2025 Faculty Day Address: "To What End Do We Educate?"

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece, “They’re Killing the Humanities on Purpose,” University of Maryland Classics Professor Eric Adler cites examples of wealthy universities shrinking their humanities departments and offerings. That the University of Tulsa fired the dean of its Honors College, my friend Jennifer Frey, despite the fact that she had led that College to quintuple its number of students by telling them they could read great books in seminars, is perplexing since the stated reason for moving the Honors College in a different direction was financial underperformance. Another example that Adler points us to is the University of Chicago’s restructuring of its humanities programs due to “historic funding pressures.” Tulsa has an endowment of $1.36 billion, and Chicago has an endowment of over $10 billion. You would think that if those institutions were really losing money from their humanities programs, they could find a way to sustain them nonetheless. But Adler suggests that this is not really about money, that there clearly is something else going on.