by Howard Stein taught me that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He was defending a wall between two free rooms. China and the United States are now knocking down the building. Howard Stein used to stand at the front of a seminar room at Columbia’s Oscar Hammerstein II Center and tell a room full of playwrights that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He had earned the right to say it. Eleven years at the Yale School of Drama as associate dean and head of playwriting, seven years running the playwriting program at Iowa, ten years as the first permanent chairman of the Hammerstein Center, and a lifetime spent turning young writers into working dramatists. When a man like that tells you the Humanities are the enemy, you do not argue. You wait to understand.
What he meant was a distinction about modes of mind. The Arts make. The Humanities study what has been made. A playwright works in the present tense, generating a thing that did not exist that morning, taking the risk that it fails in front of strangers. A scholar of drama works in the past tense, explicating, placing the made thing in a tradition and a theory. Stein’s fear, the fear of every conservatory teacher who has watched a gifted student go quiet, was that the second mode can strangle the first. Teach a young writer enough theory and history and criticism and you can talk the nerve right out of him. He will know too much to write badly, which means he will not write at all. The scholar dissects the frog to learn how it jumps, and the frog stops jumping. That was the enmity Stein named. He wanted the maker protected from the embalmer.
Here is the thing to hold onto. Stein’s quarrel was a family quarrel. He was arguing about how to arrange the rooms inside a house he took for granted, a house where the Arts and the Humanities both lived, each funded, each free, each with a door that closed. His whole argument assumed the building. He wanted a wall between the studio and the seminar so the studio could breathe. Never did he imagine a day when someone would arrive to knock down the studio, the seminar, and the wall together, and pave the lot for something that pays.
That day has arrived, and it has arrived in two countries that like to think they have nothing in common.
Start with China, because China is honest about it. Over the past two years the Ministry of Education ran a campaign to remake the country’s universities, and in the spring it announced that the target had been met. The shape of the cull is plain in the cases. The Communication University of China, one of the nation’s premier schools for media and art, closed five arts majors in 2025: photography, comics, visual communication design, new media art, and fashion design, and folded the survivors into broader technical degrees, rolling photography into a program called film and television photography and production. Its top official, Liao Xiangzhong, explained the logic without flinching. Translation, he said, has been largely replaced by machines, and a four-year degree to teach it wastes national resources. Photography cannot stand alone as a major, he argued, because anyone with a phone now records images. The future, in his phrase, belongs to human-machine cooperation, and the university exists to staff it.
The pattern ran nationwide. Jilin University, East China Normal University, and Nanchang University all cut arts majors including drama, film literature, broadcasting, and animation. Sichuan University canceled thirty-one undergraduate programs, broadcasting and television studies among them. Behind the individual decisions sat a quota. A 2023 directive from the Ministry of Education and four other departments set a target to adjust roughly twenty percent of all university majors by 2025, and recent reporting puts the scale of the overhaul above thirty percent of degree programs and somewhere near twelve thousand offerings cut or suspended. The fields that absorbed the damage were arts, humanities, foreign languages, and management.
The reasoning is openly economic and strategic. Youth unemployment in China runs above sixteen percent, graduate numbers have hit records, and a degree in a saturated field buys a young person almost nothing in the job market. The new majors point where the state is pointing, with nine universities adding programs in embodied intelligence to feed the national push on artificial intelligence, alongside fresh offerings in integrated circuits and the digital economy. A quieter motive is quality control, since more than five hundred universities had once offered the same information-management degree, many without the faculty to teach it well, so part of the cull corrects an earlier glut. Read the policy in the most generous light and it says something defensible: a discipline should earn its place by meeting a national need and getting its graduates hired. Read it in any light and the harder message comes through underneath. The silo is the problem. Enfolding is the cure.
The comfortable response is to file this under authoritarianism and move on. The Party plans the economy, the Party plans the university, and a free country would never treat the life of the mind as a line item. That comfort does not survive a look at home.
Syracuse University, a private research school in New York, announced in 2026 the closure or suspension of ninety-three academic programs, most of them in the humanities and social sciences, on the ground of low enrollment. The administration noted that a third of its programs drew eighty percent of its students, and that fifty-five of the cut programs had no students enrolled at all. The University of Chicago, the school its own students call the place where fun goes to die for its devotion to fifty-seven living and dead languages, paused doctoral admissions across most of its humanities, including English, classics, art history, comparative literature, and linguistics. West Virginia University set the template in 2023 when it eliminated a hundred and sixty-nine programs. Indiana’s public universities sunset two hundred and ten low-enrollment programs in 2026 under a state law that targets any degree producing too few graduates. Plymouth State in New Hampshire moved to pull its arts and humanities into what its provost called an integrated liberal arts model, a phrase doing heavy work, while planning to cut some thirty full-time faculty.
Look closely at the mechanism and it is the same hand China used. At the University of Texas at Austin, the administration is closing the American Studies department along with several gender, ethnic, and language departments, folding them into a single department of social and cultural analysis. The reporting is explicit that budget was not the main driver here, and that is the tell. When a Chinese university folds photography into film-and-television production, we call it industrial policy. When a Texas university folds American Studies and gender studies into social and cultural analysis, we should name it accurately, as a reorganization that lets an institution keep the appearance of teaching a subject while it shrinks and supervises it.
The United States then added a federal hammer that China does not need, since China’s universities already answer to the state. In April 2025 the administration moved against the National Endowment for the Humanities, the agency that since 1965 had funded scholarship, archives, libraries, and museums in every state. It terminated more than a thousand active grants and put most of the staff on leave, by one count eighty percent, then sent termination notices to roughly sixty-five percent of the agency. The official letters told grantees their money was being repurposed in service of the President’s agenda, with reporting that the new priority would be patriotic programming. The companion arts agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, canceled grants to theaters and arts groups within hours of a budget proposal to abolish it. A federal judge later called the humanities cuts unlawful and let a lawsuit proceed, which tells you the cuts moved fast enough to outrun the law.
