Populism, religion, nationalism, and the revival of humanities: a cross-national study of higher education enrollments 1960-2017

• In Event: The Political Context of Education

Abstract

Within universities, the humanities have been in decline for two centuries. Amidst understandable scholarly concern about this ‘death of the humanities,’ the literature has largely glossed over the fact that in some countries, the humanities have persisted in the university – and in some cases are even showing new signs of revival. What is driving this nascent new wave of the humanities and, more broadly, what are the social bases for retaining and expanding the humanities in the university? We argue that religious, nationalist, and populist regimes and movements, often engaged in political projects around illiberal ideologies, are bringing back the humanities in some countries. For instance, the nationalist-populist political project in Hungary has sought to repress the critical social sciences but bring back the study of Hungarian history and literature, in order to strengthen the mythology of Hungarian identity and ‘greatness.’ To explore these possibilities, we analyze country-level higher education enrollments in the arts and humanities, using a new field-disaggregated tertiary enrollment dataset covering up to 118 countries from 1960 to 2017. Using panel models with country fixed effects, we find that the arts and humanities enjoy stronger support in societies with regimes that are anchored in religion, nationalism, or populism. Our paper illuminates the impacts of illiberal regimes on the university curriculum and brings new arguments and empirical insights to the scholarly literature on the arts and humanities.

Authors

• Yuhan Gao, University of California-Irvine

• Evan Schofer, University of California-Irvine

• Julia C. Lerch, University of California-Irvine