So the NYT says the Humanities are in trouble in these troubled times.  “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” the headline reads. Possibly, but not as much trouble as the media.

I am never sure whether history is included in media/political discussions of the Humanities, but I will bite here on one bit of justification: If most of the people running our financial and government institutions had even the slightest factual knowledge of history, especially historical trends, they would never have wrecked the economy by placing so much faith in the idea that property values would only go in one direction, up, forever. They would also have known that far from needing to get out of the way, law and government created modern private property markets in the first place and strong periodic restructuring and regulation has always been necessary to maintain them. That did not sound very humanistic, I know, but it is the kind of thing you and learn from humanities education. I will be discoursing on the Panic of 1819 later today myself, a case in point if ever there was one.

But I should perhaps let the Times speak for itself.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

I’m sorry Andrew Delbanco feels irrelevant, but me not so much. We are not hiring right now to be sure and cutbacks are on the way, but as the Times figures indicate, the humanities seem to be falling apart at about the same rate as everything else in the world economy. At the same time, in my Midwestern public university, at any rate, our history enrollments and graduate applications are up and undergraduates seem to be looking for historical perspective more than ever, wondering how the hell we got here from there, and where else we might be going.

In short, this Times article seems to be premature, chasing after a trend that might develop but has not quite happened yet. Frankly, I put it down to the schadenfreude toward humanities academia that has long fairly pulsated through the cultural coverage of our tottering elite media institutions.