Don't forget Aeneas' wife's assistance in fleeing from Troy. As the picture shows, the strength of men cannot succeed without the guidance and care of the family. We are beginning to listen to women, but I don't believe we are welcoming them into positions that can help guide humanity into a new society based more on the care of the individual than on accumulating wealth. We cannot maintain a democracy while teaching avarice as the moral goal of the individual.
So glad I stumbled upon your channel, Adam. When sitting exams for the English "tripos" here at Cambridge, we are neither encouraged nor discouraged from this old-style humanist way of thinking about texts and culture (my Director of Studies reminds us that theory is there if we want to engage with it, but we are not obliged to). This said, as much as we cannot help but approach texts with some level of theoretical assumptions, whether consciously or not, I think some of these assumptions are products of being human more generally – not merely products of political conditioning and power. I really value what you refer to as 'spiritual poetics'. It does feel sometimes like the most important quality of literature – i.e. the comfort literature brings to people's lives and makes them want to read, makes them want to study a literature degree to begin with – is of little to no interest to the discussions happening at university. I really hope this changes.
There is, indeed, a long history behind this: Many years ago, a large university English department in Michigan removed Shakespeare from their courses, and they required all incoming students to first take a course in Critical Theory before being allowed to take any literature courses.
My professors certainly did not present Derrida as spiritual, so I was shocked to later learn that deconstruction had theological roots—and that the whole project was unabashedly messianic.
Great insights here, Adam. There is much hope on the horizon! This reminds me of K-12 classical charter schools in the US where students study great books and poetry instead of reading through textbooks. Plus, they're tuition-free at places like Valor Education and Great Hearts. A small but mighty generation of young folks falling in love with Plato, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky are slowly rising in our midst.
This explains why I, as a homeschool parent trained in science engineering in the early 90s, have always felt outside of both paradigms. I very much appreciate that you draw the focus to the thread that is neither solely utilitarian nor political.
I still battle with myself about education. First as a young adult and then later as a married dad with a baby. My education stalled out in my 20s, and I wasn't able to finish. I ended up stuck in a government job that I was poorly aligned with.
The way out? "Go back to school and finish your bachelor's." That's what would make me even more economically viable. So that's what I did. It took almost 4 years, but I did end up leaving that job.
Fast forward to now and I'm new to Substack still imagining myself as a writer. "Maybe I should get an MFA." "Perhaps I should try this contest or that retreat." Which sets me at odds with what we learn from fields like the humanities.
You say: "The most direct cause was a decline in state and federal funding for higher education."
I'd have to see a lot of proof before I believed this. I could believe that the decline in funding might have kick-started the increased tuition, but by far the most significant factor was the availability of student loans of unlimited amounts. Between the early 1990s and now the universities have raked in so much money that, in order to avoid losing their non-profit status they've had to build more elaborate housing and other facilities. Tuition has increased above the rate of inflation for every, or almost every (if there's been an exception in recent years since I did my research) from the mid 1970s until the present. Are you seriously suggesting that state/fed funding has been decreasing at that rate or anywhere near it?
Student loan debt has matched that increase. Removing price constraints gave the universities the license they needed to increase tuition as they have without losing students.
The availability of student loans is directly connected to the rise of tuition, yes. But the rise of tuition is partly the result of defunding. Follow the effects to the cause.
Defunding probably accounts for some minor part of the tuition increases in the early years, but after five years that stopped, and for the next 45 years it has been caused by student loans. Under the circumstances claiming that increases in tuition were caused by defunding is a gross misstatement.
In the early years, when defunding was biting, some schools went broke or cut programs. Now they go broke or cut programs only in response to student loan availability.
I would go further and say that first, the facts that students are largely taking more than four years to graduate, and the emergence of all the boutique majors, are also directly, causally linked to the proliferation of unlimited student loans. As is bankruptcy (which is the problem that brought all this to my attention) and what one might call a whole new class of education serfs.
One logical extension of your position is that education should be regarded as a public good and funded by the state. That probably has some complications, but I would certainly agree (if that’s your position) that it would be a huge improvement that is long overdue. Universities are a for-profit industry; I think that needs to change.
