IT ISN’T THAT HARD: Studying the humanities is hard, and that’s a good thing.

As attention spans dwindle, even among students at elite schools, humanities departments are struggling to attract students, he writes. Many colleges are trying to persuade students the humanities are “relevant” and “practical.”

That’s not going to work, writes Williams, who teaches about books and ideas at Bard. “For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.”

He’ll teach two spring seminars this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other on the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. His “bright, self-selecting” students say they’re “eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts,” he writes. But their zeal doesn’t last when they realize that close reading is difficult. “By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI.”

Humanities instruction — at least without lefty deconstruction — largely fell by the wayside long before AI. Probably because teaching the humanities leads to a deep appreciation for Western culture.