Ok, so two things. Humanities: Exist. But like clockwork the call for inventing new disciplines that will teach us about the past/critical thinking/truth/the meaning of life* comes and at the same time the humanities are seen as not "practical".

*delete where not applicable 1/

Remember the "Progress Studies"? I do, what fun it was! We all laughed how the techbros just invented history. Heck, it was hilarious. But it got published in The Atlantic. And I can bet with all of you that more people read this piece than any critique of it. 2/

Do we have a marketing problem then? Yes. But it's not just that: think about it, humanities graduates kind of run The Atlantic. And other outlets. And those outlets often do a good job! And yet, we constantly hear "wouldn't it be nice if we were taught critical thinking". 3/

(Admit it, you sang the beginning of the last sentence of the previous tweet in your head). 4/

Properly taught and founded humanities are the ultimate reservoir of transferable skills. I do this with my students: if you learn to critically asses, let's say, a medieval hagiography, then you are gonna do a decent job with critically assessing a piece on the internet. 5/

But it's not easy at all to learn that! You need to put a lot of work into it. You need time and resources. Those are difficult skills. They are, and hear me out here, more difficult to acquire than, let's say, programming. But they are way more transferable. 6/

But "Hard Humanities Skills" are not as desirable in the society now as skills like programming. First of all, they are seen as "soft" skills. Useful but disposable. Second, they are discounted as easy to acquire thus not requiring investment. 7/

Perpetual divestment of the humanities creates a situation where only a small portion of the society is at all aware of the existence of HHS (Hard Humanities Skills) and even a smaller portion commands those skills at a level that makes them universally useful. Vicious circle. 8/

But this lack of HHS in the society creates a demand that cannot be filled by programs that are currently en vogue. So attempts are made to fill this void *inside the frameworks* of those en vogue programs. Those attempts might be laughable but the need is, of course, not. 9/

We hear constantly: "hey, take some programming classes, you will surely get a job!" but nobody "hey, take some literary criticism classes, you will surely get a job!". But in fact the second one is true for in practice everybody expects you to have HHS. 10/

Therefore the more humanities are gonna be divested the more the lack of HHS is gonna be visible and the more calls for "reinventing the wheel". All those attempts are futile at and kind of sad to watch: it's an economic and education system that drove itself into a dead end. 11/