News of the ‘Death of the Humanities’ at PSU (and elsewhere) is greatly exaggerated. In the broad scope, what higher education has seen over the past century or more has been a series of attempted murders of the humanities: defunding, devaluing, deprioritizing. The current GENAI hype bubble is one recent attempt, as is Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill.’ Not to mention the proposed legislative cuts to USNH.

But surely it’s not the case that reading, writing, critical thinking, and human-scale storytelling are less important now than they were in past centuries, is it? That these practices are less crucial to human flourishing, less needed for surviving and thriving in the world? Perhaps we’ve reached the portion of late stage neoliberal capitalism where humans are no longer necessary for capitalists? Or perhaps the pro-productivity & anti-human propaganda has reached such a fevered pitch that universities have been incapable of cutting through that noise?

To put it differently: rather than designing backward (‘how can PSU produce graduates with marketable skills, as dictated by big business, to meet the needs of the market?’), how might we design forward for the humanities (and more)? Which wicked problems must be addressed with humanist methods? Is the dearth of the humanities itself a wicked problem? And what would educating (not producing) students to address such problems look like? What barriers (designed backwards) would we need to eliminate to do so?