Should They Stay or Should They Go? Humanities questioned abroad as well

Comparative analysis can lead to the discovery of difference but, currently, it is international convergence on certain topics that commands attention. Grassroots dissatisfaction with elites is prevalent in many parts of the world and often leads to the same authoritarian solution. Similarly, the arts and humanities (and often the social sciences) are under attack in national university systems. Motives from country to country converge, as do calls for the defense of these fundamental disciplines.

A recent conference co-sponsored by Danish universities and the European Commission, as reported in University World News, took a long look at “Human Values and Grand Challenges: Social sciences, arts and humanities [SSAH] contributions to European transformation and resilience.” What participants saw was an SSAH component included in only 40% of all projects funded by the EC’s Horizon Europe research funding program. In her keynote address, Annelien Bredenoord, president of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said the “necessary societal, climate, and digital transitions are primarily social, cultural, and ethical.” Relying only on technical input from STEM and economics is a dead-end, according to a conference consensus.

Denmark’s Minister of Higher Education and Science, Christina Egelund, spoke out in favor of “humanistic dimensions” being considered as crucial elements in responses to technological challenges. She said that Europe needs to put humanity at the center of innovation. For her, Europe can contribute to global innovation by maintaining a focus in teaching and research on values, on the “why.” Thoughts which echo those of Slavoj Zizek speaking of the idea of “Europe” as a whole, when he points out that it is through an ardent defense of the defendable, the Europe of human rights and social justice, that those values can be put to use to build an alternative to the “technocratic vision of Europe” (In Le Monde, 13 May, 2021).

At the conference, some European universities presented a “problem-oriented” organization of teaching and research as a way to enforce inter-disciplinarity and a significant role for SSAH fields. Could such an approach be important not only for solving technical challenges but also as one way to organize the humanities themselves? That is, could we identify the main issues humans face and encourage students and teachers to wander across SSAH fields with these challenges in mind?

The need for concerted efforts to bring SSAH fields back into the European picture was made clear in remarks by conference participants about a “targeted campaign against the humanities for several decades” devaluing all but economic incentives. A professor at the Nordic Humanities Center testified that “the societal contribution of the humanities has been undervalued for decades” and called for needed knowledge from “history, literature, philosophy, language, and a range of other humanities disciplines.” A quick corroborative search finds that in the Horizon Europe topics section labeled “health,” ironically only 12% of funded projects included an SSAH component, leading the observer to wonder “health of what?”

In its annual global survey of higher education, the Canadian think tank Higher Education Strategy Associates included a “Humanities Watch” summary in which it found that while “people in the humanities often claim that their fields are under attack,... in 2025 in several countries, they actually were.” In the case of the US, the report found that besides the obvious recent politicization of attacks on certain disciplines, “the general pressure on the humanities long predates Trump.” Looking elsewhere the report finds that the European University of the Humanities in Belarus was declared a “terrorist organization” and lives in exile in Lithuania, while China announced in 2025 a shift of university programming away from the humanities to STEM fields. A bright spot in the report is South Korea where enrollments in the humanities rose sharply last year.

Another indication of the globalization of the woes of the humanities is UK newspaper The Guardian’s reporting on the situation in the US, which found the malaise in large part due to universities’ recourse to outside management consulting, since the humanities don’t score well in corporate-style ROI analyses. Indeed, economic return is a common reason everywhere that SSAH budgets suffer attrition, as neo-liberal utility trends give short shrift to whole-person-based analysis, even in evaluating public goods such as education. Indirect pressure by public policy on the humanities occur when unemployment is allowed to remain at high levels forcing short-term decisionmaking among university “users” (students).

Besides management methods and economic pressures, another internationally-trending reason to diminish – and to fear – the humanities is political. University systems in Europe, the US and elsewhere bear witness to the pressures that authoritarian regimes exert on the university as a natural enemy to enemies of freedom. Nowhere in the university is this pressure felt more than in the halls of the humanities where the pretense of neutrality as a form of submission is more difficult to maintain than in the sciences. Commenting recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, two defenders of the humanities observed that if there is a lull in preoccupation with the “state of the humanities,” it is simply because now the rest of the university is under similar pressure. “We are all humanists now,” say the authors, for whom the humanities are no longer the poor man of the American university but instead the “vanguard.”

Ditto for France and Europe, where the only thing more galling to the radicalized right than the straw specter of wokisme is the fact that this supposed blight is harbored in an institution that is a public service. SSAH disciplines in the French university are indeed the vanguard of the struggle to preserve, protect, and fund the latter. In any event, the bonfire of the humanities is international, and an “Internationale” for academic freedom would be a good response. Advocates of study abroad would do well to be its first members.