He acts like the grant funding crisis is a problem the humanities created but Trump could zero out the NEH and NEA tomorrow & not cause more than a ripple in the universities. It is RFK Jr. wrecking the NIH - that's *you* buddy, *your* public communications failure - that is wrecking the place. 4/
He protests to admire the arts and humanities, but evidently doesn't think his students should get to study them. He doesn't collaborate with historians because they have "nothing to contribute" - well, chief, they might warn you not to go on appeasing fascists? 5/
There is something astounding in the unrealized conceited arrogance of a medical researcher, of all things, in an age of vaccine hesitancy and intense public medical skepticism thinking that the humanities have nothing to contribute to public health. 6/
And then there is the boot-licking, unsurprising coming from HxA, an organization for which I once foolishly had hopes, which takes the administration's anti-intellectual agenda purely at face value and concludes that what we need to do is give Trump the Department of the Sudetenland. 7/
I am embarrassed, as someone who has also written for the Dispatch, that this was published at the same place and at the same time annoyed that, it being the start of the semester, I simply don't have time to write a full response. /end
I think right now to answer the question he asks in that paragraph is a resounding "Yes, and also fuck you." Speaking as someone who does cancer research for a living, it's not hard to see the societal value of the humanities, especially for the price tag. You just have to get off your high horse.
Also without a decent humanities foundation for ugrads and grads you end up with all of STEM looking like computer science is now: almost no one understanding how to run a study, especially with human subjects, and mostly in the service of private industry instead of science
You end up with the kind of soulless dipshits like the DOGE boys, who hubristicly destroy all that is good in the world. Wholly incapable of understanding what the purpose is of technological progress. And millions will suffer death and despair because of them. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-boy-ge...
I understand. There was a time when I subscribed to both The Bulwark and the The Dispatch and, uh, now I only subscribe to one.