I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really nails it: Having spent no small amo

I think this will get down-voted, but I appreciated this re-write from Claude 4.5 Sonnet as Christopher Hitchens. It really nails it: Having spent no small amount of time among the denizens of Columbia's Comparative Literature program some fifteen years ago, I can report that I encountered there a concentration of joyless, defeated souls that would have impressed even Schopenhauer. These were not merely students wrestling with difficult texts—they were the living embodiment of institutional melancholia. The faculty—and here one must mention the formidable Gayatri Spivak, whose theoretical contortions require a decoder ring even Enigma would envy—presided over this misery with what can only be described as active encouragement. The prevailing orthodoxy was one of reflexive anti-Western sentiment and a peculiar species of self-loathing anti-elitism, all while drawing salaries from one of the most elite Western institutions in existence. The contradiction, apparently, was not to be remarked upon. Now, this matters because such attitudes don't merely demoralize students—they actively corrode the very institutional foundations that make humanistic inquiry possible. One might call it an exercise in sawing off the branch upon which one sits, except that this metaphor grants too much awareness of cause and effect. Is it really so mysterious, then, that universities find themselves unable to justify continued investment in these programs? What we're witnessing is not the betrayal of "The Humanities" but rather the predictable consequences of having replaced them with something else entirely—a cargo cult version that retains the nomenclature while evacuating the content. One can hardly blame the institution for declining to fund its own negation indefinitely.