The Honest Case for the Humanities

Or: Why I’m Tired of My Colleagues Making Arguments That Only Work on Us

I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey, and I want to start by making it clear that I admire Frey enormously. She is a serious thinker and a courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at Tulsa before it was sadly dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting.

However, almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, well-meaning but completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table. I have spent my career in philosophy. I am the head of philosophy at one of the largest departments in the country, whose enrollments are actually growing. I have heard these arguments my entire adult life. They are the arguments humanities professors reach for when asked to justify what we do. And I have come to believe they don’t work, that they have never worked, and that 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.

So let me first say what’s wrong with the standard case. Then let me try to say what I think is right.

The Intrinsic Value Argument Cannot Bootstrap Itself

Frey’s central move, repeated in several forms throughout the conversation, is an appeal to intrinsic value. She invokes paideia and bildung. She tells Douthat that her concern is that “we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self-cultivation.” When pressed on why Shakespeare is better than John Grisham, she answers that great art “calls you to those transcendentals — truth, beauty and goodness.” When pressed on whether this defense of hierarchy is undemocratic, she says, simply, that “of course, there’s a hierarchy of goods.”

I happen to agree with her. But notice what the argument requires. It requires the interlocutor to already recognize the intrinsic value being invoked. If you do recognize it, the argument is unnecessary; you are already persuaded. If you do not recognize it, the argument is impotent; you are being told that there is a good you ought to see, and your failure to see it is itself the problem. There is no third path. The argument cannot reach across the divide it is trying to bridge.

Consider an analogy. I find chess intrinsically rewarding. The structure of a well-played endgame, the way a positional sacrifice unfolds three moves later into a forced sequence — these things have, for me, something like the quality Frey ascribes to Shakespeare. But I have no way to convince someone who finds chess boring that they are missing something. I can browbeat them from my supposedly higher vantage point. I can tell them they lack refinement. I can quote Kasparov on the beauty of the game. But none of this is an argument. It comes off as an announcement of taste dressed up as metaphysics.

The same is true for Shakespeare versus Grisham. I will go further than Frey: I think Shakespeare is obviously better than Grisham and I think anyone who has spent serious time with both knows this (I struggled with a hard Shakespeare class in college at the expense of my GPA, yet, it was well worth it). But “anyone who has spent serious time with both” is precisely the population that is already inside the humanities. To everyone else, we sound like the chess player insisting that bullet chess on the phone cannot compare to a slow tournament game. Maybe true. Maybe profoundly true. But the person who needs convincing is not going to be convinced by that.

The “Slaves to Desire” Argument Proves Too Much

Frey’s other central claim, and the one she ends on, is that humane learning is what protects us from becoming “a bundle of desires that are coming from outside” — that without it, “we will not really, in any meaningful sense, be free.” This is the argument she leans on most heavily in the AI section, and it’s the one Douthat tellingly does not push back on.

But the argument proves too much. Consider how many people in human history have lived disciplined, reflective, non-enslaved-to-passion lives without ever encountering a great books curriculum. Most monastics. Most rural clergy. My own grandfather in rural Peru who left school as young kid. Devout Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians across centuries who never read Plato and would not have known what to do with him if they had. Frey’s own working-class autodidact tradition — Frederick Douglass, the British workers’ education movement — is moving precisely because these were people who had not been given the humanities education and went and got it for themselves. The implication is that they were not free before. I think that is plainly false. They were free in the way that mattered. They wanted more.

If formal humane learning is necessary for genuine freedom from desire, then most of the human beings who have ever lived were unfree. That is a conclusion most humanists, including Frey, do not actually want to defend. So the argument must be weaker than its rhetoric suggests — and once it is weakened, it stops doing the work it was supposed to do.