My point, to be clear, is not to rattle off facts, but to suggest this is not a right/left issue, although of course ideologies always play a role. This is a capitalism issue.
I hear ya. My article doesn't mean to reduce this to a political issue. It's showing some of the ideological factors that have influenced it. There are many factors at play for sure!
If you believe that institutions should provide sufficient financial aid, that diversity initiatives should focus on socioeconomic factors, and that humanists should consider their professions public-facing while consciously revering history... congratulations, you're subscribing to a left-wing vision.
The fact that these are left-wing ideals *and* that the left is interested in theoretical, context-sensitive approaches to art, literature, and philosophy is not a coincidence. The rise of theory in the 20th century was largely a response to the academy's pervasive elitism. It wasn't really until the 1960s that scholars who didn't represent an elite minority (i.e., who were lucky enough to be simultaneously white, male, Christian, and of means) had the ability to articulate their own visions of the meaning of art, literature, and philosophy, at least without being dismissed a priori (due to their race, gender, and so forth). Theory is the language that they developed to be able to do this, that is, to make their visions intelligible. They had to talk about context, because if they didn't address it first, it would've been used against them. In the course of doing this, they developed very interesting ideas about how context shapes the meaning of art, allowing us to ask questions about where "art" ends and "society" begins. One of the premises of this post is that those lines are clear and self-evident. This is a rightist viewpoint.
(To make a related point: the notion that theorists aren't interested in subjects like beauty, spiritual meaning, art for art's sake, and so forth, is inaccurate at best and at worst ignorant towards disciplines engineered by marginalized people. Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, bell hooks, and Herbert Marcuse are all examples of theorists who went way beyond the straw-man versions of "the political" favored among people who traffic in simplistic depictions of theory, especially on the right.)
The idea that the humanities should serve the public comes from the exact same impulse that led to the establishment of the theory disciplines. And I'm afraid that the "beyond left and right" vision for para-academic initiatives blinds us to histories that we can learn from, since leftist principles guided visionary educational projects in moments similar to the one we're in today. The worlds of Ancient Rome and The Renaissance aren't nearly as comparable to the world of 2025 as 1930s Germany — which gave rise to the remarkable Black Mountain College — or the US in the 1990s, where Clinton-era policies that made it harder for incarcerated people to get a college education led to brilliant, radical education movements initiated by incarcerated people themselves. Both of these examples embody the best of what left-leaning pedagogical thought has to offer to society. And, not for nothing, Ancient Rome is a favored reference point among today's burgeoning far right.
Which brings me to my last point: equivocating between the right and the left, for any reason, is very dangerous in a moment where the far right is becoming more and more powerful each day, both in the US and globally. I believe strongly in a humanities "renaissance" that operates beyond academia, but I'll be heartbroken if most of its advocates fall victim to the same "ideologically neutral" mindset that's actually right-leaning, whether they realize it or not.
I've spent 10 years meandering between work and getting my undergrad degree.
I've experienced both sides(STEM-Business and the Humanities) of modern education. The former makes you feel like a number that is rewarded only by extraneous herculean effort. The latter is obsessed with fulfilling some political or social goal.
I'll have my degree next spring but the current state of the university makes me hesitant to pursue my education anymore.
It is simply untrue that either the federal or state governments cut spending on higher education—just the opposite. Since 1960, almost monotonically, total expenditures have risen exponentially. For the actual data, see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G161091A027NBEA for state spending, which has risen continuously. In every state, elementary and secondary education is the largest line item, followed by healthcare, and with higher education in third place. This partly explains why US infrastructure is so crappy now. The only time federal education expenditures fell was during the second Obama administration, which followed a huge increase in his first administration. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160701A027NBEA. In real, inflation adjusted terms, federal and state spending on higher education increased 6x each over the period 1970 Q1 to 2024Q4. According to the Dept of Education, there were 18.6 million higher ed (both undergrad and grad) students in 1970 and 14.4 million in 2024, so per capita real spending increased even faster (7.75x). Actual facts matter. These numbers do not include the huge contingent liabilities created by the student loan guarantee program, which served mainly to allow the universities to raise their tuition prices. It would be worthwhile to look seriously at how the universities managed to squander all this cash. The universities have a big problem, but it is not lack of funding.
