Oh, The Humanities! How the Liberal Arts Can Save Themselves
Is it possible to imagine a society without the humanities? Such a society has probably never existed in all of human history. There is little doubt that the human animal is obsessed by its own past, by the meaning of its existence, by narratives and theories which help it make sense of experience. Whatever science and technology help us to achieve, they remain useful tools which offer little insight into the core of our emotional lives and the bulk of what motivates us on a day-to-day basis. They can answer the question of “how” but have little to say as to “why.”
As has been pointed out before, the scientific method has proven itself successful by limiting the questions it can answer to falsifiable hypotheses. This has allowed the extraordinary progress of our understanding of the natural world, but it has also meant the permanent divorce of the humanities and natural sciences into C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” and the Methodenstreit of the German professors. The “natural philosophers” of yesteryear are gone, and we are the better for the triumph of empirical inquiry—provided we don’t convince ourselves that it is the only form of knowledge.
Just because the scientific method is not applicable to all the questions besetting humanity does not mean we should limit the questions we ask. How great an impact would Einstein or Andrei Sakharov or Subramayan Chandrasekhar have had on the world if they had limited their insights to natural science and ignored political and moral questions? Can a mind even think the creative thoughts that advances in engineering or particle physics or evolutionary biology require without being exposed to anything beyond a narrowly technological education?
Despite all of this—that is, the seemingly self-evident relevance of the humanities as disciplines—there is talk by informed observers that a world without any sustained inquiry into literature, art, philosophy, and history may be on the horizon. This possibility, and the supposed horrors it would unleash, is of course nothing new. It has been kicked around by apocalyptic cranks and reactionary snobs for decades. Discussing it leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who recall Allan Bloom defending his shrinking profession against the terror of Rock and Roll and affirmative action.
The defense of the humanities and the liberal arts can at times take on the tone of a rear-guard action. It is no coincidence that the most ardent defenders of the humanities are those who make careers in them and often have little skill or expertise to do anything else. They can oftensound rather like the genteel nineteenth-century French nobleman who refuses to sully himself with the work of tradesmen.
We also don’t need to agree with Eric Hobsbawm when he claims in The Age of Extremes that today’s young people are living in a “perpetual present,” knowing only the latest bands and fashions and completely oblivious to their place in the grand progress of time and history. Intellectuals tend to be attracted as a rule to apocalyptic fantasies which magnify personal insecurities into social conspiracies. Young people are the usual targets of such fantasies as the standard-bearers of the coming chaos. This is undoubtedly unfair to rising generations and deeply exaggerated.
Leaving any reactionary language aside, however, it is worth considering for a moment the real facts underlying talk of the decline of the humanities and the debilitating social consequences that could accompany it. The truth is that there are immense problems facing the professional humanities and it is no fantasy or joke: it bodes ill for the future of our children and ourselves.
By numbers alone, the humanities are in steep decline. In a much quoted article in Harvard Magazine published a decade ago, the authors summarize the situation as follows:
Between 1970 and 1994, the number of B.A.s conferred in the United States rose 39 percent. Among all bachelor’s degrees in higher education, three majors increased five- to tenfold: computer and information sciences, protective services, and transportation and material moving… English, foreign languages, philosophy, and religion all declined. History fell, too. . . On the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, only 9 percent of students now indicate interest in humanities.[1].
In the intervening years, the situation has only deteriorated. Today, only 50% or so of those who obtain PhDs in humanities fields go on to acquire tenure-track jobs within a year of graduation. And given the number of drop-outs in such programs, the total percentage of those who enter PhD programs who eventual become full-time professors is closer to 30% [2]. Anthony Grafton on the New York Review of Books blog reports talk of the closing and elimination of humanities departments at large state schools in Iowa, Nevada, and elsewhere due to planned budget cuts [3]. Once again, when the blade comes down, the humanities are the first to go.
