See, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there is a crisis occurring in the humanities. I cannot remember the last time I browsed the op-ed section of The New York Times without encountering someone worrying about “the continuing value of a humanities education in an increasingly technology-driven world” or something similar. For the past several years, stories about declining funding, poor job prospects, and sagging enrollments have dominated the public conversation. These stories are so prevalent, in fact, that it has become rather trite to publicly wring one’s hands over the decline of the humanities. The New Republic even features the macabre article tag “Humanities Deathwatch.” In truth, the existence of the crisis is so solidly established that complaining about the hand-wringing over the crisis has itself become a cliché.

Yet the faint reverberations of distant pianists playing the Marche funèbre of the humanities can be heard everywhere. Many public officials—like overbearing uncles at a funeral—have leaned over to offer counsel, urging everyone to consider degrees in STEM fields. President Obama has made public proclamations about the importance of financial support for STEM subjects to ensure a thriving workforce. The standard avuncular narrative about why we should choose STEM subjects runs like this: In the future, as science and technology continue to grow in cultural importance, there are going to be more and more jobs in STEM fields—and, by implication, fewer and fewer jobs in the humanities. There are figures from The National Center for Education Statistics showing as much. It is the staid duty of educators to ensure that our graduates have the skills they need to participate in tomorrow’s so-called “knowledge economy,” especially if America is to remain globally competitive—or so the argument goes.

The more I heard of this overbearing uncle’s counsel, the more I wanted another drink. As I wandered back to the hotel bar alongside a group of graduate students leaving a lecture on Ernest Hemingway, I started thinking: Isn’t it exactly this sort of hyper-competitive anti-logic that created the crisis of the humanities in the first place? Insistent warnings about the need for practicality—for sacrifices in the name of the job market—have filled students with a fearsome anxiety about their financial futures. Are you going to try and pay your electric bill with music, Susan?

In other words, the humanities crisis is largely a positive feedback loop created by stressing out over economic outcomes. Research by government bureaus held that people who studied STEM disciplines had better employment prospects. As a result, state and federal education budgets consistently made these subjects a priority. Enrollment in the humanities slumped, and this made it more difficult for budding humanists and artists to succeed, not least because fewer and fewer jobs were available in the academy.