Did the humanities go woke because they went broke? That scenario has become one of the more persuasive explanations for the present crisis in the humanities. As their enrolments declined and federal funding shrank, and universities began sending money (and, thus, prestige) toward STEM and professional programs, the humanities went looking for support wherever they could find it. If serious funders wanted academic work to be framed in the language of social justice, then scholars were willing to adapt accordingly. Tyler Austin Harper recently made this case in The Atlantic, arguing that what looked like ideological capture may, in fact, be economic desperation.

There is truth in this. As a STEM professor, I have watched as the modern university has become more and more driven by the types of metrics that favour my side of campus: grant dollars, industry partnerships, obvious economic utility, and jobs for graduates. The engineering school can point to nanotechnologies; the biomedical school to cancer drugs; and the chemistry and computer science departments to batteries and artificial intelligence, respectively. In stark contrast, an English department has a harder time proving its worth to administrators who are, increasingly, looking for money to fund an ever-expanding university.

But this account, while helpful, lets the humanities off too easily. The humanities did not simply have politicisation imposed on them by administrators or market logic. They helped create the intellectual conditions that made politicisation attractive, prestigious, and, eventually, routine.

A new report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences now makes a similar point from inside the academy. The report is careful. It rejects the crude claim that the humanities are simply corrupt or unserious. But it nevertheless finds, across every field studied, evidence of declining scholarly standards, the drop driven, in part, by the substitution of political criteria for scholarly ones and by a weakening of older ideals of rigour and objectivity.

But the report is mostly diagnostic. What still needs explaining is why those habits became so powerful, and why they proved so professionally useful. My answer is that critical theory did not merely politicise scholarship. It also made scholarship easier to produce.