A new study published Wednesday finds that American doctoral dissertations in history, literature, philosophy, arts and culture are becoming more critical of Western culture, even as fewer people complete them.
The American Academy of Sciences and Letters reported that humanities dissertations dropped 49% from a historic peak of 33,473 in 2015 to 16,951 in 2025. The dataset overrepresents large research universities, with declines most pronounced at elite schools.
Meanwhile, the share of words tied to identity politics and social theory grew tenfold from 1960 to 2025, with a sharp acceleration after 2019. That includes terms such as “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” “patriarchy,” “oppression,” “queer,” “equity,” “diversity,” “whiteness,” “marginalization,” “privilege,” “diaspora,” “disability,” “gender,” “feminist,” “systemic racism” and “social justice.”
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This growth was concentrated in literature, anthropology, psychology, communications and interdisciplinary studies.
Overall, the study’s findings show that the tone of words surrounding “Western” became significantly less positive in 65 years of dissertations.
Stanford University researchers Josiah Ober, Rachel George and Kirill Kalinin analyzed the full text of 443,543 humanities and social science dissertations from 678 universities archived at ProQuest between 1960 and 2025.
“Our study suggests that the academy has become more critical of Western and American cultural heritage in its scholarly rhetoric while simultaneously sustaining, or even strengthening, its rhetorical commitment to truth-seeking,” they wrote in the study.
According to the study, the findings describe trends and can’t explain why humanities programs lost ground.
Yale University history and religious studies professor Carlos Eire, who chaired the advisory committee overseeing the study, blamed a hostile job market for scaring off non-Marxist students from the humanities. He noted that 10 Ph.D. graduates he supervised over the past decade still have not found tenure-track jobs.
“My field is not just dying; it’s dead,” Mr. Eire told The Washington Times. “No one is hiring anymore because the field itself is unnecessary, but the few jobs available require a Marxist class struggle.”
He noted that most of the few university jobs that remain available to humanities doctoral graduates specify race, class, gender and related topics as requirements for getting hired.
The study cited outside research showing that the share of new humanities Ph.D.s with jobs lined up at graduation declined from two-thirds in 1990 to less than half in 2020.
The academy commissioned the study and bills itself as nonpartisan. Mr. Ober and Mr. Kalinin hold positions at the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s conservative-leaning think tank.
On the positive side, they found that language about facts and truth remained the most common category and did not decline.
Dissertations declined by 59% in interdisciplinary studies, from 10,707 in 2015 to 4,373 in 2025, and by 52% in history over the same period, from 7,496 to 3,583.
History and literature combined fell from 30% of all dissertations in 1965 to less than 11% in 2025. Dissertations for literature/language dropped by half over a 20-year period, from 8,162 in 2005 to 4,084 in 2025.
The authors cautioned that small regional universities and historically Black colleges use ProQuest less frequently, suggesting they could be undercounted in the data.
They also noted that recent dissertation counts were depressed by registration delays between 2023 and 2025.
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