Slow Digest: The Humanities Cannot Stay the Same

This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Chloe Kwiatkowski.

In October of 2025, the Center for 21^st Century Studies hosted a panel on the current state of the humanities in Milwaukee. The panel, moderated by C21’s Director Jennifer Johung, consisted of four humanities advocates: Michael Carriere from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Arthur Derse from the Medical College of Wisconsin, Jodi Eastberg from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Maggie Hoffmann from Marquette University. These panelists offered a multifaceted view of how the humanities are being challenged and reimagined in the contemporary political landscape. This week’s Slow Digest post, along with next week’s, will detail topics and questions discussed during the panel discussion, breakout sessions, and survey responses. This essay will focus on two key insights that cut across all three sources: first, the current crisis facing the humanities is political, and second, the humanities are essential for survival, joy, and collective meaning and not just economic outcomes.

Under the current administration, budgetary cuts to humanities institutions across the country have been prevalent. Panelists framed recent federal cuts to agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Science (IMLS), and Title VI programs as part of a broader political assault on free inquiry and public knowledge. Rather than viewing these cuts as neutral financial decisions or reflections of declining public interest, the panel emphasized their ideological stakes. Funding, in this context, becomes a mechanism through which certain histories and communities are either supported or marginalized. The erosion of humanities funding thus signals a narrowing of what kinds of knowledge are considered legitimate or valuable.

This framing resonated across breakout rooms, where participants named curriculum policing, censorship, and cultural erasure as signals of authoritarian anxiety rather than neutral budgetary decisions. These actions were understood as attempts to control narrative, identity, and dissent, revealing a fear of the critical and imaginative capacities that the humanities cultivate. Survey responses reinforced this analysis, with many participants emphasizing that institutional precarity is driven by political priorities that devalue critical inquiry. In this sense, the humanities are not failing; they are being actively constrained.

Interestingly, a generational tension emerged around how best to respond to this political crisis. Panelists often emphasized advocacy within existing institutions, such as working through policy channels, fundraising structures, and administrative reform. Many breakout participants, particularly younger scholars and creatives, expressed skepticism that institutional systems alone could be persuaded to reverse course. For them, the scale and intensity of political hostility toward the humanities suggested the need for more radical approaches, including alternative institutions, community-based projects, and modes of resistance that operate outside traditional academic frameworks. This tension did not indicate disagreement about the nature of the problem but reflected different beliefs about whether reform or rupture offers the more viable path forward.

The second major insight from the event was the collective rejection of market-based justifications for the humanities. Across panel presentations, breakout conversations, and survey responses, participants challenged the assumption that the humanities must constantly prove their worth in economic terms. Panelists described humanistic work as central to emotional survival, dignity, imagination, and community cohesion. Rather than framing the humanities as job-training mechanisms or tools for economic productivity, they emphasized their role in helping people process grief, cultivate empathy, build solidarity, and imagine alternative futures. This perspective reframes the humanities as infrastructures of care and meaning rather than as commodities.

Breakout participants echoed this sentiment, noting that crisis-driven rhetoric and constant demands for economic proof ultimately undermine the very values that draw people to the humanities in the first place. When humanities work is justified only by employability metrics or market outcomes, its deeper ethical, emotional, and social functions are obscured. Survey respondents reinforced this view, frequently citing the panel’s insistence that the humanities help people make sense of rapid social change and political instability. In a world defined by uncertainty, the humanities offer tools for resilience.

One of the most valuable insights to emerge from the panel was the idea that the humanities are already thriving, though often in invisible or undervalued ways. Their sustainability, participants argued, depends on meeting people where they are through collaboration, community engagement, and collective action. Humanities work does not exist solely in universities or cultural institutions; it lives in libraries, nonprofit organizations, mutual aid networks, classrooms, and artistic communities. Recognizing this broader ecology challenges narrow definitions of where and how intellectual and cultural labor happens.

The discussion emphasized the importance of coalitions among universities, community partners, and nonprofits, particularly in moments when public funding falls short. Panelists and participants alike highlighted innovative funding strategies such as bridge funds or unity funds, as well as the necessity of shared responsibility in sustaining humanities work. Invisible labor often performed by graduate students, adjunct faculty, community organizers, and cultural workers was acknowledged as a crucial yet underrecognized foundation of the humanities’ survival.

---

Recommended for Further Exploration:

Check out the full panel discussion of the State of the Humanities MKE on YouTube.