and centers into “clusters” with shared administrative staff. The University must make sure that no move towards administrative efficiency jeopardizes the academic experience. While I recognize that these changes are only administrative at the moment, I fear they are a sign of what is to come. In the name of “progress,” smaller humanities departments at Harvard might soon find themselves sharing much more than just administrators. Some fields outside of the humanities may not even be safe.

This is not to say that we should continue exactly as things are now — that simply is not possible. As 2036 approaches, the 400th year of higher education in the United States, the humanities must make changes, as every other subject has and will for as long as education exists. But to best weather the storm, the humanities must be reactive, not proactive.

I mean that instead of sweeping, university-level reorganizations, the humanities must be left to change on their own, reacting and responding to issues as they become specific to each discipline.

Different specialties in the humanities often draw on each other, absolutely, but the same could be said of any department. Chemistry draws on physics as much as classics draws on linguistics. Combining either leaves students underserved by both.

Similarly, another proposed cluster including History & Literature and Medieval Studies would encompass over 50 graduating seniors, making it larger than Chemistry, Chemical & Physical Biology, and Chemistry & Physics combined. The cluster model will dilute the administrative support that helps to define these departments.

Certainly, opportunities might become limited, or seats in classes and graduate cohorts might dwindle. Before we make irreversible changes in the name of proactive fiscal responsibility or to preempt another AI boom, we must first react to what the decade has in store.

The next decade might be the most important time for the humanities in history. Instead of sweeping top-down changes in the name of progress or utility, the ship must right itself.

Mac M. Mertens ’26, a former Crimson Editorial editor, is a Classics and History double concentrator in Mather House.