The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities

In 1964, an influential report identified a disquieting trend in academia. “Increasingly during the past few years,” it began, “concern has been expressed about the condition, in this country, of those fields of intellectual activity generally called the humanities.” The 200-plus-page document was a publication of the National Commission on the Humanities, which had been established the previous year.

Reading the commission’s findings six decades later, one could reasonably conclude that...