Grafton, a prolific historian and beneficiary of unapologetic liberal arts training at the University of Chicago, has also written of a different but related challenge to the humanities: the renewed attacks by know-nothing Republicans against the historical profession and its academic freedom. One recent controversy involved William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin. Grafton outlines the details: “Stephan Thompson—an operative for the Republican Party of Wisconsin—used the state’s Open Documents law to demand copies of all emails to and from Cronon since January 1 that mention Wisconsin governor Scott Walker or any of a number of other words related to the state’s recent labor debates. Professor Cronon had written critically on his blog Scholar as Citizen of Wisconsin Republicans’ recent efforts to curb the rights of state workers, and Thompson clearly hoped to catch him using his university email to engage in pro-union or pro-Democratic politics, which would violate state law.” [4].
The historical profession has of course always been a target for the American Right since the age of McCarthy, which bears it a somewhat bizarre antipathy given the lack of any real power exercised by the tribe of historians in broader society. But of course, the campaign against Cronon came on the heels of other political debates in Wisconsin which attempted to tar teachers and fire-fighters as a corrupt “elite.” The logic is very similar. It is also unsurprising that modern day Republicans and Tea Partiers would dislike academic history when it disagrees with their founding myths of a God-fearing Jefferson (the man who took a razor to the Bible in order to eliminate all mention of the supernatural) and a Social Darwinist Benjamin Franklin.
What is more disturbing than the attacks of Republican bulldogs on a variety of inconvenient truths is the apparent capitulation of the would-be defenders of the humanities. In countless ways, professional experts in the humanities seem to have acquiesced to the decline of their own profession. This may partly be due to the fact that professors of history and literature tend to benefit from a shrinking job market and the concomitant proletarianization of the graduate student body. The proliferation of “adjunct professors” and various part-time teaching assistants has freed these professors to do “research” and quit teaching almost entirely, unless it is to mass audiences who treat them as superstars.
Of course, there are professors who act as crusaders for the humanities and fight the good fight on behalf of their frazzled and unemployable graduate students: see Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, a recent contribution to a growing genre of scholarly work defending English, philosophy, and history as fields of study. However, Nussbaum, Grafton and others often seem to be lone voices in the wilderness, and their own comfortably tenured status reduces the urgency of their appeals.
The real problem goes so deep as to appear nearly insoluble. The fact is that young people are not as interested as they once were in studying the humanities. Since education is and must be a market-driven enterprise, it would be foolish to insist that students study what they don’t care about and don’t regard as valuable. When young adults come to college and go into debt and spend four years cut off from the possibility of earning a living, they expect to be able to make a comfortable life for themselves at the other end.
It does not help that liberal arts professors and teachers often contribute to the widespread misconception that their fields do not lead to successful careers by endlessly repeating the cliché that the humanities teach one “how to live.” The annual “Aims of Education” addresses at the University of Chicago regularly showcase this attitude to beginning undergraduates and are often met with rolled eyes. When told they will learn “how to live” by studying Elizabethan sonnets, most young people counter that they need a career to live at all: the question of how it should be done therefore becomes secondary. The defenders of the humanities argue that the study of history and literature and philosophy offers a framework for approaching the world and a set of narratives, examples, and stories that can sustain one throughout the challenges of life. Ideally this is true. But again, students counter that such an intellectual framework will be useless if they never go on to face exciting challenges in stimulating careers.
Humanities professors and other defenders of the liberal arts need to accept that it is appropriate for young people to want to make a living for themselves and to go on to careers of some sort. These are not purely materialistic concerns, and providing for oneself and one’s future family are essential to spiritual and emotional health. Being told that the liberal arts teach you “how to live” undoubtedly sounds hollow when you are 22 and forced to envision moving back in with your parents after college.
The point that needs to be made, rather, is that the liberal arts make for an excellent preparation for a variety of careers, particularly when they are pursued critically rather than as a soft alternative to engineering and physics. It simply makes no sense that vocational college majors are increasingly sought-after in a rapidly changing economy. This is not to say that a background in engineering or nursing or anything else is not useful, but that it is not the only background which can prepare a student for a successful career. It is shocking that in a professional world increasingly driven by the ability to communicate, analyze, and think critically, in which specific technical skills are often rendered obsolete by mechanization—in such an environment, we still perpetuate the myth of the unemployable humanities grad. This despite a recent study by Richard Arum of New York University showing that liberal arts majors tend to show steady improvement over the four years of their education in essential cognitive skills, while those who study business administration, communications, or other vocational fields are often cripplingly failed by their schools in this respect [5].