What the Humanities Actually Give You

Here is what I tell prospective majors, and here is what I told myself when I chose philosophy as an undergraduate. I did not, at the time, imagine I would become an academic. I chose philosophy because I had figured out, correctly, that it is one of the most rigorous trainings available in a particular cluster of skills: reading carefully, writing carefully, expressing yourself carefully, and thinking carefully in non-quantitative domains. I was also a mathematics major, because I had figured out, also correctly, that quantitative reasoning would matter for whatever I ended up doing. The two together seemed to me to cover the ground and challenged me immensely.

I still think this is right. And notice what I am not saying. I am not saying the humanities prepare you for the workforce by giving you “soft skills” — the move Frey rightly rejects as denaturing the thing it claims to promote. 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

I use AI all day. My students use AI, with my encouragement and within limits I have thought carefully about. And what I have noticed is that the skills the humanities teach are not less valuable in an AI-saturated environment; they are more valuable, because they are now the bottleneck on getting anything good out of the machine.

To use AI well, you have to read carefully what it has produced. You have to notice the place where the argument slips. You have to recognize when a confident-sounding paragraph is actually evading or subtly misunderstanding the question. You have to write the prompt that gets the model to do what you actually want, which requires knowing what you actually want with a precision most people never develop. You have to revise the output, which requires being able to write better than the model writes by default. The productivity gains AI offers do not eliminate this work; they create the time in which to do it well. The person who cannot do it well is the person who ships the slop.

Frey’s framing — that AI clarifies the stakes of cultivating our humanity — is correct but, I think, pitched at the wrong level. The stakes are not only existential. They are immediate and practical. 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.

And It Matters Beyond Your Job

Here is the part I most wish Frey had pressed harder. 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.

You will, at some point, need to advocate for your child at her school. You will need to read a teacher’s email carefully enough to notice what it is and is not saying, and write a response that is firm without being inflammatory, and recognize when an administrator is performing concern rather than offering it. You will need to talk to a doctor about a parent’s care, or your own, and follow an argument about risk and tradeoff that the doctor is making quickly and imperfectly, and ask the question that exposes the assumption the doctor has not examined. You will need to understand the context of someone who grew up in a place very different from you, with radically different values and experiences. You will need to read a contract. You will need to read a ballot measure. You will need to argue, in public or in private, for the candidate or the policy you believe in, and you will need to do this against people who are themselves trained, motivated and may not have your best interest at heart.

These are not the higher reaches of the soul. They are not transcendental encounters with truth and beauty. They are ordinary citizenship and ordinary parenthood and ordinary adulthood, and they have material consequences — for your kid, for your parent, for your community, for the decisions that get made about you when you are not in the room. The humanities prepare you for this. Not uniquely, not perfectly, but better than anything else in the curriculum does.

This is the case I wish my colleagues would make. It is less stirring than the one Frey makes. It does not invoke Aristotle on leisure or Cicero on citizenship. It is not the kind of argument that gets quoted in commencement addresses. But it has the advantage of being true in a way the interlocutor can verify from their own life, rather than true in a way that requires them to first accept the framework that makes it true.

The Evidence That We Almost Never Cite

Before I get to the studies which support my claim, I want to point out something so obvious it embarrasses me that humanists do not say it more often. The most direct empirical evidence that students learn to read, write, and think carefully in humanities courses is generated, in enormous volume, every single semester, in every humanities classroom in the country. It is called grading. At the end of every term, in every class I have ever taught, some students wrote excellent papers and some wrote poor ones. Some answered hard questions well and some did not. Some had visibly improved between the first paper and the last; some had not. These differences were assessed by people with doctorates in the relevant subject, with years of teaching experience, asking deliberately difficult questions of texts they had spent their careers thinking about.

This is, in any other context, what we would call expert evaluation against a rigorous standard. For example, expert building inspectors check the soundness of foundations and structures. When a building passes inspection, this is empirical evidence that it was built properly. Professors grading student work are like building inspectors. These assessments happen millions of times a year across colleges and universities. It is the most direct evidence imaginable that the skills in question are real, are distributed unequally, can be taught, and can be measured. And almost no one in our public debates mentions it.