This is such an oversimplification. Sure, nominal total expendatures on higher ed have increased and governments did not cut spending in absolute dollars.
The truth is, real inflation-adjusted increases are much smaller and across states. And growth in total spending is heavily influenced by tuition and not solely increased by government support.
I wasn't able to find any support for your claim that the only time expendatures fell was during the Obama admin., but the federal indices show variation and a more complex picture. Depending on how you adjust for inflation and program shifts, the breakdowns could show the same declines for other periods. The facts matter, yes. And it's important that they tell the whole story.
As i said before, I am willing to agree that there is an implied causal link between student-loan availability and tuition rising and university squandering of funds, but that concession is going to require much more data on case-by-case basis.
I don’t think I am so ridiculous as to confuse the various data streams. I simply presented the relevant spending. And resent being accused of moving goal posts. Read what I wrote closely. Try to look at the data . Doubtless, there is a lot going on under the aggregates. You said that government spending on higher education was cut, which is absolutely untrue both in nominal and real terms. Actually, it was increased by 6x in real, inflation adjusted dollars. That is what the numbers say, even though they might negate your thesis. This is a subject in which theses can be confirmed or negated by evidence, unlike literary “theory.” If there is actual evidence that significantly affects the argument, I would certainly weigh it.
No. Per student real, inflation-adjusted federal and state expenditures on higher education, not including tuition (which also increased much more rapidly than inflation) increased 7.75 times from 1970 to 2024. This data is for federal and state government expenditures, not university total spending, which rose even faster because of the student loan windfall. The data I cited from the Federal Reserve shows the non-inflation adjusted data, including for the Obama administration. What index shows a more complex picture? I used the GDP deflator (also from the Fed) to adjust for inflation. You could look at other inflation indices, but there are trivial differences and the GDP deflator is considered the most accurate. Number of students in colleges and universities is from Department of Education data. I don’t see any other story than that the actual data shows a huge 6x increase in total inflation-adjusted govt spending on higher education over this period and an even larger per student inflation-adjusted increase of 7.75x. Of course, tuition increases make the increase even more egregious.
It is entirely possible that little of this money went to improve student education or to reward the faculty, though I have not seen any data on budget allocation within the universities. But that is not a matter of lack of funding. Rather, it is a matter of mis-placed priorities.
I think the really interesting question is how universities in the 1960s, which is often considered the golden age of higher education, managed to educate students with between 1/6th and 1/8th of the real, inflation-adjusted government support as universities do today. Real, inflation-adjusted tuition was also much lower in the 1960s. Across all years of education, many European and Asian countries get significantly better outcomes at a fraction of the expenditure. A similar situation occurs in US healthcare, which is about twice as expensive per capita as Germany or France and about 4x as Singapore, which has the best health outcomes in the world.
You're conflating different datasets and categories as if they are interchangeable. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation we need to at least hold one category constant. You can't keep toggling between state appropriations, federal direct spending, federal loan guarantees, total university spending, and per-student figures, etc. You can't draw sweeping casual conclusion from aggregated spending.
It's difficult to keep up with the goal-post moving going on here. When challenged, you shift from nominal total spending to real total spending. From per-student spending to combined fed. + state numbers. From excluding tuition to including tuition. A classic sign that you are defending a position and not a consistent factual claim, but I'll bite.
You claim there is massive misallocation, but, as you have admitted yourself, you don't know where the money actually goes. The more aggregated numbers you add to your claim, the more obscured and complex the story becomes. Indeed. It truly is a complex story. That real total spending has risen tells us almost nothing about what states actually appropriate per student, how many institutions opened or closed, student demographics and costs of service, etc. No single macro number accounts for an extremely complex ecosystem.
The bottom line is, I agree that mismanagement of funds is likely a part of the picture. I too am critical of the student-loan program and how it has impacted tuition. I still hold that reductions in public funding for higher ed contributed to the rise of tuition while also admitting that not the only causal link. There are many factors at play.
