[Originally published on June 8th, 2026, 9:02am. Reposted by request.] “In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals…
“In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.” That is from a…
Administrators at the University of Hertfordshire are eliminating not just philosophy (as reported last week) from the school, but also undergraduate programs in English Language and Linguistics, English Literature, Creative Writing, and History. The reason given for these cuts is that the programmes are ‘no longer financially viable’. We have been given no other information about the courses,…
The number of students earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy in the United States declined for the third year in a row. According to new data from Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, US universities and colleges issued 5,763 bachelor’s degrees in philosophy in 2024, compared with 5,998 in 2023, 6380 in 2022, and 6,757 in 2021. Though the changes…
The National Humanities Center (NHC) recently announced its fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, and two philosophers are among them. They are S.M. Love (Georgia State University) for the project, “Freedom from the Market: A Kantian Account of Socioeconomic Rights,” and James Van Cleve (University of Southern California) for the project, “Roderick Chisholm and Philosophy in America, 1950–2000.”…
Alumnus Tim Shannon (Cowell ’71, history) has philanthropically supported the Humanities at UC Santa Cruz for 15 years. His support of the Norcal Regional Highschool Ethics Bowl, hosted annually at UC Santa Cruz, has opened doors for public schools across the region.
Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.” That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE […]