The crisis of the humanities professor

There’s a particular species you find prowling the seminar rooms and offices of humanities departments. It’s not stupidity; not even malice, not exactly. It’s a dog. Let’s start there, with dogs, because everybody still understands dogs. Not the golden retriever kind, doing donuts on the lawn because you came home from the store. Not the shelter mutt who’ll love you forever for one scratch behind the ear. I mean another kind. I mean Cerberus, guarding the gates of academia, snarling at anyone who so much as looks at the shelf where they keep the good stuff. If you get close enough to see past the fur and the fire, there’s a man under there—usually a man—who’s almost forgotten he was ever anything else. Now, nobody’s here to sneak past him with a lyre to drag someone back from the dead. Nobody’s dragging him off in chains for some labor. At the gates of his Hades-classroom-office you find twenty-year-olds who wandered in because they wanted to read the Iliad or William Carlos Williams or Arendt, and they get met by a dog with three heads and a red pen.

I’ve spent enough years around universities—both sides of the desk, professor and formerly-terrified student—to know the type intimately. He was, in most cases, once terrified himself. These are people who take their pedigree seriously, the “I studied under John Doe and oh boy was he demanding” kind of scholar. In short, someone did this to him. And now he does it back, calls it rigor, calls it standards, calls it “not coddling them,” and hands back a paper so thoroughly eviscerated that the kid who wrote it—who chose this, mind you, who nobody frog-marched into a Kant seminar at gunpoint, whose parents were probably praying for law or medical school—looks at the bleeding page and quietly decides that maybe philosophy or literature or theology or anthropology isn’t for people like her after all. Maybe she should go do something that pays. Maybe everyone who told her this was a waste of time was right. Congratulations, professor. You just did more for the death of the humanities in one red-inked exercise of your tiny little piece of authority than any dean with a budget spreadsheet ever could.

I should say, for the record, that I got lucky. I landed in a department where this particular species is happily extinct, which is probably the only reason I can write about it at all without flinching, the way you can only really talk about a bad kitchen once you’re not the one still working the line in it. It’s a realization that only arrives in hindsight, well on the other side of my own transit through the Ivy League. And this is not to say the Ivy League is Hades. I had my share of nurturing relationships, and I will always be thankful for it. But I also found myself fighting through sulfur during what should have been a productive, formative, regular office hour.

Let me be clear, because I know how this sounds and I don’t want to be misread: I’m not asking anyone to go soft. Rigor isn’t the enemy here. We all know the racket—university transcripts these days read like everybody in the building graduated summa cum laude, A’s handed out like cocktail napkins, grade inflation so routine it’s basically house style now. That’s real. That’s a problem. It’s just not this problem. A flabby, everybody-gets-a-trophy humanities is its own kind of corpse, rotting from the opposite direction, dressed up in better clothes, still a corpse. I’ve read those papers too, the ones that deserve to be sent back bleeding, and I have done my share of bloodshed—only I try to do it the way a priest does, not a butcher. Even then, our job is to educate, not to humiliate or destroy. It is it a rite of passage, blood and everything, not a meaningless killing.

What I’m talking about is the confusion—the very basic, very common confusion—between being a gatekeeper and being a teacher. We are not the keepers of the flame. Nobody appointed us to decide who’s worthy of Augustine. Our actual job, the whole job, is to teach people how to read, how to write, and how to think, and then—this is the part everybody forgets—to get out of the way and let them do whatever the hell they want with it. Descartes didn’t ask permission before he took the entire scholastic tradition and set it on fire to see what would survive. Aristotle inherited Plato and immediately started arguing with him. That’s not disrespect. That’s the whole point. That’s what a living tradition looks like: something you’re allowed to get your hands dirty in, not something you file past behind velvet rope.

Now, I’m not saying every kid who walks into that seminar room is the next Descartes, the next Aristotle. Most of them aren’t. But here’s the part we conveniently forget: neither are we. And we were further from it—further from Descartes, further from Aristotle—back when we were nineteen and sitting in the exact same chair, than we are now. Nobody handed us the red pen as professors because we were finally finished. We walked into our offices and tenure-tracks half-formed and wrong about most things, embarrassing ourselves in ways we somehow have the mercy to forget. Somebody let us stay in the room anyway and, the horror, teach. That’s the whole debt. That’s the only thing being asked of us now.

