Does studying the humanities make us more humane? That it is at least capable of doing so is the underlying premise of the medical humanities programmes – which aim to cultivate empathy among future doctors, to enable them to relate better to their patients – that have proliferated in medical schools across the US in recent years.

It is no coincidence, then, that in the reactionary period of rising fascism we’re living through, humanities courses – and all aspects of higher education that might cause students to question right-wing narratives about their nation – are under relentless attack.

Decades of anti-intellectual rhetoric from the right, along with the corporatization of the university, which involves macroeconomic changes such the expansion of administrations and the dismantling of faculty power, have come to a head.

I am not speaking merely of the attacks on ‘critical race theory’, women’s and gender studies, African American and other ethnic studies, DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) initiatives, and university governance that characterize numerous red states and have advanced furthest in Ron DeSantis’s fascist Florida.

These attacks are, of course, all quite bad enough and have rendered working conditions impossible for some educators. But we are now also beginning to see a trend in the US, especially pronounced among rural universities, of the laying off of tenured faculty, as entire arts and humanities departments and majors are scrapped or consolidated in favor of more explicitly job-focused programs.

As reporter Anemona Hartocollis grimly concluded in The New York Times last week, the debate over whether a liberal arts degree is worth the price “now seems to be over, and the answer is ‘no’”.

She wrote that students “are fleeing to majors more closely aligned to employment”, resulting in university administrators – “often aided by outside consultants” – cutting entire programs like foreign languages, art history, American studies, and more.

While the situation for the arts and humanities in American higher education is indeed grim, I take issue with Hartocollis referring to the hand-wringing of “economists and more than a few worried parents” as if they are the only voices on the topic that matter. There has never been a fair ‘debate’ about what higher education should offer that involves all relevant stakeholders, including students and future students.

The structures that shape our education landscape are not inevitable. They are the outcome of decades of bad decisions by state and federal policymakers, not-for-profits like the College Board (which act more like businesses than they should), and university administrations. Together, these actors have succeeded in reframing education as an ‘industry’ rather than a public good, but we don’t have to accept that narrative. Insulating education from markets would allow us all to benefit from the social enrichment that comes from providing students with the opportunity to study a wealth of subjects outside of a strictly, and narrowly economic, utilitarian focus.

There is no question that the outrageous burden of student debt that many Americans carry is a crisis, nor that a university degree in any subject costs far too much in this country. But these sad facts are the outcome of our society devaluing education and intellectual exploration, and not a reflection of the value of a liberal education, which cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Of course, it’s impossible not to think about the economics of education at a time when housing and healthcare are also increasingly unaffordable, leaving many Americans struggling. And while student loan relief of the type President Joe Biden champions would help, it would not address the larger exploitative and predatory structures that got us here.

In any case, pushing more students away from studying French or anthropology and into business programs will not, in the aggregate, make life in the US more affordable – only major structural reforms to reverse decades of increasing inequality can do that.

This topic is a personal one for me. I was raised as a right-wing evangelical Christian and indoctrinated in staunchly right-wing Christian schools before I had the chance to go to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where I double majored in history and German. Despite my parents’ harsh religion and politics, they still believed in the value of a good education for its own sake and did not try to limit me to evangelical universities, and as a result my world expanded greatly.

Exposed to a much more diverse group of people than I ever had been before – both on campus in Indiana and while studying abroad in Germany and England – I inevitably came to question, and reject, much of what I had been taught growing up. This is what conservatives are afraid of. It’s why they aren’t concerned about higher education being prohibitively expensive, even as they still try to exert as much control over what is taught in universities as possible. (About 38% of Americans overall earn at least four-year degrees, according to the US Census Bureau, and most of them don’t come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.)

For my part, I eventually went on to earn a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University and worked in higher education for six years after finishing that degree. At the University of South Florida, I taught students who arrived with a strictly ‘dollars and cents’ approach to their education and were skeptical of the honors core courses they had to take that weren’t geared toward ‘useful’ subjects like science or economics. In some cases, though, I was able to watch their skepticism melt away as they found joy in exploring the arts and humanities.

Obviously, not everyone who gets access to this sort of education will become an artist or writer. Most will not, and that is as it should be. But learning about these subjects allows students to question received wisdom, to grasp divergent perspectives and complex contexts, to cultivate information literacy, to effectively argue points, to sort through values and learn self-awareness, and to find the common humanity in people who at first seem radically ‘other’.

We are not increasingly depriving America’s youth of these opportunities because we “have to.” We are doing so because corporate interests and right-wing extremists have steamrolled the power of university faculty and departments to the point that most university teaching is now done by poorly paid contingent faculty, and yet the cost of higher education has continued to rise, even as housing and healthcare have also become outrageously expensive.

To return to the question posed at the beginning of this column, I don’t know that we can draw a straight line between studying the humanities and developing a more humane outlook. But I do know that access to a rich education that includes serious engagement with the humanities can open students’ eyes to a wide array of social possibilities and help them understand the systemic impact of policy decisions, enabling them to more effectively work toward a more just and equitable future should they care to do so.

Young people pushed away from pursuing their own interests will be less likely to challenge the status quo as adults, I suspect. As American higher education, and the humanities in particular, continue to be decimated, we should be clear-eyed about who benefits, and remember that another future is possible.