A 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 talented students from the humanities. He noted that 10 doctoral 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 specific training in woke fixations such as identity issues and power dynamics.”
He noted that most of the few university jobs still available to humanities doctoral graduates require race, class, gender and related studies to get hired.
The study cited outside research showing that the share of new humanities doctorates 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.
Several academics not involved in the study said its findings confirm a growing divide between humanities research and soaring demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. But they also warned that the study doesn’t prove what caused the decline in dissertations.
“The report does not establish that increasingly critical rhetoric caused declining student numbers,” said political scientist Daniel Schatz, a former visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford and Georgetown universities. “Weak employment prospects, funding pressures and the demands of doctoral training are powerful alternative explanations.”
Rhetoric and writing professor S. Scott Graham, associate director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, said increased identity-related language doesn’t mean humanities research has abandoned its traditional search for truth, despite critics saying otherwise.
“The crisis in the humanities is driven by declining funding and a popular story about what the humanities are,” Mr. Graham said. “The real story here is that this report shows us that this popular narrative isn’t true.”
Regional variations
The study found that five schools contributed nearly 1 in 5 of all humanities dissertations between 1960 and 2025: the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, New York University, Indiana University and the University of California at Berkeley.
The University of Chicago contributed more than any other school, recording 11,000 over 65 years.
Schools such as Yale and Harvard, and large state university systems in Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois, also recorded large numbers.
California led all states with over 56,000 dissertations from Stanford, the University of Southern California, the University of California system and many smaller programs. New York recorded 50,293 and Illinois 34,281.
Rachel Fulton Brown, a medieval history professor at the University of Chicago since 1994, said funding changes and a shift away from faculty teaching “pre-modern” history have accompanied “much smaller cohorts” of doctoral students since the early 2000s.
“At Chicago, this focus on modernity has been supported further by the fact of our department’s being in Social Sciences,” she said. “As a department, we tend to work more on questions of political economy and globalization, including empires, than on more intellectual or cultural questions.”
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, accused the study of overlooking liberal biases in humanities scholarship.
“The reality is more complex, and unfortunately it leans toward Ph.D.-holding scholars embracing very weak standards of evidence and a very strong disposition toward telling stories that bend against what is true,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University.
He pointed to a “State of Scholarship” report that Vanderbilt University published on June 5. It faulted contemporary history, philosophy, anthropology, music, sociology and literature studies for prioritizing liberal race and gender identity agendas over the “disinterested inquiry” that traditionally guides research.
“That’s how we end up with highly educated people, including professors in the humanities, upholding the idea that men and women can be really and truly members of the sex opposite their biological one,” he added.
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