09 Higher Education Reading Group
Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. Chapter 1: “The Silent Crisis”
The book was first published in 2010, and since then many of the things Nussbaum warned about have come to pass. The “silent crisis” she describes is a slow but profound erosion of the humanities and the arts that threatens the moral and intellectual foundations of democracy. While nations focus on economic and political challenges, they neglect an equally dangerous shift: the reduction of education to a tool for profit and technical productivity.
Nevertheless, our discussion also examined how much the humanities themselves have been complicit in this decline. The humanities may have been too successful in mainstreaming their critical stance, but not as successful in preserving what once made their critique constructive. As a result, they have lost confidence in their own positive vision—the habits of thought and shared values that sustain democracy. This problem becomes especially acute in a society marked by supercomplexity and skepticism, where excessive critique without grounding can erode trust and purpose altogether, contributing to our current post-truth dilemma.
The discussion also centered on the issue of utility and how to create something genuinely meaningful, unpacking the complexity of this distinction. Commodifying the humanities—whatever form that may take—risks decentering the very vision of education as an end in itself. This process undermines the kind of epistemic goods that make intellectual conversation and reasoned debate possible in the first place.
We also spent some time considering the degrees of connection by which universities, as mainstreaming institutions, broadcast their ideas and values outward across society. Here, we contrasted the dilemma of educating too narrowly, inadequately, or insufficiently—and questioned for whom this education is truly intended. We reflected that such questions may not be fully solvable, yet they keep the conversational space open as a form of epistemic humility. In this sense, the simple act of engaging with students, colleagues, and others may itself be meaningful and sufficient as an individual contribution.
Finally, we reflected on the role of democracy and how precious it remains in the modern world, asking what preconditions are necessary to keep this tradition alive. Perhaps the contribution of the humanities—their countercultural role in 2025—is to be affirmative: to reinvestigate what it means to trust others, to recognize justified authority that can be challenged, and to resist the arbitrary invocation of “truth” and “facts” as unquestionable labels.
