This piece seems right to me: arguing that, while "the humanities as we know them" are doomed, that does not mean that the humanities themselves, as a set of disciplined modes of attention and inquiry into human creativity and its creations (a very loose definition), are doomed; and further arguing that, if they are not to be doomed, it will be because people like me--scholars and teachers and devotees of the humanities--fight for them, argue convincingly for them.  Absolutely.  People complain about the decline of the humanities, but often it sounds like an inevitability, like you know that, before lunch break, the bully is going to beat you up and take your lunch money.  This kind of fatalism is self-defeating.  It's also empirically unwarranted.  As Hayot notes in the piece, we can fight--we have to make a case for the value of the humanities, against the many forces (career anxieties, shallow promotions of less valuable degrees like business or even I would argue economics) that would predate on our students.  I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who said, "the mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort."  Work is required by us.

This piece--on what the author calls "apocalypse chic" in the academy, particularly the humanities academy--is a nice analysis of some of the forces, mostly cultural and psychological, encouraging pessimism among the humanists.  Basically it comes down (for me, anyway) to the sense that pessimism and a pose of cynicism are more socially acceptable, but the author--a PhD candidate, and so young and vulnerable--isn't mean enough to say it.  He is a bit unfair to Stanley Fish, who is not a fatalist, but actually making a case for defending the humanities, even if he is dismissive (and a bit contemptuous) of arguments that Tyson finds more compelling.  But he at least cites Fish--it's an interesting essay, and you should read it.  He also mentions Albert Hirschman, who is one of my favorite social theorists (so much more than an economist), and his analysis of what he called The Rhetoric of Reaction, and especially the "Futility Thesis".  Tyson is right to point out that the humanist academy's resignation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look, I recognize that pessimism is cool.  It's certainly more socially acceptable in the humanities than optimism, which most people can't distinguish from "being a sucker."  As a congenital optimist, I resent that.  More importantly, in my experience of about a quarter century as a professor, I have noted the pessimists don't actually do the work of helping sustain the universities they inhabit.  When the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors (or a ridiculously small and ridiculous faction of that Board, led by a real estate developer with no academic distinction) tried to fire the University's President, it was the pessimists who didn't know what to do, and didn't lead the rest of us to refuse to give up hope; they mostly wandered around stunned, like survivors of a bus accident.  It was the optimists and the institutionalists on the faculty, who kept resistance alive long enough for other forces--notably the media and the alumni--to delegitimate (media) and mobilize voice (alumni) to stop the firing.  Fighting is what is required sometimes.  Arguing is required, all the time.  Advocacy is, if not labor, at least effort.  Good effort, delightful effort, but effort nonetheless.  We must be willing to expend it.