# data[].attributes.body
Suzanne Conklin Akbari

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On December 4, 2019, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, gave the talk "What Is the Value of the Humanities? How We Read (and Write) Today," examining how we engage with literature and exploring the case to be made for reading aloud.

Watch Akbari's talk in the window above, or on the IAS YouTube channel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On December 4, 2019, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, gave the talk "What Is the Value of the Humanities? How We Read (and Write) Today," examining how we engage with literature and exploring the case to be made for reading aloud.Watch Akbari's talk in the window above, or on the IAS YouTube channel.

# data[].attributes.body
Jessica Stillman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With " software eating the world" and just about every business becoming, in some way, a tech business, it's no surprise that many experts (and a whole lot of worried parents) have argued that getting a tech degree is the best way to ensure you'll thrive in today's economy.

The pace of technological change isn't going to slow down anytime soon, but some contradictory voices are now arguing that doesn't mean everyone should become a coder or engineer. On the contrary, some are now ready to predict that 2020 will be the year demand for traditional liberal arts majors makes a major rebound.

Predicting a liberal arts rebound

"AI will automate technical skills and drive the demand for soft skills like creativity, communication and empathy. While there's been such a focus on recruiting STEM over the past several years, those majors will continue to lose relevance, while liberal arts majors will become more valuable to companies moving forward."

All this coupled with record low unemployment and an increasingly messy political landscape for tech companies, Schawbel argues, suggests liberal arts hiring is set to shoot up in 2020.

CEO liberal arts boosters abound

His isn't the only voice arguing that accelerating innovation and its complex impacts on society will lead to a greater demand for the critical thinking and communication skills you learn studying the liberal arts. Many tech CEOs who come from a humanities background themselves are happy to testify to the usefulness of these often ridiculed degrees.

George Arison, the co-founder and co-CEO of used car sales platform Shift, has a degree in political science. He told Inc.com that this background taught him skills that more tech companies could use.

"Engineering and technology alone won't be enough to help companies be successful in the future," he says. "As future technology companies will inevitably have to rely more on artificial intelligence and machine learning, they will be confronted with a lot of issues that do not have cut and dry answers. The need to make value judgments on these issues will be of great importance."

He cites the complex questions social media companies face around balancing free speech and combating disinformation as one example. "A lot of the criticism that Facebook has faced over how it has handled Russian meddling and dummy accounts is a testament to this," he says. "Probably if there were more folks in leadership at Facebook with broader backgrounds, who are more suited to force consideration of ethical issues like this, it is possible that it would have addressed these issues differently."

His co-CEO Toby Russell, who has a PhD in international relations from Oxford, agrees on the unique value of liberal arts grads in negotiating the intersection of tech capabilities and messy human realities (such as social's fake news problem or ensuring A.I. tools don't duplicate and even reinforce existing biases).

"The next generation of great tech companies will need to find ways to have software interact successfully and harmoniously with real humans in the real world," he believes. "In order to do that, you need soft-skilled leaders that can integrate people, process and technology -- to in essence practice technological diplomacy."

As I have reported before Shift's founders are far from the only tech leaders pointing out the underappreciated value of the liberal arts. Next year might just be the year these voices reach a tipping point and liberal arts grads are esteemed and in demand once again.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Most Unexpected Workplace Trend Coming in 2020: the Return of the Liberal Arts Major

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With " software eating the world" and just about every business becoming, in some way, a tech business, it's no surprise that many experts (and a whole lot of worried parents) have argued that getting a tech degree is the best way to ensure you'll thrive in today's economy.

# data[].attributes.body
Rachel Grate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's no secret that reading is good for you. Just six minutes of reading is enough to reduce stress by 68%, and numerous studies have shown that reading keeps your brain functioning effectively as you age. One study even found that elderly individuals who read regularly are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's than their peers. But not all forms of reading are created equal.

The debate between paper books and e-readers has been vicious since the first Kindle came out in 2007. Most arguments have been about the sentimental versus the practical, between people who prefer how paper pages feel in their hands and people who argue for the practicality of e-readers. But now science has weighed in, and the studies are on the side of paper books.
Reading in print helps with comprehension.
A 2014 study found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback. Lead researcher Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University concluded that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does."

Our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted and created new circuits to understand letters and texts. The brain reads by constructing a mental representation of the text based on the placement of the page in the book and the word on the page.

The tactile experience of a book aids this process, from the thickness of the pages in your hands as you progress through the story to the placement of a word on the page. Mangen hypothesizes that the difference for Kindle readers "might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading."

While e-readers try to recreate the sensation of turning pages and pagination, the screen is limited to one ephemeral virtual page. Surveys about the use of e-readers suggest that this affects a reader's serendipity and sense of control. The inability to flip back to previous pages or control the text physically, either through making written notes or bending pages, limits one's sensory experience and thus reduces long-term memory of the text.

John Keeble/Getty Images
Reading long sentences without links is a skill you need - but can lose if you don't practice.
Reading long, literary sentences sans links and distractions is actually a serious skill that you lose if you don't use it. Before the Internet, the brain read in a linear fashion, taking advantage of sensory details to remember where key information was in the book by layout.