Perhaps the greatest career asset offered by the liberal arts, meanwhile, is one that is widely undervalued but increasingly sought after in our society: an antidote to self-centeredness. They take one outside of oneself, force one to realize that one occupies a place in time and a broader human society, that our lives are determined as much by the human condition as by individual factors. It is little surprise that the steady decline of higher education in the humanities has coincided with a decline in measurable levels of empathy and compassion among college students. One study at the University of Michigan finds that young people in the college cohort are 40% less likely than their forebears of 20 or 30 years ago to express a concern for the less fortunate or to demonstrate a capacity to imaginatively sympathize with friends and acquaintances [6]. The stereotype of the “bleeding heart” college student is becoming ever more outdated as motives of competitiveness and acquisitiveness define career ambitions. Ironically (or perhaps not) it is precisely this aggressive and self-interested outlook which often proves a hindrance to true success in any form of cooperative enterprise in the “real world.” To counteract this tendency, the world needs the liberal arts now more than ever!
All of this means one of two things: either that the pendulum is set to swing back as more people recognize the value of a liberal arts education, or else that things need to get much worse before they can get better. There is some evidence that things may improve. Education in English and History continues at the high school level, and while it too faces challenges, it seems set to remain a part of the basic curriculum. Less tangibly, there is still the widespread belief among teachers and professors at all levels that a facility with words and ideas is a valuable asset: that it will allow one to do “great things.” This attitude is typically passed on to students: we all still feel on some level that truly “great things” involve making a contribution to society beyond the ability to make money or manipulate people or rise in a hierarchy. We should sell the liberal arts as a path to a earning a living, but a living of a certain kind—one which can sustain a person through the vicissitudes of history and social change and personal upheaval which she is certain to pass through as time goes on.
Of course, none of this is going to get across to students until the liberal arts change themselves and recover their former relevance. It is all well and good to blame the evils of commercialism and “market society,” but beyond a certain point, experts in the humanities have none to blame but themselves for failing to defend and articulate the inestimable value of their disciplines: or to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal of the liberal arts and what actually happens in your average humanities seminar. All the “market” means is that society will offer what people want and are willing to pay for: an essentially unobjectionable concept. Of course, unfettered capitalism can be a type of authoritarianism in its own right, and the examples are legion of young people who wish to make a career in the humanities but are unable to do so for financial reasons (a PhD in English is easier to pursue if you’re living on a trust fund!). But the answer to this is greater funding and government support to the humanities, not a rejection of the model of free choice in higher education.
Instead of blaming young people, anti-intellectual political currents, the market, and consumerism, the professors of the humanities ought to turn inward and ask questions of their own relevance. Why is it that the growing importance and usefulness of the liberal arts have gone unsung and the message of their worth fallen on deaf ears, or perhaps no ears at all? The growth of commercial society and the attacks of the rabid right on rational and humane study are not new to the twenty-first century. The humanities have weathered them before. Why should they cause such turmoil now?
What has changed in the last decades is the content of the humanities themselves, the turn away from a rational and critical study of literature, history, and philosophy to increasingly jargon-laden prose and rigid postmodern dogmas. People will only ever care about history, for example, if they perceive it as a path to truth and fact: a way of critically examining texts and documents which yields knowledge of the past and hones analytical skills. If history departments claim only to offer a “narrative” or “discourse” which is as good as any other, student will rightly ask why they should bother.
Literature and the study of it can likewise only justify itself if it contains truths about the human experience which can be absorbed and prove helpful to people in navigating their own lives. In a postmodern literary field dominated by pastiche and irony, it is easy for young people who need this sort of guidance to decide that English class is useless: are they so wrong?
Meanwhile, the proliferation of pop culture and media studies classes in humanities departments which are aimed at an extremely low level of intellectual engagement only adds to the problem: liberal arts professors hypocritically claim to be honing critical thinking and analytical skills while in far too many cases they offer only grade inflation to their increasingly unambitious students: who then go on to find that the ego-stroking did them no favors in a professional world which expects results and has no room for narcissicism.
