The Muscular Humanities

A call to arms

For anyone who lives in the Hudson Valley and wants to catch me talking Glass Century and other matters, I’ll be appearing at the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival on April 26th in Rosendale. It’s a great weekend and a lot of talented people are converging for some fascinating talks. Don’t forget to preorder my new novel Glass Century, which Current Affairs likened to Tom Wolfe’s best works and Junot Diaz called “spectacularly moving.”

On May 6th, I am having my book launch in Manhattan with the legendary Adelle Waldman. You should attend and you must RSVP to get in. Tickets are only $5 and they are going fast. Secure your spot right here and I’ll see you soon!

And if you’re in Brooklyn on April 16, this Wednesday, come hear me read an excerpt from Glass Century at the new issue launch for Serpent Club Press.

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These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in doubt. Fewer believe in the dream of college, especially when exorbitant tuition and housing fees ensure, in many instances, debt will follow a student until death. Incoming fire arrives from all sides. Technocratic liberals want the university to be little more than a job-trainer, delightfully pumping young blood into the STEM fields. Conservatives believe the universities are irredeemably “woke” and must be brought to heel. Unless a college is churning out a future law clerk for Samuel Alito, a conservative wonders what it’s all really for. With more Americans than ever college-educated, the value of a degree, naturally, isn’t what it was forty years ago. A college graduate is no longer so rarefied. That’s the trouble with the law of supply and demand.

The humanities, for decades now, have been at the end of the barrel, quaking in retreat. Who will pull the trigger and kill off English, history, and the classics for good? When I spoke at Yale recently, I found defending the university system itself to be something of a hopeless endeavor, the very concept of a “cultural elite” now suspect in one of the world’s greatest universities. Yale has been on my mind because Maurie McInnis, their new president, revealed she’s hit a bit of a snag: she can’t deliver a speech outlining her vision for the university, after all. McInnis, coincidentally, was once president of my alma mater, Stony Brook University, and she had planned, since taking over Yale last year, to have conversations with hundreds of students and faculty at her new school before delivering, this month, a grand speech. It would come on April 6th, and it was going to be her inaugural address. Instead, she won’t say much at all. “We are in a different and more complicated moment in terms of the public’s sense of higher education,” she told the Yale Daily News. “It’s a little bit more complicated time.”

When did the individuals who sit at the very pinnacle of culture start to sound so insipid? I’m not intending to just flay McInnis here—she is truly a symptom, not a cause—but I stare at this quote and think of how far we’ve fallen from the age of Lincoln, or even a half century ago, when public speaking was still nearly an art form. The student journalist here probably did not cherry pick the blandest possible quote and choose it as her showcase. This is what McInnis gave her; this is how the president of Yale explained her decision to not deliver an inaugural address elucidating her vision for a university that is three centuries old and has graduated five American presidents, along with the current vice president. “McInnis said her speech will now consist of reflections on Yale’s history, the values of the University and musings on its future,” the Yale Daily News reported, not explaining any further what the “musings” might be. But I don’t blame the journalist. McInnis likely has little idea herself. The future is a great, gray blob, utterly inoffensive, and best to nod in that direction and duck once the sounds of Trumpian cannon fire are heard in the distance.

Here, I will offer a degree of sympathy: the Trump administration is ruthlessly targeting American colleges and universities on free speech grounds, yanking billions in funding over their failure to fully squelch the pro-Palestinian protests that overtook their campuses last year. A select number of liberal Jews (as well as the usual MAGA contingent) has cheered on these actions because there were Jewish students who felt alienated and afraid. Only the hand of the federal government, it seems, can save them, and Trump has brazenly exploited civil rights statutes to target those who were, in virtually every instance, peacefully protesting against the Israeli government and American support for the war in Gaza. Universities are afraid, and for them it’s always easier to capitulate. That’s what Columbia has done. They don’t mind that Mahmoud Khalil was whisked away as long their federal grants are protected. And now that Trump has shown he’s willing, with no notice, to withdraw federal cash over any perceived slights or supposed speech violations, colleges and universities are fast bending the knee.

