If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?
Tyler Austin Harper | 26 August 2025 | The Atlantic
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was lit, COVID-19 was still a mysterious respiratory illness in Wuhan, and I was a Ph.D. candidate in a dying field: comparative literature. I was getting ready to Zoom interview for a tenure-track job near Boston that I almost certainly wouldn’t get (and didn’t). Sardined with me in a Greenwich Village coffee shop in December 2019, one of my faculty mentors talked me through, for the thousandth time, the questions I should expect the hiring committee to ask me and dispensed advice about how I should answer them. Then we walked back to his office, lined in handsome foreign-language editions of various novels and works of philosophy, where I would sit for the interview. There, he offered a final piece of wisdom: “Don’t be nervous. It’s just Harvard,” he said, grinning. “It’s not like it’s Chicago.”…