So again, we are looking at two alternatives: a reappraisal and correction of where the humanities stand or a further decline before the inevitable rebound. Either way, the humanities will persist in one form or another. It is doubtful whether the human mind can sustain itself without some grappling with the larger questions of meaning, direction, and morality. But the extent to which humanities departments in the universities continue to fire this side of the human imagination is open to question.
It is quite possible that the situation will deteriorate for some time. Glenn Beck is already a prime source for many Americans’ notions of what happened in the past. He and his ilk, with their brand of rage and bigotry masquerading as moral conviction, may begin to look more convincing to young people whose only other exposure to the world of ideas has been an introductory English seminar full of incomprehensible quotations from Lacan and Derrida. The key to Beck’s appeal is that he offers emotional and moral guidance of a sort that ought to be gained through serious engagement with the humanities. Journalist Kate Zernike reports a conversation with one Tea Partier regarding some of Beck’s more specious factual claims (Beck makes a habit on his show of standing at a blackboard and offering lessons gleaned from the writings of Cold War-era conspiracy nuts). This Tea Partier ranted, “I don’t care if [its] untrue. It doesn’t make any difference…. You can have all the facts, but if you don’t’ trust the mind-set or the value system of the people involved, you can’t even look at the facts anymore.” [7]. Something is very wrong when the value system of Glenn Beck can seem so unassailable that reason stands no chance against it.
The potential to offer a better future for new generations, one in which people don’t have to turn on Fox News to feel the spur of moral passion, is up to those of us who have committed ourselves to the humanities: we have no one else to blame if we fail, and no other saviors to turn to if we refuse to shoulder the burden.
REFERENCES
[1] James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University, Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard magazine, May-June 1998: 50.
[2] http://phdinhistory.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-aha-paper.html
[3] http://www.nybooks.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/09/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities/
[4] http://www.nybooks.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/04/academic-freedom-cronon-affair/
[5] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-college-students-not.html
[6] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2010/05/28/todays-college-students-more-likely-to-lack-empathy
[7] Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. New York, 2010, pp. 11.
This article conveniently ignores the fact that the vast majority of employment in the humanities has always been at the taxpayer’s expense. Asking for more humanities graduates and more jobs in the humanities is essentially asking the taxpayer to foot a larger bill for activities which are of very dubious value. Graduates who aspire to be valuable members of society should be able to demonstrate that value by supporting themselves, and of course many of them do: more books on history, art and literature are being published and sold today than at any other point in history.
What we should try and avoid, however, is any sense that particular disciplines are inherently entitled to public support, since this invariably leads to waste and featherbedding. Latin was taught in British private schools for many years, though the only people it provided any benefit to were the students who later went on to teach it in a closed and self-perpetuating system. French and German in Australia are in the same position. If the taxpayer is being asked to fund humanities studies we have the right to ask what we are getting in return, other than teachers of humanities studies.
And as for irrationality and mistrust, that has been with us just as long as religion has: there is nothing new about it except the fact that the irrational and mistrustful now have access to a larger audience. In fact critical thinking is far more likely to appear in the science curriculum than in the humanities, where a servile acceptance of unfalsifiable ‘theory’ has often been the norm.
Humanities, like pure science, has to be done with the public support, since it isn’t profitable. (Even academic “superstars” likely only could have their bestsellers if they already had a job.) This is true even if you think the truth matters little by itself or what not and do not wish to support such things and only wish to have students of industry and finance. Why? Because we simply do not know what basic findings will, after a long tortuous route, appear in products one can (given our system) buy or sell. This even extends to the humanities. Just recently, the first glimmerings of DBMSes using artificial intelligence techniques first pioneered as part of “philosophical logic” have started appearing. Who knew that epistemology would suddenly be big money (in data mining, for example)?
I agree, however, that the pomo and other vacuous anti-knowledge strains (of all sorts) are a problem. I don’t know quite how to get rid of them with harming the valuable stuff. I think, somehow, we have to raise the “herd immunity” against them, and they may largely disappear. It does seem like matters have gotten better that way from (say) the early 1990s to now.