Don't forget Aeneas' wife's assistance in fleeing from Troy. As the picture shows, the strength of men cannot succeed without the guidance and care of the family. We are beginning to listen to women, but I don't believe we are welcoming them into positions that can help guide humanity into a new society based more on the care of the individual than on accumulating wealth. We cannot maintain a democracy while teaching avarice as the moral goal of the individual.
Well said, Leslie!
What makes you think that women are less avaricious than men? Do you have any evidence of that?
So glad I stumbled upon your channel, Adam. When sitting exams for the English "tripos" here at Cambridge, we are neither encouraged nor discouraged from this old-style humanist way of thinking about texts and culture (my Director of Studies reminds us that theory is there if we want to engage with it, but we are not obliged to). This said, as much as we cannot help but approach texts with some level of theoretical assumptions, whether consciously or not, I think some of these assumptions are products of being human more generally – not merely products of political conditioning and power. I really value what you refer to as 'spiritual poetics'. It does feel sometimes like the most important quality of literature – i.e. the comfort literature brings to people's lives and makes them want to read, makes them want to study a literature degree to begin with – is of little to no interest to the discussions happening at university. I really hope this changes.
There is, indeed, a long history behind this: Many years ago, a large university English department in Michigan removed Shakespeare from their courses, and they required all incoming students to first take a course in Critical Theory before being allowed to take any literature courses.
My professors certainly did not present Derrida as spiritual, so I was shocked to later learn that deconstruction had theological roots—and that the whole project was unabashedly messianic.
I consider it his saving grace (forgive the irony.)
Great insights here, Adam. There is much hope on the horizon! This reminds me of K-12 classical charter schools in the US where students study great books and poetry instead of reading through textbooks. Plus, they're tuition-free at places like Valor Education and Great Hearts. A small but mighty generation of young folks falling in love with Plato, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky are slowly rising in our midst.
This explains why I, as a homeschool parent trained in science engineering in the early 90s, have always felt outside of both paradigms. I very much appreciate that you draw the focus to the thread that is neither solely utilitarian nor political.
I still battle with myself about education. First as a young adult and then later as a married dad with a baby. My education stalled out in my 20s, and I wasn't able to finish. I ended up stuck in a government job that I was poorly aligned with.
The way out? "Go back to school and finish your bachelor's." That's what would make me even more economically viable. So that's what I did. It took almost 4 years, but I did end up leaving that job.
Fast forward to now and I'm new to Substack still imagining myself as a writer. "Maybe I should get an MFA." "Perhaps I should try this contest or that retreat." Which sets me at odds with what we learn from fields like the humanities.
I really hope the new renaissance will come. 💕
You say: "The most direct cause was a decline in state and federal funding for higher education."
I'd have to see a lot of proof before I believed this. I could believe that the decline in funding might have kick-started the increased tuition, but by far the most significant factor was the availability of student loans of unlimited amounts. Between the early 1990s and now the universities have raked in so much money that, in order to avoid losing their non-profit status they've had to build more elaborate housing and other facilities. Tuition has increased above the rate of inflation for every, or almost every (if there's been an exception in recent years since I did my research) from the mid 1970s until the present. Are you seriously suggesting that state/fed funding has been decreasing at that rate or anywhere near it?
Student loan debt has matched that increase. Removing price constraints gave the universities the license they needed to increase tuition as they have without losing students.
The availability of student loans is directly connected to the rise of tuition, yes. But the rise of tuition is partly the result of defunding. Follow the effects to the cause.
Defunding probably accounts for some minor part of the tuition increases in the early years, but after five years that stopped, and for the next 45 years it has been caused by student loans. Under the circumstances claiming that increases in tuition were caused by defunding is a gross misstatement.
In the early years, when defunding was biting, some schools went broke or cut programs. Now they go broke or cut programs only in response to student loan availability.
I would go further and say that first, the facts that students are largely taking more than four years to graduate, and the emergence of all the boutique majors, are also directly, causally linked to the proliferation of unlimited student loans. As is bankruptcy (which is the problem that brought all this to my attention) and what one might call a whole new class of education serfs.
One logical extension of your position is that education should be regarded as a public good and funded by the state. That probably has some complications, but I would certainly agree (if that’s your position) that it would be a huge improvement that is long overdue. Universities are a for-profit industry; I think that needs to change.
