On the Receiving End of “Crisis”

Noemí Fierros revisits Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s 2023 discussion in light of the current crisis facing college humanities departments.

By Noemí FierrosNovember 8, 2025

• Education

IT WAS JUST over a month ago, the first Monday of my senior year of college, when I received an email from the University of California payroll portal declaring my status as “former employee.” Without warning, my job as a writing counselor was gone. Not only had I lost my primary source of income (weeks after successfully interviewing for a promotion), but, just as the school year began, countless students had also lost access to a program aiming to facilitate their transition to the rigorous expectations of university-level writing. In the weeks since, I have received countless phone notifications about reservations for counseling sessions I have then had to awkwardly cancel, texting a hasty “Sorry, I got laid off because funding and hiring has been federally frozen. Good luck on your first college essay!”

I’ve been on the receiving end of belittling comments and questions regarding the value of my American literature and culture degree since before I even arrived on campus as a freshman. Four years later, the “crisis” plaguing humanities has spread across higher education writ large (many of my friends found their jobs similarly slashed come the beginning of fall quarter: not only humanities students, but arts and STEM students too). For students and faculty, the concrete consequences of the most recent federally led attack on the livelihood of humanities programs are unprecedented, precipitous, and dangerous. Twenty-eight California campuses, including mine, have had their humanities funding cut as part of President Trump’s slashing of the National Endowment for the Humanities this April. With the 2025 fall semester upon us, California public universities in both the UC and Cal State systems are still missing five million dollars in grants toward the humanities.

In this context, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera’s 2023 essay, “Where the Humanities Are Not in Crisis,” reads almost like prophecy. On their own, my experiences as a student may seem like anecdotes, but paired with those of Herlihy-Mera, an author and humanities professor, they testify to not only the extremity but also the sheer breadth of this year’s attack on humanities divisions in state universities. Writing in response to NYU professor John Guillory’s 2022 book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies, Herlihy-Mera insists that having professors from prestigious private universities lead the discussion on the current crisis in the humanities marginalizes—sometimes silences—the voices of those who are truly in the belly of the beast. Humanities researchers from smaller public universities often rely on grants to complete their work. Yet thy are competing with elite professors at prestigious private universities for the same financial awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. As Herlihy-Mera puts it, “NEH grants going to scholars who are not in financial need of them is yet another mechanism of silence cloaked as ‘opportunity.’”

Herlihy-Mera observes that “some of the best scholarship about the crisis […] has come from authors who are living the crisis.” Herlihy-Mera references a group of graduate students at Universidad de Puerto Rico–Mayagüez who, in addition to lack of funding, face the additional barrier of English-only requirements of the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies, a restriction that ultimately blocks them from developing a program on digital critique. According to Herlihy-Mera, funding is just one of many reasons humanities scholars that have been “defined” by the crisis are barred from actively participating in its definition.

In 2025, Herlihy-Mera’s argument is not simply increasingly salient—it’s also scalable. After all, faculty, graduate students, and researchers are not the only ones bearing the brunt of the war on the humanities: everyone, from student employees needing to buy groceries with their paychecks to incoming first-years from underserved backgrounds adjusting to new academic expectations, must be allowed to, in Herlihy-Mera’s words, “enunciate their own circumstances” at the same level of those who have, up until now, “defined [those circumstances] for them.”