Humanities Future; or, Don’t Quit Lit

Abstract: In 2024, I saw the ongoing crises facing higher education in the United States reach a new inflection point, both for my own career and for the broader professions of academic work. In this essay, I draw from my experience at St. Norbert College—a small, Catholic, liberal arts college in Wisconsin—and from work in Black studies and critical university studies, in order to offer an analysis of what forces humanities workers in particular will confront, as well as some ideas about what steps they can take. Ultimately, I suggest that our sites of academic labor will have to be disciplines in the sense that Mariame Kaba says hope is a discipline: spaces where we do the daily work of making what students and scholars will need in humanity’s future, not just what we think will save our own positions in the world as it’s arranged now.