the reason humanities enrollments are not where they should be is not that students are philistines or that the culture has decayed, but that we have failed to articulate what is actually valuable about what we do ...

I am saying something more specific: there is a real, identifiable competence that the humanities, done well, build in a person, and that competence does not exist in the same form anywhere else in the curriculum. You cannot get it from engineering. You cannot get it from business school. You cannot get it from a coding bootcamp. You can only get it by spending years reading difficult texts, being forced to defend your interpretations of them in writing, and being told, repeatedly, that you have not yet made your argument as well as you could.

This is not a luxury good. It is an invaluable skill with material consequences in the real world. AI has not changed this...

The person who has been trained to read closely and write precisely is, right now, in 2026, more useful in almost every knowledge-work context than the person who has not been. This is not a prediction about a workforce of the future. It is an observation about the workforce of the present ...

The skills the humanities teach are not only valuable at work. They are valuable in the parts of life that are not work and that nevertheless matter enormously...

Let us say plainly that we teach the most durable, most transferable, most stubbornly human skills there are — and that we can prove it. The humanities are not a relic to be defended. They are a discipline whose moment has arrived. We should stop mourning and start teaching like we know it.