The following is  from a reader who takes issue with  Chad McIntosh's Euthanizing Liberty.  Secondarily, he takes issue with me since I basically endorse McIntosh's contentions. McIntosh maintains that

. . .  the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, [is] a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

According to my reader:

Chad's article is interesting, but short-sighted. The humanities aren't ever going to close entirely . . . . My issue is that as long as our current culture is converting people and otherwise pushing out [producing?] lefties, it's only a matter of time until they take over the country. Suppose Trump wins. What are you going to do in five years? How is he going to change the culture and stop the country from becoming more and more liberal? He's stopping some of the bleeding and slowing the left down, and that is reason to vote for him over alternatives, but let's not get carried away. I'm reminded of what Peter Hitchens said in his recent interview with Eric Metaxas talking about Christianity disappearing from e.g. political discourse: "Once you've given away that ground, it's hard to see what you can do to fight back." It seems to me that Christianity was needed to renew conservative values with each generation. Without it (or some suitable replacement), unless we fix the superstructure to include it (or a replacement), it's only a matter of time.

My reader appears to be arguing that humanities departments ought not to be shut down because they impede to some slight extent the total leftist takeover of the culture.  But that impedance can happen only if some conservatives manage to get jobs, and eventually tenure, in these departments.  These hardy souls, however, would have to hide their conservative beliefs to get hired in the first place, and then carefully keep them hidden for six or so years until they — if they are lucky — get tenure.  So during that time they would be unable to do anything to impede the spread of leftism.  But once tenured, they would not be safe either, for any espousal of conservative positions would get them branded racists and white supremacists, and, as we all know, tenure affords no absolute protection if the administrators and the faculty really want to get rid of you.

More fundamentally, any conservatives in humanities departments that are allowed to speak and publish and influence students and get tenure would be vastly outnumbered by their leftist 'colleagues.' So the net effect of keeping the humanities departments in operation would be a further poisoning of the culture with 'woke,' i.e., benighted, leftist nonsense.

So isn't McIntosh right to celebrate the closure of humanities departments, even if the closures are motivated by the wrong reasons, e.g. the failure of business types to grasp the value of the humanities (properly understood and properly taught)?

And wouldn't it be better for serious truth-seekers to abandon the present-day pseudo-universities and set up their own competing institutions, both on-line and with brick and mortar?  Back to my reader:

As an aside, it's nice that he [McIntosh] holds you [BV] up as an example of an independent scholar, but I don't think a scholar of equal ability would be taken even fractionally as seriously as you are if he hadn't also held a professorship in the past. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you having gotten that "stamp of approval" is important.

Getting taken seriously is much more a matter of publishing competent work in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals and presses. That does not require having a Ph.D., or an academic post, or having had a (tenured, full-time) academic post.  My being retired from a tenured, full-time academic post does nothing to enhance my credibility in the eyes of leftists for whom I remain a 'racist,' a 'white supremacist,' and and a 'theocrat.' And to these despicable people, any proof that I might proffer that I am not any of these things is just further proof that I am.

It is important to realize just how sick and destructive academe has become, and not just in the humanities and social sciences. A prime example at the present time is the tenured fool, Robin DiAngelo.