Hence McInnis, who was undoubtedly not going to deliver any sort of address that was a paean to Palestinian sovereignty, deciding that she will say nothing to Yale. She has no vision for Yale. Visions are a threat; visions are what Trump can pick over, and if a bully is after you, the lesson the college presidents want to teach is that it’s best to do exactly what he says and hope, after enough dunks in the toilet bowl, he gets bored and finds someone else to torment. Give Trump and his sycophants credit: they intuited, perfectly, the squeamishness of left-leaning American elites. They understood these elites—those who’ve been elevated to the most splendid heights of their professions—lack all will to fight back. And no fight is not merely an unwillingness to enter it any verbal combat with the president. It is not just shirking from a necessary struggle. It is not just lacking the gumption required of any wartime leader. It is something, rather, more debilitating and disturbing: it is the utter lack of belief.

Maurie McInnis, and those like her, really have no idea why they are where they are. They do not know what they stand for. They have no argument to make for the American university. If they cannot make it now, when the universities are facing their greatest attacks since at least the McCarthy era, then when can they? If they can’t even offer platitudes in defense of academic freedom and the First Amendment, they have already been defeated. Even if Trump lets them keep every last dollar, they have lost. They are rotted out. They have telegraphed that they have nothing left to offer and they tell future students that universities have no true modus operandi, no reason for being; they do the work of Trump or a future Trump who has no interest or use for intellectual life and no need for robust institutions like these to carry onward.

Colleges and universities, of course, will survive Trump, just as American democracy will. Even if Trump illegally seizes his third term—I’m skeptical he can, through force, make it happen—he will one day die, and MAGA will be left to squabble in the ashes of Dear Leader. New politicians and movements will emerge; that is the cycle of life, memento mori, today’s caesars are tomorrow’s bar trivia. But if the colleges cannot argue for their purpose, they will have none. They will be imitation institutions, Potemkin institutions, and the brightest and most ambitious Americans of tomorrow will have little use for them. Perhaps that’s fine. I am certainly not one who would argue a college degree confers greater intelligence or is necessary for a worthwhile life. I enjoyed college, but did most of my serious reading afterwards and there is much to recommend for a self-education, for the autodidact tradition. Technology makes this, simultaneously, easier and harder. YouTube alone is a wonderful learning resource if wielded properly, and there are many useful podcasts, Substacks, and online articles that can teach you as deeply as any college professor if you are motivated enough. Technology, of course, offers far greater distractions, today’s striving autodidact up against the swill in TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch, as well as the unkillable tide of AI. It takes far more active effort to pursue intellectual enrichment. The internet is engineered to knock you back into numbing amusements.

Most Americans believe the university should exist, at the minimum, to facilitate biomedical research and further the prerogatives of STEM. I agree with them. America’s rise as a cultural and scientific superpower came through the university, and the many billions the federal government invested in higher education after World War II. As an alumnus of a state university, I believe strongly in this research function; we’ll be a weaker country if investment in the hard sciences ends. But STEM doesn’t need many more advocates. Republicans and Democrats will never abandon it fully, and there’s still an ethos that the only useful majors are those in mathematics, engineering, computer science, pre-med, or whatever can land you high-paying job out of school. The business major, though not pursuing a hard science, has always been thought of as one who engages in more realpolitik than your young English scholar. If coders and would-be businessmen have long oversaturated the market—again, the law of supply and demand—the image of practicality will not be easily scrambled. It doesn’t matter that the easy money is leaking out of Big Tech or that AI may fast eviscerate many computer programming jobs.

What is needed is a muscular humanities—a humanities that advocates for itself in an age of turbulence. It needs actual champions, not quislings and aimless technocrats. For several decades, practitioners of the humanities have been on the defensive or attempted, in ham-fisted ways, to remain on the playing field of advanced technology, hoping iPads in the classroom or digital textual analysis can save them. They do not know how to strongly argue for reading and writing. Absent a raison d’être, they can’t even make the utilitarian case for what they do. There is one to make: the acts of reading and writing themselves, which are still demanded in the humanities, are the antidote to the enshittification of the human being. It’s not just technology that curdles: it’s us. Consider what you are after hours of streaming and scrolling, after you’ve done the work of farming out thinking to the reams of shallow, inexhaustible content. Consider what you are when you’ve stopped reading books, learning languages, or understanding history. The humanities are the last bulwark against the erosion of the inner life. A world where the humanities barely exist and aren’t taken seriously is one of decadence and spiritual exhaustion.