Thanks for reading and for the thoughtful critique– however, it seems you are missing the point (or some of the points) of my article. You write “If the taxpayer is being asked to fund humanities studies we have the right to ask what we are getting in return, other than teachers of humanities studies.” I completely agree– however, one of the main purposes of the article was to suggest ways in which studying the humanities in school can prepare young people for careers beyond the self-perpetuating cycle of teaching. What we are “getting” through these disciplines, ideally, is a set of socially-adaptable, broadly-educated, thoughtful, critical, and analytical young people, not more professors.
I do not doubt that the sciences also promote critical thinking– their positive impact on cognitive skills is undeniable. However, humanities bring a unique skill set and set of concerns which cannot possibly be replaced by the sciences. If citizens are to be able to dissect an argument and not be swayed by rhetoric and demagoguery, they need to have prolonged exposure to well-articulated and intelligently-argued works of politics, philosophy, history, etc. which challenge their own views and force them to think critically. They also need to have broad exposure to art and literature which expand their imaginative sympathies and enable them to contemplate the experience of others (essential skills in the workplace, life as a citizen, etc.) Of course, the arts are often fetishized and the worst examples of “abstract” or “experimental” work dogmatically regarded as superior, even when they fail to speak to any genuine human experience– but this is a failure of aesthetic understanding which needs to be corrected by broader exposure to the humanitites, not by writing them off as disciplines.
I don’t doubt that liberal arts departments often cripplingly fail to live up to their promise of braodening aesthetic horizons and making better thinkers and citizens: that they have often been guilty of a “servile accpetance of unfalsifiable ‘theory.'” This is a point I tried to make in the article when I suggested that humantiies professors had no one to blame but themselves for being percieved as irrelevant. I think my cirtique of any dogmatic theory of literary criticism or postmodernism or what-have-you is evident from the article above and from my other work on Butterflies and Wheels. But the humanities, when done right, still offer an antidote to narcissism and shallow reasoning that no other discipline could replace. If they are failing to live up to their promise, no other disipline can be relied on to do this essential work: so criticism needs to be directed toward the resurrection of the humanitites, not their elimination.
As for the notion that the taxpayer shouldn’t be expected to suppot those who can’t support themselves, I wonder about your definition of supporting onself and demonstrating one’s value. Teachers, police officers, fire fighters, public criminal defenders, social workers, and more all rely upon public funding. Many of them no doubt could not support themselves as private service providers sicne the services they offer are specifically targeted toward those who are too poor to afford them. This does not mean they have not demonstrated value or cannot support themselves, it means that we as a democratic society have decided that the services they provide are too essential to human well-being to be resevred for those with private wealth.
It is up to huamntiies professors to similarly demonstrate their value in this sense in order to continue to benefit from public support, but again, I believe I made this point in the article: the whole article, in fact, was intended as much as a criticism of the current state of humantiies departments as it was of the forces arrayed against them in broader society. I’m attempting to argue that humantiies professors need to recognize what their discilplines ideally offer to the world outside of the Ivory Tower, articulate this, and ensure that they are living up to their promise.
“Is it possible to imagine a society without the humanities?” No, and I don’t know anyone who is imagining that. This is a common “straw man” accusation leveled against anyone who criticises the state of affairs, but in my opinion it’s more of a numbers game. We need people to study the Humanities, I agree, but do we really need so many of them?
I agree with the author that too few people have any sense of history; but why is left until university? Everyone goes to school, so that is its place. Not everyone goes to university, and only some students study history when they get there.I studied Engineering, but it wouldn’t have killed me to study some Liberal Arts topics as part of that process. Actually, we did do some “softer” subjects too, such as basic Law and a bit of Architectural History and Theory.
Conversely, I think some “harder” subjects ought to be in “Liberal Arts” too, which would (in a sense) signal a return to the original Roman definition of “Liberal Arts” i.e. the subjects most useful to a free people. As it stands, the “Humanities” have a (possibly unfair) reputation, in the Sciences, as the dumping ground for those who failed Maths at school.
As you implied: it’s all very well “learning how to live”, but once you can do that, you still need to learn how to do things. I don’t see anyone seriously proposing to get rid of the Liberal Arts, but we do need to see an admission that Liberal Arts, as currently taught, are incomplete and inadequate to the challenges facing societies today.