A kid who shows up to your seminar with a half-formed, clumsy, genuinely wrong reading of Hadewijch is not committing a crime against scholarship. She’s doing exactly what’s expected of her, and what the tradition has always demanded of the people inside it. Somewhere down the line, if she keeps at it, she gets better. That’s what happens when you’re not made to feel, in year one, that you never belonged in the room to begin with.

And here’s the thing that keeps me up at night about this, the thing that makes it more than just a “bad professor” problem: the crisis in the humanities isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the same crisis you’ll find in a bar, in a church, in a market, in a public square—the four legs that, I think, keep the world’s table standing. My bar-owning friends . People stopped going to bars to meet each other because you can swipe for that now, and God forbid you get photographed with a drink in your hand looking like an actual human being having an actual night. People stopped going to church looking for answers because there’s a chatbot that’ll tell you what to think about yourself without the risk of a pew and a stranger standing next to you. Nobody sits in the square anymore because the friends are already in your pocket, on WhatsApp, curated and safe. Nobody talks to the fishmonger or the butcher anymore, doesn’t know his name, doesn’t know how to ask him what’s good today, because there’s an app for that too, and it arrives in a box, and it never once looks you in the eye.

Every single one of those places—the bar, the church, the square, the market—required you to show up with your actual, unfiltered, occasionally embarrassing self. And every single one of those places is dying because we built a thousand ways to get some of the feeling, distilled and sanitized, without the friction.

The university is perhaps the last one of these rooms still standing, more or less. A library is a room you have to walk into, no matter how many PDFs you download. A hard text is a friction you can’t swipe past, even if your AI of choice can give you a summary of it. And there are still kids—fewer every year, sure, plenty of them staring at a laptop calculating whether “content creation” or day-trading crypto is the faster route out—but there are still some who show up, sit down, and open a book instead of asking a tutorial to tell them what Gilgamesh means so they don’t have to find out themselves.

There’s one more room still standing, though, and nobody saw this one coming: the gym. Of all the places that could’ve survived the great swipe-left of everything, the one still full at six in the morning is the one where you pick heavy things up and put them back down. You can’t prompt your way to a deadlift. No app does the reps for you, no tutorial makes you sore on your behalf, no chatbot hands you a summary of a back squat. The barbell doesn’t care about your intentions or your vibe or your personal brand—it goes up when the work’s been done and not a second sooner. And the kids line up for it. That’s the part that should stop us cold: the same nineteen-year-old who’d rather ask a bot why Joseph Beuys’ work is important will, that very night, suffer under a bar or sweat his heart out on a treadmill for an hour or more, on purpose, and pay for the privilege. She hasn’t stopped believing in effort. She’s just been sold the idea that effort is for the body and shortcuts are for the mind—that you earn the squat, but meaning gets delivered in five seconds.

And the joke of it—the thing that should make every humanities professor laugh and then wince—is that the Greeks knew better and put it right there in the word. Gymnasium, from gymnos: naked. The place you went to strip down and train. And what got built on those same grounds, in the same dust? Plato’s Academy. Aristotle’s Lyceum. Both of them gymnasia. The Charmides opens in a wrestling school, Socrates strolling in fresh from the war to see who’d grown beautiful and who’d grown wise—as if those were the same question, asked in the same building. To him they were. Philosophy was born in the gym. Literally. Body and mind worked in the same room, on the same afternoon, because it never once occurred to anyone that you’d train the one and let the other coast.

So the kid already knows the whole lesson. She knows it in her hamstrings. Nobody’s told her it applies “upstairs” too—that the mind is a muscle, that it only grows under load, that a book you let a machine lift for you is a book you never actually read. That’s the fifty-foot walk, gym to library, and most days it’s the only thing I think I’m really being paid to carry.

That kid, sitting in your seminar right now, choosing that chair over every easier option the century has handed her, is not an inconvenience to your standards. She’s the last customer walking into the restaurant on a night when everyone else stayed home for delivery. You don’t spit in her food. You don’t hand it back cold to prove a point about how things used to be done. You don’t go soup nazi on her. You cook like it’s the only order left tonight, because for the health of the whole enterprise, it might be. You better be worthy of the fact that she still showed up at all. Humbled by it, honestly. Grateful. Because the day she stops walking through that door, there’s no gate left to guard, and no Cerberus left to matter.