The reason no one mentions it, I suspect, is that humanities professors are so accustomed to grading that we do not see it as evidence. We see it as a chore. But step back. A profession of trained evaluators, working independently across thousands of institutions, asking different questions of different texts, all converges on the same basic finding: students enter unable to do a certain kind of work, and some leave able to do it. If we cannot count that as evidence that the skill exists and can be taught, we have lost the thread of what evidence is.

That said, I recognize that this kind of evidence — the cumulative judgment of expert teachers — does not travel well in policy debates. So let me put a few formal studies on the table as well.

The most important is from Academically Adrift (Arum and Roksa, 2011), the famous and largely pessimistic study that tracked over two thousand students at twenty-four institutions using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized measure of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. Critics seized on the headline: forty-five percent of students showed no significant gains on the CLA between their first and second year of college. (The headline figure has since been disputed on statistical grounds, but set that aside.) What got much less attention was the comparative finding underneath it: controlling for student background, preparation, and institution, the largest gains were among students in the basic sciences, humanities, and social sciences — precisely the majors most likely to be asked, with a raised eyebrow, “what are you going to do with that?” The follow-up work identified a contributing mechanism: students whose classes required them to read at least forty pages a week and write at least twenty pages a semester showed bigger gains. Reading-and-writing-intensive coursework — which is to say, the humanities, done seriously — was where the skill-building happened.

Here’s a quote from the authors:

“Two categories of majors stand out…social science/humanities and science/mathematics. Students in those two fields of study have higher predicted CLA scores, than students majoring in either business or education/social work, which have the lowest predicted 2007 CLA performance. The other fields fall in between those two extremes” (page 98)

Although this study is widely by critics of contemporary higher education, it turns out to support the value of the humanities.

A smaller but causally cleaner study comes from McLaughlin and McGill at NC State (2017). They compared students in two history courses that explicitly taught critical thinking against a control group taking a psychology research methods course that taught statistics and study design but did not explicitly address critical thinking. Students in the history courses showed measurable drops in pseudoscientific beliefs, with the largest effect — a full point on the belief scale — among honors students for topics covered in class, and a half-point drop for topics not covered in class. The transfer to uncovered topics is the part that matters: it suggests genuine skill acquisition rather than topic-specific belief revision. This is, in miniature, exactly the “argue with your doctor, read the ballot measure” capacity I was describing in the previous section.

And then, more recently and more directly relevant to my own field: a 2025 study by Michael Prinzing and Michael Vazquez in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, working with data on over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions. The authors designed the study to answer the obvious skeptical objection — that philosophy majors do well on the GRE and LSAT only because verbally strong students self-select into philosophy. They confirmed the selection effect: students with higher SAT verbal scores, and students who reported greater curiosity, intellectual rigor, and open-mindedness in their freshman year, are more likely to choose philosophy (this checks out in my personal experience, teaching philosophy students is a great privilege). But after controlling for these baseline differences, philosophy majors still outperformed every other major on the GRE Verbal and the LSAT — by 33 points on the GRE Verbal and 2 points on the LSAT. Philosophy ranked first on three of five outcome measures, including the test scores and a measure of "habits of mind." They showed no advantage on the GRE Quantitative: philosophy does not teach math. It teaches the thing it teaches, and the data suggest it teaches it well.

Of course, there are limits. None of these studies are randomized controlled trials, because you cannot randomly assign students to majors. Selection effects can never be fully ruled out. But these are the best data we have, and they all point in the same direction: the humanities, done with rigor, build a transferable competence that other parts of the curriculum do not build as well. The intrinsic-value argument tells you to take this on faith. The data tells you that you don’t have to.

A Closing Note to My Profession

Here’s what I am not saying. I am not saying that the intrinsic-value case is wrong. I think it is right. I have spent my life inside it. When I read Aristotle on friendship or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on the pursuit of absolute knowledge, I am having the kind of experience Frey is describing.