So we have two systems and three engines. China enfolds the Arts and Humanities for the market and the plan. America enfolds them for the budget and the culture war, the dollars on one side and the politics on the other, with the same merger-and-suspension machinery doing the cutting in both places. The motives differ. The method has converged.
Now to the question that matters, the one Howard Stein would have asked first. Does it work? Is a discipline better off enfolded, or better off in its own silo, walled away from the market and the state, free to ask its questions on its own terms?
Enfolding is effective because some of what it cuts deserved cutting. A program with no students enrolled is administrative driftwood with the lights left on, and Syracuse had fifty-five of them. The demographic cliff is real, the college-age population is shrinking, and tuition-dependent schools cannot fund every chair forever. China’s youth-unemployment problem is real, and a country has a legitimate interest in not graduating a million people into fields that cannot hire them. Enfolding cuts cost quickly, it signals to anxious parents that a degree leads somewhere, and now and then it forces a collaboration that neither department would have chosen on its own. Honesty requires saying that much. The humanities, for their part, made themselves easy to kill. Decades of writing for the handful of specialists who would ever read it, of treating public explanation as beneath the work, of trading the study of beauty and argument for a narrow politics that alienated the same public that paid the bills, left these fields with few defenders when the budget knife came out. A discipline that will not explain itself to the public should expect no rescue from it.
Enfolding is not effective because it mistakes a symptom for a disease and then amputates the wrong limb. Low enrollment and budget strain are symptoms. The cure on offer destroys capacity that takes three generations to build and three months to cut. Even the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, no enemy of reform, warned that Chicago’s cuts on the announced scale would wreck the school’s business model and cost more than they would save. The capacity being dissolved is the trained human power to read closely, argue honestly, weigh evidence, hold a second language in the mind, and make something that did not exist before, and that power is exactly what a society drowning in machine-generated text and engineered falsehood most needs, and exactly what these cuts destroy. China’s wager that a translation degree is obsolete because software translates mistakes the tool for the judgment it requires, since the machine moves the words and a human still has to know whether the words are true. America’s wager that the humanities are an ornament the budget can shed mistakes the foundation for the decoration. Enfolding in particular, set beside honest closure, is the worst option on the table, because it works as camouflage. Honest closure says a dead program is dead and frees the resources. Enfolding keeps the label on the door, slides the subject into a larger unit, and lets the administrator and the politician claim continuity while they perform a reduction. A department of social and cultural analysis that has swallowed American Studies and gender studies can be cut again next year, quietly, one course at a time, with no headline, because the headline already ran when the names came off the doors.
This brings us back to Stein, and to the apparent contradiction in using his words to defend the silo he spent a career criticizing. He called the Humanities the enemy of the Arts, an argument for keeping them apart. I am using him to argue against pulling them apart. The contradiction dissolves once you look at what kind of separation he wanted. Stein asked for a wall between two free rooms inside a house of free inquiry, a piece of zoning that let the maker work without the scholar’s hand on his throat. The enfolders arrive with a wrecking ball and a parking plan. Where Stein drew a line between two living disciplines so each could keep its own air, they pour both into a single corridor that ends at a job or a loyalty oath. Stein’s wall protected one way of asking questions from being answered in the wrong currency. Enfolding hands every discipline two bills it cannot pay, the accountant’s demand for a return and the commissar’s demand for loyalty, and a field that survives only by paying them has already surrendered the independence that made it worth keeping.
A university under real pressure has more than two options, and the honest ones are worth naming. One path is enfolding, the current default, which I have argued is camouflage for reduction. Honest closure is a second, stating plainly that a dead program is dead and moving its resources to the living, which at least respects the people involved and frees real money. A third path protects a core, funding a small but genuine department in each foundational field as public infrastructure, insulated from enrollment arithmetic the way a library or a fire station is, because its value is counted in decades and in goods that never reach a graduate’s first paycheck. Reinvention inside the silo is the fourth, keeping a field’s autonomy while changing what it offers, pairing a language with a profession, turning the humanities outward toward a public that needs help telling truth from forgery, with no dissolving of the department into something alien to it.
My recommendation runs to the third and fourth together, and against the first. Protect a real core in each foundational discipline as public infrastructure, and require those disciplines to reinvent what they teach and to explain themselves to the people who pay for them, while refusing the enfolding that hides a cut behind a merger. Cut what is genuinely dead, plainly and on the record. Keep what is alive in its own room, with its own door, answerable for its relevance and free of any dependence on this year’s enrollment or this administration’s idea of patriotism. That arrangement keeps Stein’s wall and saves the building.
There is a detail in Howard Stein’s record that I cannot read the same way anymore. From 1979 onward, he directed summer seminars for college teachers under the National Endowment for the Humanities, ten of them. The man who warned that the Humanities could kill the Arts spent his summers using a federal humanities agency to make college teachers better at their craft, because he held the wall and the house in his mind at the same time, the rivalry inside the family and the family’s right to exist. That agency has now been gutted in service of an agenda, its grants killed in all fifty states, its people sent home. I think Stein would have recognized the enemy in the room, and known plainly that it was no longer the one he named to us in class.
The cost will not show up on a quarterly report. It will arrive in a generation, in citizens who cannot read a contract or a propaganda feed with a skeptical eye, in artists who were never trained because the studio was paved over, in a public that has lost the muscles for argument at the moment it needs them most. China is placing this bet to win the coming decade of machines. America is placing it to balance a budget and settle a culture war. Both are eating the seed corn and calling it a harvest, and the field will stand empty long after the people who ordered the cutting have gone.
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