The humanities are not dead

All right then, it’s official.

People like me have gone out of fashion, grown superannuated, way past their sellby date. According to no less an authority than The New Yorker, that most bookish of large-circulation magazines, the academic study of imaginative literature is in the process of vanishing from American college campuses. The humanities, we’re told, are all but finished.

“During the past d…