As a specialist on a gay writer killed in the Civil War, I won't be a homophobic Franco supporter. Not only because of that, of course, but that would be major contradiction.
But thinking that humanities research and teaching should be mainly about promoting issues of social justice also seems wrong to me. We are often adjacent to such concerns, but if we put them front and center as the main justification and raison d'être of everything we do, then something odd happens. Since a lot of what we do is not directly about that, then our work on a daily basis makes only a trivial contribution to any social justice movement. Most of the research questions that might be interesting will be tangential or adjacent to activist goals, at best (at worst).
So the social relevance of the humanities is related to only a small part of what we do, and to make that the whole enchilada risks destroying the humanities completely, making most research questions seem trivial.
A related problem is that we are after nuance and complexity, and the goals of woke movements can be expressed in 3 or 4 word slogans.
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