Donald Trump has declared that if he claims the White House this year, he will create an “American Academy”. He will fund it by raising “billions and billions of dollars” from “taxing, fining and suing excessively large private university endowments” to “compete directly” with “very costly” four-year universities. The vicious ideological wars around the Israel-Palestine conflict and their resonant echoes through legislatures, endowment trusts and university leadership are Trump’s immediate context but he has made no secret of the fact that his plan behind this American Academy is to create an antidote to ‘woke’ universities driven by a political awareness foregrounded by the humanities and the social sciences.

With the world’s most powerful cloud computing investors waiting predatorily to monetise the next big leap in the development of Artificial Intelligence and teachers in high schools and colleges struggling with a flood of ChatGPT-aided student work, the future of the humanities, along with human resources on the whole, has become open to many difficult questions. But deep hostilities around educational curriculum and campus activism have made it clear that identity and ideology, the shaping forces behind the humanities, are looming larger than ever worldwide and, in fact, have started to play greater roles than the force of hard data and science in our bizarrely post-truth era. What this implies is that even if and when the means of persuasion and communication are taken over by AI, the end and the goal will remain firmly rooted in real human subjectivities. These are the subjectivities we seek for our private and public selves and, crucially, the identity that we seek to pass on to posterity through teaching, curricula, educational policy, and in the work we publish on academic and public forums.

In the two worlds I’ve known well — in India and in the United States of America — I’ve experienced the adaptation and the exclusion of identities, both conscious and unconscious, in research and teaching in the humanities in many direct and indirect ways. Being on the margin in one situation — a brown non-Westerner — has sharpened my consciousness of privilege in the other as an educated, urban, upper caste Hindu man. In the US, the previous edition of this battle seemed to be about culture wars — whether the opening of the canon was brought about by the closing of the American mind or by the dread of the onslaught of mediocrity in the name of multiculturalism. The sanctity of the canon has doubtless mutated over the last few decades, as have the tone, pitch, and locus of the culture wars. The formulation of classics as a discipline has been interrogated by the work of figures such as Dan-el Padilla Peralta; Emily Wilson has performed her Homer translations on YouTube with a cardboard crown, cat ears, and a dishevelled wig. But if social media has nourished the resentment of #cancelculture that has sometimes amounted to a refusal to read texts by anyone who doesn’t look like the reader, real power in the world of policy and curriculum has almost completely swung to the other extreme. The legislative, pedagogic, and administrative in many parts of the US have now become unrelenting in their multi-pronged attack on critical race theory and on multiculturalist and decolonising projects in the humanities and the social sciences.

This attack on critical race theory in the US and on the pluralist reality of the Indian State as we’ve experienced them directly are both, on one level, about the discomfort of the privileged that immediately becomes a narrative of denial. The perverse and disturbing fact is that the power of the humanities is indispensable to this very denial. The reconstruction of history as a fictional project in order to change its very philosophy and rhetoric is a terrifying abuse of key humanistic disciplines that also reveals the fundamental power of these disciplines in making and breaking meaning, symbol, and identity. The most lasting — and perhaps the most dangerous — evidence of the importance of the humanities and the imaginative social sciences are the ugliest wars that derive from them.

We’ve seen the reinterpretation of the humanistic as the most blatant handiwork of the ideological in the ceaseless reframing of educational policy and curriculum in India today. I was invited to several consulting sessions with the committee on National Education Policy set up by the Government of India following a brief book I’d published in 2018 on the possibilities of interdisciplinary liberal arts education in India, a nation that has traditionally been trapped between a colonial-bureaucratic model of arts and science education centred on examinations and a breathless fetish for engineering and medicine. As a group, which also included a young Fields Medal-winning mathematician of Indian origin, I found the NEP committee sharply enthusiastic about interdisciplinary liberal arts education that sought to combine range with depth, a radically new direction for postsecondary education in India. But when the policy was published, first in draft and then in final form, what very much felt like the American model of interdisciplinary liberal arts was dressed in the unmistakable language of high-Sanskritic Hinduism. It was clear that the saffronwashing of the multidisciplinary content happened primarily at the formal and the structural plane of rhetoric, language, and historiography. The ideological battle of the arrangement of disciplines, in the final instance, was played in a field of the humanities.

Economics and technology might have pushed traditional humanities to a corner — not just in the university but in the larger public sphere of cultural consumption. Who knows, the needs of economics and technology may very well bring them back closer to the centre if AI does the grunt work of capitalist labour and pushes human beings to more creative and imaginative thinking — if indeed in a future such distinctions are at all clear and sustainable. But it is a saddening kind of irony that the greatest pulse-beat of the humanities, the one that remains forever audible to people on all sides of the political divide, will be ideological. It is up to us — humanists — what we make of this terrifying potential.

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Views are personal