In my experience, a lot of cynical or disillusioned young Americans see this as the exact opposite of the truth, and that’s one of the humanities’ major P.R. problems. If someone goes into science or medicine, or even business or engineering, it’s not only clear how that person might make a living, but what kind of impact that person can expect to have on society. That’s not as true for students who major in history or philosophy or their native language, not only because only a small fraction of such people manage to become publicly visible, but also because, for example, the writers of popular bestsellers are rarely thought of as arising from a broader academic culture. Or to put it a different way, when one hears about a famous scientist or doctor, most people already know someone who is involved in science or medicine in some way (if no one else, a few geeks they went to school with). A variety of technical fields are seen as continuous with, supporting, or drawing upon the work done by “pure” scientists outside of industry. Comparatively few people are involved in work that seems obviously connected to the academic culture of the humanities.
So someone who goes into philosophy or English (at least, and particularly, as an undergraduate) isn’t necessarily perceived as grappling with deep questions or exploring the human condition. That person could also be seen as short-sighted or indecisive, choosing a major purely out of vague personal interest rather than with a clear idea of how they will make any real contribution to society. That’s not always the case, of course, and I can think of a number of professions directly related to the humanities in one area or another. But the idea is there, and is reinforced by a certain volume of humanities majors who really do find themselves making difficult decisions later, torn between their academic or artistic aspirations on the one hand, and a need for reliable income on the other.
It’s also worth pointing out that the humanities are not the only struggling field. I suspect that we have a shortage of students in most fields that require both extensive study and a strong sense of social responsibility. For example, the U.S. has an intense shortage of doctors in certain fields; we rely to a certain extent on importing the best students from other countries. I suspect that the American focus on a virtue of personal independence (or in conservative-speak “personal responsibility”) has caused a corresponding devaluation of contributions to the welfare of others, at least when it comes to contributions via sacrifice of one’s personal well-being or security, rather than through charity on the behalf of an already-comfortable person.
Nearly all of the effects that the author calls valuable, are secondary effects. They appear nowhere in the class title or description. They are, indeed, skills that one can learn by engaging in the course, but they come about not by instructor’s intent, but by slef-realization of the student- and not all students will do so.
This is similar to claiming that learning to cook teaches you nutrition. It can, but not by design or intent.
If your courses have these values and skills, then call them out. Stop living in the past and market yourself for the present and the future. Change your courses from the same old thing to something that has obvious value to the students shopping for knowledge today.
I value the liberal arts myself, but advocates are as hopeless at communicating their values as today’s Democrats are at communicating liberal values.
Thanks for your response, Prof. Leach — but from my perspective it illustrates exactly what is wrong with humanities training. You claim that it aims to produce “a set of socially-adaptable, broadly-educated, thoughtful, critical, and analytical young people”, but you can’t provide any evidence that it actually does. (In fact, you admit that it often doesn’t). That is, you are taking humanities teaching at face value and judging it on the basis of what it intends to do, rather than adopting what I would regard as a scientific approach and examining its outcomes.
One of the basic precepts of science is that well-intentioned people are very good at fooling themselves, and we need to take special precautions to prevent that happening. I don’t see any indication that you have done that in this case.
As for comparing the place of humanities graduates in society with that of police, fire fighters and social workers… do you really think these other groups have any difficulty justifying their use of taxpayer’s funds? But humanities-based academics and teachers do; which is exactly the point you are trying to deal with.
Well, Jon– the nature of the benefits we hope to gain from a liberal arts education are not always quantifiable, so it may be difficult to provide “evidence” in the form you ask for. However, I believe I adduce the example in my article of a recent study showing that the typical college education in the United States increasingly fails to enhance critical reasoning, writing, and analytical skills, especially among those who major in vocational fields, business administration, etc. Those who study English, history, and yes, math and pure science, DO show such an enhancement of basic skills. This would seem about as scientific a metric as we could hope for as to whether or not liberal arts degrees offer marketable skills.
It is true that liberal arts majors tend to have a somewhat lower entry-level salary, according to the national average than those who major in accounting or engineering. But part of this is an electivie affinity among those humanities grads, whose social awareness often prompts them to go into education or nonprofit work– these fields are low-paid, but the only measure of a successful career is not the size of the pay-check. Most skilled engineers could make more money if they moved into sales or something– but people have a desire to be stimulated and engaged by their careers, not just fed by them, and most engineers choose not to do this because they wouldn’t enjoy the work.