As we increasingly read on screens, our reading habits have adapted to skim text rather than really absorb the meaning. A 2006 study found that people read on screens in an "F" pattern, reading the entire top line but then only scanning through the text along the left side of the page. This sort of nonlinear reading reduces comprehension and actually makes it more difficult to focus the next time you sit down with a longer piece of text.

Tufts University neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf worries that "the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing." Individuals are increasingly finding it difficult to sit down and immerse themselves in a novel. As a result, some researchers and literature-lovers have started a "slow reading" movement, as a way to counteract their difficulty making it through a book.

Kathy Willens/AP
Reading in a slow, focused, undistracted way is good for your brain.
Slow-reading advocates recommend at least 30 to 45 minutes of daily reading away from the distractions of modern technology. By doing so, the brain can reengage with linear reading. The benefits of making slow reading a regular habit are numerous, reducing stress and improving your ability to concentrate.

Regular reading also increases empathy, especially when reading a print book. One study discovered that individuals who read an upsetting short story on an iPad were less empathetic and experienced less transportation and immersion than those who read on paper.

Reading an old-fashioned novel is also linked to improving sleep. When many of us spend our days in front of screens, it can be hard to signal to our body that it's time to sleep. By reading a paper book about an hour before bed, your brain enters a new zone, distinct from that enacted by reading on an e-reader.

Three-quartersof Americans 18 and older report reading at least one book in the past year, a number which has fallen, and e-books currently make up between 15 to 20% of all book sales. In this increasingly Twitter- and TV-centric world, it's the regular readers, the ones who take a break from technology to pick up a paper book, who have a serious advantage on the rest of us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's no secret that reading is good for you. Just six minutes of reading is enough to reduce stress by 68%, and numerous studies have shown that reading keeps your brain functioning effectively as you age. One study even found that elderly...

# data[].attributes.headline
The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors

# data[].attributes.subject
The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors

# data[].attributes.body
Heather Long

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A woman ponders making a purchase at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. (Bruce Leighty /Alamy Stock Photo)

A great migration is happening on U.S. college campuses. Ever since the fall of 2008, a lot of students have walked out of English and humanities lectures and into STEM classes, especially computer science and engineering.

English majors are down more than a quarter (25.5 percent) since the Great Recession, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics. It's the biggest drop for any major tracked by the center in its annual data and is quite startling, given that college enrollment has jumped in the past decade.

Ask any college student or professor why this big shift from studying Chaucer to studying coding is happening and they will probably tell you it's about jobs. As students feared for their job prospects, they - and their parents - wanted a degree that would lead to a steady paycheck after graduation. The perception is that STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) is the path to employment. Majors in computer science and health fields have nearly doubled from 2009 to 2017. Engineering and math have also seen big jumps.

As humanities majors slump to the lowest level in decades, calls are coming from surprising places for a revival. Some prominent economists are making the case for why it still makes a lot of sense to major (or at least take classes) in humanities alongside more technical fields.

Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller's new book " Narrative Economics " opens with him reminiscing about an enlightening history class he took as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. He wrote that what he learned about the Great Depression was far more useful in understanding the period of economic and financial turmoil than anything he learned in his economic courses.

The whole premise of Shiller's book is that stories matter. What people tell each other can have profound implications on markets - and the overall economy. Examples include the "get rich quick" stories about bitcoin or the "anyone can be a homeowner" stories that helped drive the housing bubble.

"Traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events - that is, narrative,' Shiller wrote. "Economists can best advance their science by developing and incorporating into it the art of narrative economics."

Shiller, who is famous for predicting the dot-com crash and coming up with the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, is spending a lot of time looking at old newspaper clippings to understand what stories and terms went viral and how they influenced people to buy things - or stop buying things.

When asked if he's essentially arguing for more English and history majors, Shiller said, "I think so," adding: "Compartmentalization of intellectual life is bad."

Shiller isn't alone in wishing that there were more storytellers (and story analyzers) around. Every August, some of the world's top economists gather in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to discuss how the economy is doing and how they should tweak their models. On the final day of events this year, Philip Lowe, head of Australia's central bank, urged his colleagues to spend a little less time on numbers and more time on being good storytellers.

"It's important we don't just talk about numbers, coefficients and rules, but stories that people can understand," Lowe said. "Stories about how policies are contributing to economic welfare and the things that really matter to people."

Lowe's words struck a nerve, partly because Australia has not had a recession in more than 25 years and partly because central bankers around the room generally agreed that their communication could be better.

One economist pointed out that Jamaica's central bank is employing reggae artists to explain that " high inflation is a wicked ting." The Federal Reserve doesn't have anything quite like that, but it is searching for a senior speechwriter who can help top central bank officials speak "to a wide variety of audiences."

"I am expected to be, and I am, a storyteller. I tell stories about the future," said Stefan Ingves, governor of Sweden's central bank. "We human beings simply love stories about the future. That's part of my job."

Ingves reminded his colleagues that they have a big platform that allows them to talk to business leaders and the public about the economy. If they tell a convincing story that growth will continue, people are likely to say, "Hmm, that's reasonable." That could help keep confidence high, allowing company presidents to keep hiring and consumers to keep spending. As the global economy slows to its lowest rate in a decade, worries are high about how much longer the economy can power on.

