On Saving the Humanities

A Response to the 2025 Civic Thought and Practice Conference

By Solveig Gold & Joshua Katz, November 10, 2025

“Will Republicans save the humanities?” So asked Jenna and Ben Storey in their widely read article last year about the rise of civics centers at public universities in red and purple states. For us (two classicists), the future of the humanities is of the utmost importance, and we were especially interested to hear the speakers at the joint American Enterprise Institute–Johns Hopkins University conference “Civic Thought and Practice: The Intellectual Foundations of Citizenship” this past May discuss what the Storeys call “humanistic civic education.”

We wanted to know: Are these civics centers saving the humanities? 

If saving the humanities means renewing student interest in Great Books and great ideas, then yes—a resounding yes. With choice professors teaching Plato to Publius, the centers have a tremendous opportunity to cultivate citizens who actually know something about the rich tradition they have been so fortunate to inherit.

But if saving the humanities means providing a sanctuary for the traditional practice of longstanding humanistic disciplines, away from the ideological tyranny of existing departments, then no, the civics centers aren’t doing this.

For one thing, there are significant areas of humanistic study that lie outside the scope of humanistic civic education, at least as it was presented at the conference. Music, art, and architecture all play an important role in shaping citizens (as Plato suggests in the Laws, the health of a polis depends on the quality of its music!), but the centers are not, as far as we know, teaching Bach, Bosch, or Bauhaus. Their focus is on books, and especially those books that pertain to political life.

Nor are the centers offering language instruction, even though many of their current faculty members surely could teach such classes. Students do not read Aristotle in Greek or Machiavelli in Italian—everything is in English. This is not in itself a problem: Universities have always offered introductory classes on texts in translation. But it’s necessary 1) to acknowledge that students will have to turn to corrupted existing departments in order to learn the languages—if these departments even still offer proper training—and 2) to be honest with the students that they are receiving only a foretaste of the texts’ richness and that they must therefore maintain intellectual humility.

Moreover, the centers seem to introduce students to the texts, either explicitly or implicitly, through a series of civic-oriented questions: What is the good life? Who should rule? How should justice be distributed? This approach to reading may well create expert citizens, but it will not create expert humanists.

There are three approaches to reading a given text, represented by the following three questions: 1) What does the text say? 2) Do I agree with what the text says? 3) What does the text have to tell me about [X] issue that I am interested in?

The first approach sounds straightforward but is not. Even after thousands of years, humanists are still (with justification) battling over the correct interpretation of words, sentences, and arguments. And they battle over the best method to discern the correct interpretation: for instance, New Criticism, New Historicism, Straussianism—or our preferred practice of philology, which we have elsewhere defined as “the attempt to understand a text as it was produced in its historical context, with as few anachronistic preconceptions as possible.”

The second approach is, in its least academic form, the province of book clubs, where readers are wont to discuss their feelings about a text—and, indeed, of ideologically driven so-called academics who, for instance, go around labeling great works “problematic.” At its most robust, however, this second approach is the province of philosophy departments, where students are trained to assess the strength of an author’s argument and develop counterarguments.

And the third is an expansive category, since [X] can include everything from the practical (how to repair a dishwasher) to the moral (how to live my life) to the niche and identitarian. This last is dominant in universities today, championed by those who plumb texts for references to hot topics like race and gender, even when no such references exist.

At issue is whether one treats the interpretation of a given text as a means (approaches 2 and 3) or an end (approach 1). Of course, there is in principle great value in using a text as a means: Think of the lessons that citizens take from reading their constitution or believers take from reading the Bible. But to derive the correct lessons, you need to have the correct interpretation of the text itself. And since textual interpretation can be difficult, even—or indeed especially—for texts that have been poured over for centuries, most citizens and believers rely in one way or another on expert “close readers” like jurists and theologians, judges and preachers, to help them read.

Our understanding is that the civics centers have for the most part been engaged in a combination of the second and third approaches. They raise a question of interest (e.g., Who should rule?), introduce students to texts that offer or seem to offer an answer to this question, and then encourage the students to assess the merits of the authors’ proposals. This is an excellent way to help young citizens think through big questions.

But it will not save the humanities, which—until they were hijacked by the identitarian ideologues—were traditionally tasked with developing experts in the first approach: expert close readers and, for that matter, expert interpreters of music, art, and architecture as well. For the good of all readers and audiences, this expertise must be preserved, and our sincere hope is that some initiative or initiatives will come to its rescue.

Perhaps one day the civics centers will have the capacity to take this on, too. For now, though, they have enough on their plate: As the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has documented, only 18% of liberal arts institutions require a single foundational course on American history or government, and students are civically illiterate. We have repair work to do, and the centers are doing it, taking the lead in restoring what President Reagan called “informed patriotism.” We will cheer them on as they continue to prioritize humanistic civic education—a noble endeavor in its own right, even if it doesn’t save the humanities.