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Are students and donors simply losing interest in the Liberal Arts or are far less visible forces at play? What is it that we’re actually seeking to defend by means of humanistic study? And in an age of decreasing literacy and the rapid creep of artificial intelligence into education—from grade school to universities—can this fight be anything but a losing battle?

In this salon, Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg joined our founder, Anna Gát, for a conversation about the humanities and what could come for them. Jennifer Frey, our special guest, is a philosophy professor and former dean of the University of Tulsa's Honors College.

Like marriage, like religious faith, the humanities, it is often said, are not only in crisis, but have always been in crisis. Indeed, in their 2021 book Permanent Crisis Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue that this is hardly an historical accident. This is because the humanities as we know them today—a set of disciplines embedded in higher education models that trace to the enlightenment and especially to its manifestation in nineteenth-century Germany—were designed and erected in direct response to industrialization, new technology, and emergent economic structures as bulwarks against the encroachment of instrumental rationality upon genuine—moral, aesthetic, social—value. If this is right, then the fact that the humanities are constantly called to defend themselves from attack should be no more surprising than the constancy of the operations of an organic immune system: it is their intrinsic function. Can they still fulfill it today?

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¡You can also check Jeniffer´s New York Times essay here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html!