First They Came for the English Majors

Inside Trump’s plan to defund liberal arts, privatize education, and silence the disciplines that teach us to think.

Photo by Rubén Rodriguez on Unsplash

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Donald Trump once said, “I love the poorly educated.” He meant it as a compliment. Or a kink. Hard to tell with such a self-described “stable genius.” But it wasn’t just a throwaway line. It was a blueprint.

As always, Trump is up to his old division tricks. He’s poking at the soft white underbelly of the ongoing cultural wars. But this time it’s between the academics and the working class.

And education is losing.

In the last decade, Americans have lost faith in higher education. A 2024 Gallup Poll found that 68% of Americans felt higher education was headed in the wrong direction.

And it’s no surprise that Republicans have lost the most faith. In 2015, 11% of Republicans had “little or no confidence” in higher education. Today, that number has risen to 50%.

Recently, Trump had a solution. He plans to redirect 3 billion in Harvard grants to trade schools.

But it’s not about replacing Shakespeare with shop class or Aristotle with auto repair. His end game is far more sinister.

Education is Not a Zero-Sum Game

How did we get to this strange binary where building bridges is noble, but studying bridge metaphors is elitist?

We all know the arguments. The humanities are dying because they don’t lead to income-earning jobs. Students rack up debt only to land in low-wage, algorithm-managed careers that offer no real path up. Been there. Let’s just say there’s a reason why my major — Liberal Arts — is no longer an option in most schools.

Meanwhile, trades are being romanticized by politicians who have never spent a day working one. “Learn to weld,” they say, as if any of them have ever picked up a chipping hammer. These jobs are backbreaking, under-protected, and increasingly subject to automation and outsourcing by legal immigrant labor.

No, the problem isn’t academia vs. skilled trades. It’s that we’ve built an economy that treats both thinkers and workers as disposable. And we’re teaching young people that their value lies only in what they can produce, not what they can understand, question, or create.

It’s why Trump is attacking the humanities.

The humanities are where we learn to read between the lines, spot propaganda in a headline, empathize with people we’ll never meet, and argue without needing to win. These are not luxuries. They’re the skills that keep democracies from sliding into authoritarianism and dinner tables from erupting over Thanksgiving.

And yet, they’re being dismissed as soft. Frivolous. Feminine.

That’s not a coincidence.

Once you brand something as frivolous, it becomes easy to cut. And once you equate frivolity with femininity, you’ve got the perfect political target: a subject that doesn’t promise profit, isn’t seen as masculine, and tends to ask inconvenient questions, such as who gets to be in power?

Your knee-jerk reaction might be to “blame the patriarchy!” Blah, blah, blah. But not so fast, my feisty feminists. An education system where young women are nudged away from careers they love because of impossibly low wages, and young men are herded toward what’s useful, hurts both genders.

Everyone’s boxed in. Everyone loses.

Women who major in literature, English, or sociology are told they’re wasting their time. Men who want to teach first grade or write screenplays are told to man up and pick up a wrench.

Young boys, especially, get that message early. Currently, only 11% of elementary school teachers are male. We keep complaining that boys lack strong male role models. Well, their teachers are an excellent place to start.

Instead, Republicans scapegoat academics. But while the right accuses the academic elite of subsidizing tweed jackets and weeping over Dostoyevsky, Americans must understand that pushing this false war is a distraction. They want the welder to think the philosopher looks down on him, and the literature major to think the lineman voted against her humanity.

Divide and defund. That’s the play.

If you have ever sat through a boring lecture on existentialism, you see the absurdity. A productive society can teach both — how to weld and wonder. We need people who can wire a circuit board and people who can ask whether we should plug it in.

You don’t study the humanities to act smug at dinner parties. You study it to recognize when a leader starts using the language of saviors, scapegoats, and purity. You study ethics to know when a policy is legal but immoral. You study history, so you know when you’re being lied to.

The humanities are where we learn to be human. They don’t make you “woke.”

They make you awake.

When Workers Become Widgets

There’s something eerily familiar about the push to funnel students into state-approved, utility-first career paths.

Something, dare I say (gasp!)…Communist.

Think about it. A central authority decides which skills are valuable, which paths are acceptable, and which forms of knowledge are no longer worth public investment. In Maoist China, this was called re-education. In today’s America, it’s called career readiness.

And China hasn’t abandoned that model. It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just economic pragmatism — as if we’re simply matching students to jobs more efficiently. But the blueprint looks suspiciously familiar. And not in a freedom-loving, liberal democracy kind of way.

Do you know what China’s most popular vocational school is?

It’s Apple.

In China, state-guided education funnels young people directly into factory internships, often in partnership with tech giants. Foxconn, the company behind your iPhone, doubles as a training ground. The goal? Simple: produce skilled, compliant labor with just enough training to meet economic demands. (And none of the intellectual wanderlust to question them.)

Unfortunately, when we gut the humanities and steer young people toward “useful” careers, we’re not just losing Shakespeare. We’re importing a model of education that prioritizes obedience over curiosity and production over participation.

If you build a society of workers who don’t ask questions, don’t be surprised when you get a nation that doesn’t know how to say no.

Robbing the Poets to Pay the Plumber

Remember when Trump was forced to pay $25 million in fraud settlements over his Trump University — a fake university with no accreditation, no faculty, and no refund policy. Yeah, so that guy is back to lecture America on education.

In 2023, he rebranded his Trump University 2.0 as “The American Academy.” But this time, instead of wasting his own bribe money on another half-cooked con, he had a better idea: why not just raid real universities’ endowments to fund his anti-woke erudition?

And here is the math test, America. Trump promises it won’t add “a single dime to the American debt.” Sure, maybe if he’s pulling it from Pete Hegseth’s beer slush fund. Or maybe — just maybe — he’s counting on the public not asking too many questions.

Which is exactly what happens when you kill the humanities.

Because I promise you this. When you kill the humanities, you get a nation that knows how to build things, but not how to ask whether it should.

How Do We Save the Humanities?

We stop pretending that plumbers and poets are arch enemies. One builds your house. The other helps you question what a home means. And if you don’t think we need both, you’re already halfway to authoritarianism.

We fund public universities like they matter — because they do. And yes, we fund trade schools too. But we stop letting politicians use one to destroy the other.

Parents: Stop asking your kids, “What job will that major get you?” and start asking, “What kind of citizen will it make you?”

Students: Don’t be afraid to study subjects that won’t land you in a cubicle. You are not a wrench. You are not a spreadsheet. You are not a quarterly earnings report.

And policymakers: If you’re so afraid of students reading history, philosophy, and ethics, maybe the problem isn’t the curriculum.

Maybe it’s the mirror.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.