"The Humanities Death Spiral"

"Political radicalism, up to and including the apparent repudiation of one's own field of study, functions as a market signal within the reigning value system of the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, in hypercompetitive academic fields whose material resources are vanishing, anti-institutional rhetoric has become one of the most successful stratagems for individual advancement. Such rhetoric, however, also tends to weaken the fields' public and institutional standing. This is why, as anyone familiar with them has likely observed, bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they need to make the case for why their departments should still be funded. But the conjunction of the pandemic's fallout with the longer-term trajectory of decline may push this contradiction past the point where it can be sustained."

Geoff Shullenberger at The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that "radical rhetoric does not necessarily challenge the new ideological regime of the university—and may even abet it."