My point, to be clear, is not to rattle off facts, but to suggest this is not a right/left issue, although of course ideologies always play a role. This is a capitalism issue.
I hear ya. My article doesn't mean to reduce this to a political issue. It's showing some of the ideological factors that have influenced it. There are many factors at play for sure!
If you believe that institutions should provide sufficient financial aid, that diversity initiatives should focus on socioeconomic factors, and that humanists should consider their professions public-facing while consciously revering history... congratulations, you're subscribing to a left-wing vision.
The fact that these are left-wing ideals *and* that the left is interested in theoretical, context-sensitive approaches to art, literature, and philosophy is not a coincidence. The rise of theory in the 20th century was largely a response to the academy's pervasive elitism. It wasn't really until the 1960s that scholars who didn't represent an elite minority (i.e., who were lucky enough to be simultaneously white, male, Christian, and of means) had the ability to articulate their own visions of the meaning of art, literature, and philosophy, at least without being dismissed a priori (due to their race, gender, and so forth). Theory is the language that they developed to be able to do this, that is, to make their visions intelligible. They had to talk about context, because if they didn't address it first, it would've been used against them. In the course of doing this, they developed very interesting ideas about how context shapes the meaning of art, allowing us to ask questions about where "art" ends and "society" begins. One of the premises of this post is that those lines are clear and self-evident. This is a rightist viewpoint.
(To make a related point: the notion that theorists aren't interested in subjects like beauty, spiritual meaning, art for art's sake, and so forth, is inaccurate at best and at worst ignorant towards disciplines engineered by marginalized people. Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, bell hooks, and Herbert Marcuse are all examples of theorists who went way beyond the straw-man versions of "the political" favored among people who traffic in simplistic depictions of theory, especially on the right.)
The idea that the humanities should serve the public comes from the exact same impulse that led to the establishment of the theory disciplines. And I'm afraid that the "beyond left and right" vision for para-academic initiatives blinds us to histories that we can learn from, since leftist principles guided visionary educational projects in moments similar to the one we're in today. The worlds of Ancient Rome and The Renaissance aren't nearly as comparable to the world of 2025 as 1930s Germany — which gave rise to the remarkable Black Mountain College — or the US in the 1990s, where Clinton-era policies that made it harder for incarcerated people to get a college education led to brilliant, radical education movements initiated by incarcerated people themselves. Both of these examples embody the best of what left-leaning pedagogical thought has to offer to society. And, not for nothing, Ancient Rome is a favored reference point among today's burgeoning far right.
Which brings me to my last point: equivocating between the right and the left, for any reason, is very dangerous in a moment where the far right is becoming more and more powerful each day, both in the US and globally. I believe strongly in a humanities "renaissance" that operates beyond academia, but I'll be heartbroken if most of its advocates fall victim to the same "ideologically neutral" mindset that's actually right-leaning, whether they realize it or not.
I've spent 10 years meandering between work and getting my undergrad degree.
I've experienced both sides(STEM-Business and the Humanities) of modern education. The former makes you feel like a number that is rewarded only by extraneous herculean effort. The latter is obsessed with fulfilling some political or social goal.
I'll have my degree next spring but the current state of the university makes me hesitant to pursue my education anymore.
It is simply untrue that either the federal or state governments cut spending on higher education—just the opposite. Since 1960, almost monotonically, total expenditures have risen exponentially. For the actual data, see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G161091A027NBEA for state spending, which has risen continuously. In every state, elementary and secondary education is the largest line item, followed by healthcare, and with higher education in third place. This partly explains why US infrastructure is so crappy now. The only time federal education expenditures fell was during the second Obama administration, which followed a huge increase in his first administration. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160701A027NBEA. In real, inflation adjusted terms, federal and state spending on higher education increased 6x each over the period 1970 Q1 to 2024Q4. According to the Dept of Education, there were 18.6 million higher ed (both undergrad and grad) students in 1970 and 14.4 million in 2024, so per capita real spending increased even faster (7.75x). Actual facts matter. These numbers do not include the huge contingent liabilities created by the student loan guarantee program, which served mainly to allow the universities to raise their tuition prices. It would be worthwhile to look seriously at how the universities managed to squander all this cash. The universities have a big problem, but it is not lack of funding.
