One of the most constant sounds heard within the walls of academe is the wailing about the fate of the humanities. 

The usual refrain is that humanities have been trodden underfoot since the 1980s, as a combination of a neo- liberal consensus and a hated managerialism that has progressively dismantled the humanities in favour of other (primarily scientific) disciplines that bring a greater rate of return on investment.  

The threatened consequence of this situation is not just that the humanities are imperilled but, by extension, because the humanities teach critical discourse, democracy itself is in mortal danger.

The problem with this explanation is that it isn't factually correct.  As David John Frank and Jay Gabler note in their fascinating recent book Reconstructing the University, the decline of the humanities is not at all of recent origin.  Back around World War I, roughly one-third of all faculty around the world were in the humanities.  Since that time, the decline in the humanities' share has been relentless and steady, decreasing at about two percentage points per decade, until by the 1990s the share had fallen to just under 20%.  But this slow death can't be attributed to the sciences and engineering, which they note also saw their "share" of total faculty fall over the twentieth century.  The real "winner" within the academy has in fact been the social sciences (including business and commerce), which saw its share of total worldwide faculty triple between 1915 and 1995.

When looked at this way, the decline of the humanities doesn't look quite so sinister.  Both the social sciences and the humanities are concerned with the human condition, they just use different tools to examine it.  The humanities use a variety of analytic and occasionally speculative tools, while those of the social sciences are more empirical in nature (at least in theory - in some disciplines there's an awful lot of stuff which bears only a passing resemblance to empiricism).  As the implications of the works of Marx, Darwin and other nineteenth-century thinkers began to be absorbed by society, we have come to appreciate that society has few limits in its capacity to learn, know and change itself.  As a result, studies that have emphasized action have become more important than those which promote contemplation. 

To paraphrase Marx, many in the humanities have sought to understand reality; the point of the social sciences is to change it.  And in an increasingly action-oriented society, that means the social sciences increasingly have primacy within the Academy.

In addition to this societal shift in perception, I'd also highlight the role that the conceptual shift towards the research university model, combined with the role of public funding, has played in amplifying this trend away from the humanities.

From the late nineteenth century to the present day, universities have been converging on a German-American model, which pushed the primacy of graduate studies, pure research, and the notion that each department existed primarily to push out people who were going to be like their professors.  Thus, biology was about training biologists, physics physicists and so on. 

Adjusting to this model was an enormous conceptual shift for the humanities.  Prior to that, the humanities were either seen as a prerequisite to other forms of higher study such as medicine, law or theology, or simply as providing a kind of finishing school for the (frequently dissolute) gentry.  The idea that humanities were about the "production of new knowledge", or that history should be about "producing more historians" would have seemed very odd to professors in the humanities.  But in order to remain on an equal plane of esteem with scientific disciplines, humanities chose to adopt the latter's more siloed and research-intensive (and thus costly) model.

Now, if the humanities relied primarily on private funding through tuition and the like, this shift probably wouldn't matter.  Humanities in places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have done and are doing reasonably well.  But in the context of publicly-funded education (which is where we've been for the past fifty years or so), this is a harder sell.  To put it bluntly, governments fund universities because they think more education will make their youth more employable.  And it's here that humanities have a bit of a problem.

The humanities do not, as some on the right would have it, render students unemployable.  In fact, humanities students learn all sorts of important analytic skills that are valuable in the workplace.   But equally, there's no denying that the link between field of study and eventual employment is a lot looser in the humanities and that humanities grads have a slightly rougher time than students in other disciplines in making the transition to the labour market.  Many subsequently go on to achieve great things - you can always find humanities graduates in top positions in government and business - but that's usually because they've benefited not just from their humanities training, but from some further, more applied education, as well. 

In other words, where the humanities are successful are in those cases where students themselves have put the humanities in their medieval context - as prerequisites to other forms of study.

This situation isn't going to change any time soon.  The last big technological growth wave, based on ICTs, was actually pretty good to the humanities because a lot of the profits have lain in digitization of cultural products and this was an area they knew something about.  The leading candidates for the next big tech wave are genomic/proteonomics, nanotechnology and robotics.  The last of these might have some applications that require a humanities education - the other two, much less so. 

How then can the humanities prosper in the future?  I would argue there are two possible exits from the vexing status quo.

The first option is to get humanities out of the public system.  Create more Smiths, or more Swarthmores.  The great Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. are all private because, inherently, their non-applied nature makes them something of a luxury purchase.  Re-brand the humanities as an up-market product, charge the living daylights out of students for the privilege, and watch the current traumas of funding and status wither away.

The second option is to stay within the public system but to re-adopt the role of being a preparatory field of study for more professionally-oriented programs.  Ensure that the basic critical and empathic skills that the humanities cultivate are inculcated in students across the university.  Such breadth would at a minimum make the argument that humanities are some sort of major contributor to democracy sound a lot less self-serving and elitist than it currently is.

The trade-off to this, fairly obviously, would be that the humanities would take on more of a teaching focus and less of a research focus.  More students would take humanities courses, but they would necessarily be mostly introductory courses.  There would thus likely be less room for specialization in the humanities - fewer graduate students, fewer upper-year undergraduates. 

Would humanities professors agree to trade some of the research intensity for a broader teaching role?  Hard to say.  But it's a question I suspect the profession will need to confront at some point in the next couple of decades if it is to find a way to arrest a century-old decline.