The Problem. The Humanities are, by many accounts, in trouble. The newspaper of record and the glossy magazines tell us of collapsing enrollments in languages, literature, and the arts (a collapse abetted by a steady stream of articles in those same publications predicting unemployability for humanities majors). Book-banning bills pack the agenda of state legislatures (a backward compliment to the power of literature to change minds). Underfunded, reduced to a service role in many college curricula, uncertain whether the present generation of scholars will have successors, humanities faculty talk about survival rather than flourishing. And yet the need for citizens who can follow complex chains of thought, contextualize claims to truth and reject appealing falsehoods, draw valid analogies from history and discern fact from opinion, has never been greater. These capacities are of course not exclusive to humanists or humanities majors, but building them in doctors, scientists, economists, engineers, and lawyers, as well as in poets and anthropologists, is one of the core missions of the humanities. It is always salutary for professionals to ask themselves, “What problem are we supposed to solve?” No one expects the humanities to resolve by themselves the erosion of democracy, the persistence of inequalities, or the threat of climate disaster, but without a public discourse informed by broad and deep knowledge of history and culture, our ability to choose the right remedies is impaired. Thus to the “crisis of the humanities” corresponds a need to rescue the humanities from the narrow definition of academic fields that identifies “the humanities” with the number of humanities majors, departments, or faculty lines. 

            The Way Forward. The Dean of Humanities must of course manage departments and faculty and serve the needs of students, but the urgent task is to engage the Division with a sense of this larger mission. The Dean must rebut charges that the Humanities are a frivolous waste of time, an amusement for the élite, a museum of oppressive traditions, a badge of “cultural capital,” or a propaganda brigade. Humanities faculty transmit expertise and knowledge, they generate new methods and hypotheses, as specialists in this or that area but with the ultimate aim of making society* better aware of itself and more thoughtful in the exercise of its powers. At a university like ours, with its worldwide reputation and network of alumni, the Dean of Humanities can and must be more than a caretaker. The job is to exercise intellectual leadership, nourish creativity, distinguish innovation from the already-said-and-found-wanting. The Dean cannot possess all the knowledge held by the faculty and students in the Humanities, but the Dean must be curious about it and convey that curiosity to a wider audience. A big part of the difference the University of *** makes in the world, in fact, rests on the Dean of Humanities. 

• Human society, I would have said, if that didn’t sound grandiose. But something bigger than “American society” for sure.