What I am saying is that this case, deployed as a public argument, has lost us the public. It has lost us the legislatures, the parents, the donors, the students, and — most painfully — many of our own colleagues, who privately suspect the argument doesn’t work and retreat into cynicism.

We need a more straight-forward and powerful argument. We teach a set of skills that you cannot get anywhere else, that AI has made more rather than less valuable, and that matter not only at work but in every domain of life where careful thought and careful expression have consequences. That is the argument. It is enough. It does not require anyone to first agree with us about Shakespeare.

And here is why I am, despite everything, an optimist.

The thing we teach is not in decline. It is in demand — more sharply, more universally, than at any point in my career. We have spent a generation worrying that the world had stopped needing people who can read closely, think clearly, and write well, and we built our defensive crouch around that fear. But look at what is actually happening. We have just built machines that produce fluent, confident, plausible text by the ocean — and in doing so we have made the ability to tell good reasoning from bad, true claims from merely well-phrased ones, the single most valuable cognitive skill a person can have. The world did not stop needing what we teach. The world just discovered, almost overnight, that it needs it everywhere, all the time, from everyone. The bottleneck on this entire technological revolution is human judgment — and human judgment, the careful kind, trained against hard texts and harder questions, is precisely the thing the humanities have always made.

So I am not writing an elegy. I have no interest in elegies. I have stood in front of engineering students who came to my seminars exhausted and skeptical and left arguing about Plato in the dormitory at midnight because they could not stop. I have read the last paper of the semester and seen, in black and white, a mind that could not do this in September doing it in May. I have watched a student who could barely structure a paragraph learn to take an argument apart at the joints — and then watched her use exactly that skill, two years later, to win a fight with an insurance company over her mother’s care. This is not a consolation prize. This is the thing itself, working, in the world, in the lives of people who will never take another philosophy class and never need to.

We have the argument. We have the evidence — in every graded paper, in every study, and in the plain fact that the most advanced technology humans have ever built has just made our discipline more necessary, not less. What we have lacked is the confidence to make the case in daylight, on the terms that an ordinary skeptical parent or legislator can actually verify, without apology and without retreat into a private language only the initiated can hear.

One last thought, for the colleagues and administrators who have been losing sleep for two decades now. I have watched friends in this profession turn gray over the slow decline — the enrollment charts, the closed departments, the dwindling tenure lines, the projections that always show the lines continuing down. The anxiety is real and I have shared it. But as a philosopher, I have to remind myself of something Hume taught us a long time ago: we are only entitled to project the trends of the past into the future if we have reason to believe the future will resemble the past. And the future, just now, has stopped resembling the past in a very particular way. The arrival of large language models is not a continuation of the conditions that drove humanities enrollments down for twenty years. It is a discontinuity. It is a wrench thrown into the machinery of those trend lines. And if the wrench lands where I think it is going to land, this may turn out to be the century of the humanities — and, I will allow myself to say, the century of my own field, philosophy, which has spent two and a half millennia training people to do precisely the work that the next two and a half decades will demand of everyone. If we make our case, the graphs we have been staring at do not know what is about to happen to them. We should stop reading them as prophecy and start writing the next chapter ourselves.

A note on the title. "The Honest Case for the Humanities" is not meant to suggest that Jennifer Frey or any other defender of the intrinsic-value tradition is being dishonest. They are not. Frey in particular is, in my view, one of the more genuinely serious voices on this subject. The word "honest" here is used in the conversational sense — as in "to be honest with you," or "honestly, I have to admit" — where it signals candor about something the speaker has been reluctant to say out loud, often because saying it requires conceding ground or naming a discomfort within one's own side. That is the sense I mean. The piece is an attempt to say, candidly and from inside the profession, something I think many of us have been reluctant to say to each other, let alone in public.