This is such an oversimplification. Sure, nominal total expendatures on higher ed have increased and governments did not cut spending in absolute dollars.
The truth is, real inflation-adjusted increases are much smaller and across states. And growth in total spending is heavily influenced by tuition and not solely increased by government support.
I wasn't able to find any support for your claim that the only time expendatures fell was during the Obama admin., but the federal indices show variation and a more complex picture. Depending on how you adjust for inflation and program shifts, the breakdowns could show the same declines for other periods. The facts matter, yes. And it's important that they tell the whole story.
As i said before, I am willing to agree that there is an implied causal link between student-loan availability and tuition rising and university squandering of funds, but that concession is going to require much more data on case-by-case basis.
I don’t think I am so ridiculous as to confuse the various data streams. I simply presented the relevant spending. And resent being accused of moving goal posts. Read what I wrote closely. Try to look at the data . Doubtless, there is a lot going on under the aggregates. You said that government spending on higher education was cut, which is absolutely untrue both in nominal and real terms. Actually, it was increased by 6x in real, inflation adjusted dollars. That is what the numbers say, even though they might negate your thesis. This is a subject in which theses can be confirmed or negated by evidence, unlike literary “theory.” If there is actual evidence that significantly affects the argument, I would certainly weigh it.
No. Per student real, inflation-adjusted federal and state expenditures on higher education, not including tuition (which also increased much more rapidly than inflation) increased 7.75 times from 1970 to 2024. This data is for federal and state government expenditures, not university total spending, which rose even faster because of the student loan windfall. The data I cited from the Federal Reserve shows the non-inflation adjusted data, including for the Obama administration. What index shows a more complex picture? I used the GDP deflator (also from the Fed) to adjust for inflation. You could look at other inflation indices, but there are trivial differences and the GDP deflator is considered the most accurate. Number of students in colleges and universities is from Department of Education data. I don’t see any other story than that the actual data shows a huge 6x increase in total inflation-adjusted govt spending on higher education over this period and an even larger per student inflation-adjusted increase of 7.75x. Of course, tuition increases make the increase even more egregious.
It is entirely possible that little of this money went to improve student education or to reward the faculty, though I have not seen any data on budget allocation within the universities. But that is not a matter of lack of funding. Rather, it is a matter of mis-placed priorities.
I think the really interesting question is how universities in the 1960s, which is often considered the golden age of higher education, managed to educate students with between 1/6th and 1/8th of the real, inflation-adjusted government support as universities do today. Real, inflation-adjusted tuition was also much lower in the 1960s. Across all years of education, many European and Asian countries get significantly better outcomes at a fraction of the expenditure. A similar situation occurs in US healthcare, which is about twice as expensive per capita as Germany or France and about 4x as Singapore, which has the best health outcomes in the world.
You're conflating different datasets and categories as if they are interchangeable. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation we need to at least hold one category constant. You can't keep toggling between state appropriations, federal direct spending, federal loan guarantees, total university spending, and per-student figures, etc. You can't draw sweeping casual conclusion from aggregated spending.
It's difficult to keep up with the goal-post moving going on here. When challenged, you shift from nominal total spending to real total spending. From per-student spending to combined fed. + state numbers. From excluding tuition to including tuition. A classic sign that you are defending a position and not a consistent factual claim, but I'll bite.
You claim there is massive misallocation, but, as you have admitted yourself, you don't know where the money actually goes. The more aggregated numbers you add to your claim, the more obscured and complex the story becomes. Indeed. It truly is a complex story. That real total spending has risen tells us almost nothing about what states actually appropriate per student, how many institutions opened or closed, student demographics and costs of service, etc. No single macro number accounts for an extremely complex ecosystem.
The bottom line is, I agree that mismanagement of funds is likely a part of the picture. I too am critical of the student-loan program and how it has impacted tuition. I still hold that reductions in public funding for higher ed contributed to the rise of tuition while also admitting that not the only causal link. There are many factors at play.