chad wellmon

“Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age” out in just a few weeks. Feel the hype: “…a magisterial tour-de-force of historical scholarship…It has the potential to alter the debate over the place of the humanities…” Warren G. Breckman amazon.com/dp/022673806X/…

@thezachloeffler An accountability compact of two…written and deleted several times 🤦🏻

[to myself] Do not get sucked into the Marxist discourse, do not get…

@XianMind Thank you! Love to hear what you think.

Swung by the Amazon locker to pick up @cwellmon’s latest.

The problem w/ higher ed is also our social problem: “many of us live as collections of strangers, each pursuing our own ends & college does nothing to develop the sense that what we do in our day-to-day lives resonates w/ people beyond ourselves.” nytimes.com/2026/05/20/opi…

@daniel_dsj2110 @DamonLinker I try and go big in After the University. We’ll see. Just to say the impulse persists

@DamonLinker He’s the best at doing it, imo. Was awarded the Jacques Barzun prize for the equality book which kind of went under the radar. I interviewed Darrin about the book for The Nation: thenation.com/article/cultur…

There has been a massive revival of big ideas books for the last decade or so in the field of history—published often with the big trade presses. A generation ago there was wide spread skepticism of such works in the profession but now you can find everywhere big ideas books—stretching from antiquity to the present—on equality, democracy, “sapiens,” “capitalism,” “racism,” “anthropocene,” “humanity,” and so on. There even is a book debunking the pseudo science of prehistory—most of which is premised on the big idea that anthropological studies of the earliest human beings can explain various aspects of modern human societies.

Ron Washington excellence…

Pub date not for another month but you can already get After the University in just a few days amazon.com/After-Universi…

A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I. @DouthatNYT interviews @jennfrey for @nytopinion

I'm grateful to @DouthatNYT for inviting me on his podcast to discuss the fate of the liberal arts and humanities in the age of AI. I hope that all those who follow higher ed and care about the liberal arts will listen. nytimes.com/video/opinion/… nytimes.com/video/opinion/…

It exists

@alexbronzini @monthly @tab_delete this is great: "It’s a forgivable offense: the kid does sound like a piece of work. But all this undercuts How to Rule the World’s thesis....Stanford can’t be doing all the work here. What gives?"

For the @monthly, I reviewed @tab_delete’s first book, “How to Rule the World.” Theo Baker is a gifted writer, but his contempt for his subjects gets in the way. washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/19/fea…

Glad to see more and more people discovering @leifweatherby’s book Language Machines. I still think it’s the single best academic work yet produced on the cultural and philosophical significance of AI, even though the author is a person of low moral character (he’s a Bills fan).

@leifweatherby Yes cause vibes

@cwellmon Is using Claude by comparison spiritual?

A lot goin on here but the phrase “physical google” is noted

And that’s how you do the higher ed dialectic these days.

The primary mission of the university is the creation and transmission of knowledge….also i’d pay several hundred dollars to watch Texas and UCLA play baseball right about now. The Roch is insane.

@JohnDSailer “Physically googling…” best line in quite sometime

This is ironic because a great antidotes to the problems Haidt identifies (e.g., safetyism) is getting out there and doing physical work. Like Googling.

@jamesharrigan The German is clear…? lol.

@cwellmon I just read that twice and still have no idea what he is saying.

When education “becomes an end in itself, by becoming an asset & possession which no longer aspires to be realized in society, it absorbs that element of vanity, of thinking oneself better & excluding others, into its own concept," distorting eduction into a vanity. (Adorno)

@SWGoldman @MattZeitlin Cut through all the shit and just make it a requirement for faculty on a rotating basis. Would certainly satisfy everyone :)

@MattZeitlin @cwellmon That's the ticket

We were never woke. We just wanted our Pharrell pop.

@DLaurence401 Yeah…that’s very much an Adorn-ism. Keeping those subjects and objects in constant play or just the jumble of his syntax

@cwellmon The statement has a ring to it; yet I confess myself puzzled to grasp the model or mechanism of social action and agency implicit in “aspiring to be realized in society.” Who is doing what to whom how?