The humanities are not a scam

“College is a Scam,” you might have heard, if you spend any time online. Nothing warms the heart of an old professor like waking up to being called a fraud.

The news is already bad enough for higher education: closings, cuts, death knell demographics. But in recent years, social influencers seem to revel in piling on and putting down their favorite institutional scapegoat: after “the left” and “the media.”

I don’t write to defend the whole enterprise. Higher ed deserves scrutiny on cost, content, and delivery. However, I do want to speak to an area that’s taken the brunt of the criticism and cuts—the humanities. That’s HUMAN-ities.

Why this wording? Well, I won’t try to force non-academics into an argument over what the “humanities” means—not because you can’t handle the truth, but because we educators are constantly arguing about our classifications. Sometimes, we don’t even know what we mean, but you have to put that department somewhere.

For example, I teach Communication, which I’ve seen assigned to Professional Schools (for media), Social Sciences (for human behavior and media effects), or the Arts (for performance studies and creative fields).

I define the humanities as any field of study centered on the human experience:

• What does it mean to be a human being in an age of technology and artificial intelligence?

• What is uniquely human in what I do?

• As a Christian, what is the divine spark of human creation or Imago Dei that sets us apart from the rest of creation?

Turns out, I’ve been teaching Communication as humanities for more than three decades, even when I was using a video camera and microphone. The medium was not the message, sorry Marshall McLuhan. The medium was the way to connect.

This is what the critics don’t get about the humanities and why they seem to be the first academic fields kicked out when administrators cut back. Humanities are “just not monetizable…,” according to one professor quoted in The Guardian. Inside Higher Ed documented 9,000 cuts across U.S. colleges and universities in 2025, disproportionately humanities-driven. Anecdotally, every time I hear about another faculty colleague losing a job at a private Christian university, it’s usually in art, theatre, music, language, or literature.

There is no doubt some humanities programs probably need to go. Identity-driven “studies” departments sprouted up the in the ’90s and 2000s that are rightly questioned for political indoctrination over academic inquiry. I won’t name names, but some of these departments and majors could fit more logically into larger academic homes, such as sociology, political science, or history—rather than getting their own academic clout.

On the “monetizable” question, though, I must push back simply by saying, you’re talking “practical” with a buzzy label. The false utilitarianism of “how are you going to use that major?” is nothing new. We’ve been begging the question ever since the post-World War II G.I. boom encouraged more Americans to “get a degree, get a better job.”

To be clear, I want a four-year communication degree to make my students employable, but not simply because they have acquired a set of skills they could probably get better (and cheaper) from AI and YouTube.

Let’s consider the one communication skill most employers say they want: public speaking. Coming from the broadcasting industry, I learned quickly in my first year that I would teach multiple sections of what we call the basic course in oral communication.

What outsiders often get wrong about public speaking is thinking it’s all about performance—that the “skill” of public speaking is getting the right pitch, volume, gestures, funny stories, and not saying “um” a lot.

While teaching public speaking, I learned the construct and context of communication matters way more than the performance. To be better at public communication, you first need to learn how to listen to your audience—to treat them as co-communicators with stories and motivations of their own.

Public communication is improved by interpersonal communication, attending to and respecting the receiver as a fellow human and image-bearer. That perspective cannot be gained by mimicking a TED Talk or asking ChatGPT to make better slides. It happens when humans engage with other humans to be understood and to understand.

What can you do with that?

Just about anything.

I know administrators cannot keep programs going with no students. I also know those of us in the humanities need to do a better job explaining how these human understandings connect to a working world where bills must be paid, including school loans.

But if we continue cutting programs and people who center the study of humanity, we may find ourselves chasing pixels that have already done the work long before we got there.

We need to figure out what makes a human, human, in an age of artificial everything. The university humanities tradition has offered some important answers for centuries. We would be wise to listen, instead of labeling them a scam. Let’s put the HUMAN back in humanities.