The Rise and Coming Fall of the Humanities Industry

I've been reading a book, Best of the Achaeans by Gregory Nagy (1979). It's a relentlessly intense dive into the weeds of scholarship on the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the aim of explaining the ancient idea of the hero. I find it fascinating. Part of the thesis is that the Iliad and the Odyssey, as a pair, represent an ancient debate about whether Achilles or Odysseus was really the best of the Achaeans, and thus whether strength or cleverness was ultimately more important.

But somewhere along the way I began to muse on what an absurd exercise this is. For example, there is a small section in the Iliad in which someone speaks in the dual – Greek had singular, dual, and plural – to a group of three men. There is, Nagy tells us, a "vast scholarship" on this problem. And I can well believe it.

But why? What does this say about our world?

There is nothing new about this kind of scholarship; we have very ancient examples of obsessive nerdiness about old texts from China, India, and the classical west, at least. (Not sure whether to include the Talmud.) One of the Confucian texts, the Spring and Autumn Annals, had by 1100 AD acquired a scholarly apparatus that included at least three different annotated versions, and in all of them the annotations were several times the length of the original text.

But until the 1800s, this sort of scholarship was done by a handful of wealthy gentlemen in their spare time. They understood that they were writing for a small community of other obsessives like themselves and that, far from making any money off this, they would have to pay the cost of publishing their ideas themselves. Emperors and Dukes sometimes had court scholars, but in the cases I know about those scholars actually spent much of their time on other activities, such as assisting with diplomatic receptions, generating precedents for proposed new policies, or producing occasional odes in the proper classical form. 

Then came the modern world. As part of our industrialization of education, we vastly expanded our university systems; there were about 5,500 university professors in the US in 1870, compared to more than 1.5 million today. Many of those professors are expected to produce "research."

And here is where I think things got weird. For the first century of industrial-scale higher education, we continued to follow old models of what students were supposed to learn. The notion was widespread that most students could study whatever they wanted, because it did not matter. And, in fact, there were all sort of bankers and accountants and CEOs in that world who had majored in English or History. Several of my college friends have had successful adult careers in fields completely unrelated to the humanistic disciplines they studied in college. People believed that "education" was a sort of mental discipline detached from any particular field of knowledge, and that an "educated" person could do anything. There was plenty of evidence that this was true.

But this meant that there were thousands upon thousands of professors of English, History, etc. who were supposed to produce "research." The amount of work being done in these disciplines therefore exploded, so that even in a small subfield – say, Pindar studies – there was more being published than anyone could possibly read. I remember one of my graduate school friends crying out for a ten-year halt to all publication on Beowulf so she could have a chance to catch up.

I was musing, as I read Nagy's explications of the exact meanings and connotations of various Greek words for sorrow or glory, that in a century this whole world will seem utterly bizarre. People will read that once upon a time more than 500 academics attended a conference on Jane Austen and Colonialism and think, "Wow, what a weird era that was." Because I believe the era of industrial-scale humanistic scholarship is coming to an end.

It started with students. Students have decided that the old model of "education" in the abstract is bunk, and what they need to have a business career is specialized knowledge, such as economics, computer science, or engineering. I am not sure they are right about this, but anyway they believe it. Enrollments in English, History, Anthropology, and so on have therefore plummeted. This means that there are very few jobs for professors in those fields, which means there is no need to train graduate students in those fields, which means that professors have fewer and fewer students to teach. I believe the number of humanities professors in the US (at least) is about to begin a very rapid decline.

Meanwhile, in politics, populism is surging all over the world. One thing pretty much all populists, whether left or right, agree on is that academia is a swamp pit of elite privilege, arcane bullshit, and scorn for regular folks like them. Online populists delight in skewering the strange interests of academics. The Trump administration is not the peak of anti-academic rage but the harbinger of a coming era in which nobody in politics cares, or wants to be seen caring, about the academy. If you think things are bad now, just wait.