The case for the muscular humanities takes the analogy to its limit. Reading and writing are like training muscles. It is strange that in the realm of physical achievement it’s understood that practice is essential—that there’s no shortcut to actually taking thousands of shots, hitting thousands of baseballs, and running thousands of laps—but the tech evangelists and general philistines of today do not think it’s crucial for the mind to exercise. The less reading and critical thinking a human does, the less capable a human becomes. It’s not much more complicated than that. Consider the GPS, which has already rendered humans, once proficient at reading maps and navigating via landmarks and memory, often unable to traverse from one point to another without the aid of a machine. Consider how machines have eroded what mental math skills we have left and, in a single generation, obliterated attention spans to a point where the most popular social media platform is one that earns its billions on three-second videos. Consider, too, how lonely these machines have made us.

The humanities offer a respite, and ultimately a salvation. Colleges and universities need not be the only places where they’re present—a humanities education can be found in any library book or even a YouTube lecture—but they are the first line of defense. They are where the humanities are inculcated and preserved, just as monks, for centuries, kept written records through wars, famines, pandemics, and every other societal upheaval imaginable. Scholars themselves must believe in what they do and some of them should be willing, in the public square, to enter into combat for their livelihoods. This is a battling age; Trump is eager for fresh clashes, but never quite knows what to do once an opponent meets him eye-to-eye. College presidents should be willing, especially those who command extraordinarily wealthy, world-class institutions. Yale, founded in 1701, is nigh immortal: it will outlast Trump, just as it will outlast all of us. So, what exactly, are the colleges afraid of? Do they truly believe they are such great creatures of the federal government? That the cancellation of grants will mean they will never be able to make up the deficits—that they are incapable, through additional fundraising or even the tapping of endowments, of ensuring adequate funding for their universities? (Yes, endowments come with strings attached, but if Trump has taught us anything, some rules are made to be broken.) Had Trump merely targeted unfashionable community colleges in the exurbs, some of the cowardice may have been warranted. A community college president can only count on so much political—and literal—capital. But Maurie McInnis, like Columbia’s past and current presidents, is not leading a JUCO in Indiania. She can wage a fight if she wants one.

A humanities scholar herself—she holds a doctorate in art history from Yale—McInnis is sadly one of any number of elite bureaucrats who is not up for the challenge of 2025. The same can be said of the president of almost every major university in America. Collectively, they could defend what they do and war with Trump. They could campaign against him. They could write stirring manifestos in defense of scholarship, the humanities, and scientific research, showing the public why they still matter, even now. They could be beacons; they could be leaders. Imagine, for a terrifying moment, if the civil rights icons of the 1950s and 1960s behaved with the same amount of deference and trepidation as McInnis and her ilk. What would the country look like today? These were men and women who, quite literally, risked their lives for what they believed in; these were men and women who stood up against a racial apartheid system that had been unbreakable since the end of the Civil War. Trump is not Jim Crow, and these college presidents aren’t Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin. All of this, truly, is much easier. Yes, Trump is still not a literal fascist. He is not dispatching the military to arrest any professor who speaks critically of MAGA. He is not even approaching the heights of either Red Scare, when the government jailed numerous Americans and obliterated the careers of many left-wing academics, writers, and artists. Trump is no Woodrow Wilson, and Pam Bondi has her work cut out for her to match A. Mitchell Palmer. Once, the United States government was powerful enough to backlist one of the most popular folk acts in the country. What are these college presidents really afraid of? Why shrink away? Fear is the simplest answer, but there’s a more unsettling undercurrent. The most esteemed leaders of the world’s richest universities do not believe in very much. If they do not believe, they have no reason to fight.