Some students take humanities classes only because they are percieved as an easy A or a GPA-boost. These students are not going to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities that a liberal arts education brings because they did not take full advantage of their time in college. People who truly wish to benefit from the humanities often have to think big: they have been trained to see the big picture and draw connections across disciplinary and career-field boundaries. This makes them excellent cadidates for work in any endeavor, business or otherwise, which requires creativity and problem-solving skills– from management to education to consulting or advertising or human resources or law. But they need to work to get there and they can’t expect their degree to guarantee them a place in this line of work. Humantites degrees open doors, but the students still have to walk through them.
I should also add that the “pure” sciences, such as biology, physics, and chemistry, which do the fundamental theoretical work on which all technological and scientific advances rest, are often met with the same resistance and funding problems that humanities departments are: a scientist studying cosmology and string theory is nearly as likely to see her budget cut as a professor of art history. However, someone like yourself who respects the sciences would recognize that such cuts are short-sighted. Cosmology does not have an immediate “pay-off.” It is not clear how our understanding of the multiple-universe theory is going to be readily profitable and weapons contractors and multinational firms don’t have a stake in encouraging it. But you would certainly agree that it offers a valuable contribution to human knowledge nonetheless. If we have no one thinking about the fundamentals, we will never be able to build the superstructure of technology and human connections which form the rest of our social life.
I’m not looking for an antagonistic relationship with the sciences: they too advance essential skills among undergraduates and contribute to making a richer, better-understood, more human existence. But the humanities offer something unique which the sciences can’t replace (just as humanities can’t replace science when it comes to empirical study).
As for your assertion that teachers and fire-fighters and social workers have no problem justifying their salaries to tax-payers– you clearly don’t live in the United States! Budget battles often target precisely these groups, especially since the people they serve are often politically voiceless. This doesn’t mean that they are superfluous– only that the social contribution they make is often poorly understood– sound familiar?
Not to worry.
My recent return to the workforce has revealed that there are plenty of BAs with majors in bullshit and minors in bafflegab happily infesting HR departments across the nation.
First of all, the responses here seem sincere and thoughtful. That in itself is unusual.
I’ve taught at a southern state university for well over two decades and hold the rank of associate professor of English literature. I doubt very much that I’ll ever be a full professor– mostly because I am paid 60% of a public school teacher’s salary (in the area and region where the university is located) and I can no longer afford to write for free. Not for the state or for anyone else. I deeply resent how Humanities faculty are treated at my university and elsewhere. I resent having my job politicized by those who have no understanding or interest in what I do beyond their desire to make a pile of political hay. I resent being slandered and then starved by a legislature who accuses me of deviancy–this for having preformed the job I was invited here to do. Research in my field might shed light on any field of human endeavor whatsoever–in fact, I’m delighted to report that history does indeed repeat itself–despite anyone’s best efforts. Therefore, all we really need to do is to learn to recognize idiots and the consequences of idiocy; and having succeeded in those, we might be harder pressed to brook the current bunch of idiots and more likely to avoid other idiots in the future. I have fifteen years of university training to do what I do–more than your surgeon. I dissect language. Despite the Republican Party’s accusations, I am not a communist. I am neither a homosexual nor an atheist. I am instead a philologist. If you don’t know what that is, stop reading: you are the problem. I study language, how it’s used, to what affect/effect, the historical ‘truth’ (or lack thereof) behind those words, as well as their beauty or ugliness. You see, while there may not be an objective truth, there are many subjective lies. Many. About the only encapsulated wisdom and/or tidbit of rhetorical mojo I have to offer this evening is a simple observation: the American rightwing apes the linguistic behaviors of its fascist models predecessors. You may count on it. That’s because both have the same intention and both stem from the similar or identical impulses; and people who study language notice these things. Richard Nixon stated it elegantly and succinctly to Hank and Al one afternoon: “the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.”
Not only that, I thought this article was written in 2014–not 2011. I’ve gone blind in the service of my country.
Noooooooo, it’s all too easy to overlook the date. Interesting, and very sad, comment. You should at least be paid better.