Humanistic scholarship will not disappear; after all it survived through all the Dark Ages and periods of imperial collapse that civilization has endured over the past three millennia. There are millions of people like me who love to read obsessively nerdy books about old things, and many old institutions that very much want to continue these traditions. But I feel certain that we will see a lot less of it.

Personally, I am ambivalent about this. I loved my own humanistic education and I have loved teaching history to undergraduates. Learning about the world and sharing what I have learned is my passion. But even as a graduate student I found the academic world around me strange. I was sometimes bewildered by the entitlement of professors who believed what they were doing was supremely important and deserved even more support from the government, even if, or especially if, their main goal was the destruction of that very government and its replacement by a radically different system. I sometimes feel queasy about my current job for the same reason, because I do not think what I do always benefits the people who are paying for it. I also have had a major intellectual beef with the academic world, which is that most academics write only to impress other people in their own small fields and never bother trying to explain it to dabblers like me. I would like to see much less inside baseball and many more attempts to communicate with the rest of the world. 

But I feel pretty strongly that my feelings are irrelevant here, because the world is moving on from the one I was raised and trained in, and the future will in this respect at least be very different.

The Lawsuit against Academic Publishers

You may have heard that a scientist, Lucida Unin, has filed an antitrust suit against six major publishers of academic journals. The core charge is that the journals have concoted an anti-competitive "scheme" that forces scholars to work for free while they pocket billions in revenue:

The suit alleges that the six academic publishers—which own 53 percent of academic journals—have been able to carry out the so-called scheme by forming a “cartel” through STM and fixing the price of peer-review services at zero. Those journals received more than $10 billion in revenue in 2023.

In so doing, the suit says, publishers “agreed to coerce scholars into providing their labor for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the publisher defendants’ journals,” which can boost a researcher’s curriculum vitae in what the complaint characterizes as the “‘publish or perish’ world of academia.”

The suit also accuses the publishers of agreeing not to compete with one another by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to a single journal at a time and prohibiting them from sharing findings while their manuscripts are under peer review. That enables publishers to “behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property,” it reads.

I think that this is undoubtedly true, but I'm not sure I blame the publishers for it. The root of the problem is the way scientists and other scholars fetishize publication in big-name journals. Because your whole career depends on those publications, you will of course do whatever it takes to place articles with those publishers, including following their anti-competitive rules and doing your part at peer review.

The solution is to forget about publishing in academic journals and evaluate scholars by the actual quality of their work. Everybody says this. A lawyer named Christopher Jon Sprigman puts it this way:

Science and knowledge are paying an enormous tax to commercial publishers for this prestige economy for which they depend on commercial publishers. If academics generally had other prestige mechanisms they could refer to—such as actually reading the articles more carefully when making tenure decisions—they wouldn’t depend so much on the publishers.

But nobody knows how to make that work. Let's say your colleague is up for tenure, but he or she is an expert in a field you know hardly anything about. How do you make your evaluation? Well, you can either spend a month of your life delving into that field in an attempt to figure our where your colleague's work fits in, or you can just check the names of the journals and the citation counts. So of course you just check the names of the journals and the citation counts.

So long as there are a dozen applicants for every academic position, and so long as we continue to judge professors by their scholarly credentials, it will be very hard to fix this. 

But empowering evil publishers is just one of the bad consequences of putting so much weight on placing articles in top journals. Worse in my mind is the huge pressure put on young scholars to get publishable results, which almost forces them to hack their work into some kind of positive discovery. The explosion of fraudulent or all-but-fraudulent work is only what I would expect from this system.

The rewards we give to people who get published in top journals, regardless of whether their work has any other merit, are a miasma of corruption that sits in the center of our scholarly world like a cancer on a vital organ. Wherever the cancer sits, it will eventually send its twisted offspring out through the body until the whole organism sickens and dies.

The Mind of a Scholar

A sentence that sums up one very common attitude among professors:

Although not exactly ground breaking (because it basically argues what I've been saying for years), it's a very nice effort all round and must be read by anyone with an interest in this topic.