Lecture hall. Image: Kai Schreiber, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some rights reserved.President Trump recently tried to eliminate the National Education Association and National Endowment for the Humanities. This proposal is another step in the already long process of marginalizing the humanities in society. According to Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher, the effects of the devaluation of and growing disinterest in the humanities could jeopardise democracy itself. This a general tendency which can be observed in the academic context of several countries and particularly in the United States since the early 1980s. This raises the question: to what extent has such a shift served as a favourable factor to Trump’s election?
Recent evidence (collected between 2000 and 2012 in a group of thirty countries) shows that the number of students who get degrees in the humanities area (graduates and PhDs) does not correlate with the increase of higher education attendance in general. The negligence of these fields was more pronounced at the doctoral level, with some countries registering a double loss: a decrease both in relative and absolute terms.
In the line with the German sociologist Norbert Elias’ thinking, the complexity underlying the issue of adherence to higher education by scientific fields has been kept in mind throughout this research. The question is double-edged: on the one hand, which courses and vacancies are available and, on the other, what are the choices made by students? Thus, greater or less adherence to the humanities results from a set of choices, determined by a large number of individuals with a wide range of interdependent interests and, therefore, under constant possibility to influence and be influenced.
