Green Shoots in the Humanities
By nearly every measure that can be reasonably assembled—undergraduate majors, tenure-track hires, departmental budgets, public attention—the humanities in the United States have been contracting for more than a decade. Philosophy departments, classics programs, and literature faculties have borne the brunt of this contraction, and the story has become familiar enough that it risks curdling into fatalism. Against that backdrop, it is worth paying attention when something grows. Meleteon is one of those exceptions that is worth highlighting on the APA Blog. It is an online learning platform on which PhD-verified scholars teach live humanities courses—history, classics, theology, literature, philosophy—to adult learners who come to the material on their own time and for their own reasons. The name itself is revealing: it evokes the Greek μελέτη (meletē), meaning care, attention, sustained practice—a word that runs through ancient philosophy from the Stoics to the modern understanding of philosophy as a way of life. The choice also reflects a philosophical stance: that the humanities are not primarily credentials to be earned but disciplines to be practiced. What is interesting …