In many ways, President Trump's constant attempts to call this the greatest economy of all time are an effort to tell a positive story to encourage Americans to keep spending, Shiller said, even if his claim is not based in fact.

Perhaps the most powerful argument for why students (and their parents) might want to think twice about abandoning humanities is the data. The National Center for Education Statistics also keeps track of pay and unemployment rates by major.

There's no denying that the typical computer science major makes more money shortly after graduation than the typical English major.

Contrary to popular belief, English majors ages 25 to 29 had a lower unemployment rate in 2017 than math and computer science majors.

That early STEM pay premium also fades quickly, according to research by David J. Deming and Kadeem L. Noray from Harvard. After about a decade, STEM majors start exiting their job fields as their skills are no longer the latest and greatest. In contrast, many humanities majors work their way to high-earning management positions. By middle age, average pay looks very similar across many majors.

"By age 40, the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up," wrote David Deming in a recent New York Times op-ed.

In management and leadership positions, communication is key, as leading economists and central bankers have been quick to point out at this critical juncture for the world economy.

Free college? Actually, some states are already offering it to students.

Americans show spotty knowledge about the history of slavery but acknowledge its enduring effects

Varsity athletes, admissions and enrollment at top colleges

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The world's top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A great migration is happening on U.S. college campuses. Ever since the fall of 2008, a lot of students have walked out of English and humanities lectures and into STEM classes, especially computer science and engineering. English majors are down more than a quarter (25.5 percent) since the Great Recession, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics.

# data[].attributes.headline
In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

# data[].attributes.subject
In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

# data[].attributes.body
David Deming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Economic View

Image

Credit Credit Cornelia Li

For students chasing lasting wealth, the best choice of a college major is less obvious than you might think.

The conventional wisdom is that computer science and engineering majors have better employment prospects and higher earnings than their peers who choose liberal arts.

This is true for the first job, but the long-term story is more complicated.

The advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.

This happens for two reasons. First, many of the latest technical skills that are in high demand today become obsolete when technology progresses. Older workers must learn these new skills on the fly, while younger workers may have learned them in school. Skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders as they age.

Second, although liberal arts majors start slow, they gradually catch up to their peers in STEM fields. This is by design. A liberal arts education fosters valuable "soft skills" like problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. Such skills are hard to quantify, and they don't create clean pathways to high-paying first jobs. But they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers.

Computer science and engineering majors between the ages of 23 and 25 who were working full time earned an average of $61,744 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. This was 37 percent higher than the average starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history or the social sciences (which include economics, political science and sociology). Large differences in starting salary by major held for both men and women.

Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 - an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

The story was similar for women. Those with applied STEM majors earned nearly 50 percent more than social science and history majors at ages 23 to 25, but only 10 percent more by ages 38 to 40.

One reason for the narrowing gap is that STEM jobs change rapidly, and workers must constantly learn new skills to keep up. In a recent working paper with a Harvard doctoral student, Kadeem Noray, I calculated how much the skills required for different jobs changed over time. Help-wanted ads for jobs like software developer and engineer were more likely to ask for skills that didn't exist a decade earlier. And the jobs of 10 years ago often required skills that have since become obsolete. Skill turnover was much higher in STEM fields than in other occupations.

We can also see this by looking at changes in college course catalogs. One of the largest and most popular courses in the Stanford computer science department is CS229 - Machine Learning, taught by the artificial intelligence expert and entrepreneur Andrew Ng. This course did not exist until 2003, when Professor Ng taught it for the first time with 68 students, and very little like it existed anywhere on college campuses 15 years ago. Today, the machine learning courses at Stanford enroll more than a thousand students.

In contrast, much less has changed in my home discipline, economics, where we still mostly offer the classics like intermediate microeconomics or public finance.

Since new technical skills are always in high demand, young college graduates who have them earn a short-run salary premium. Yet when the job changes, these now experienced workers must learn new technical skills to keep up with fresh college graduates and a constant stream of talent from abroad.

The result is slower salary growth and high exit rates from the STEM work force. Between the ages of 25 and 40, the share of STEM majors working in STEM jobs falls from 65 percent to 48 percent. Many of them shift into managerial positions, which pay well but do not always require specialized skills.

Why do the earnings of liberal arts majors catch up? It's not because poetry suddenly pays the bills. Midcareer salaries are highest in management and business occupations, as well as professions requiring advanced degrees such as law. Liberal arts majors are more likely than STEM graduates to enter those fields.

A traditional liberal arts curriculum includes subjects, like philosophy and literature, that seemingly have little relevance in the modern workplace. Yet many of the skills most desired by employers are also quite abstract.

According to a 2018 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the three attributes of college graduates that employers considered most important were written communication, problem-solving and the ability to work in a team. Quantitative and technical skills both made the top 10, alongside other "soft" skills like initiative, verbal communication and leadership. In the liberal arts tradition, these skills are built through dialogue between instructors and students, and through close reading and analysis of a broad range of subjects and texts.

Liberal arts advocates often argue that education should emphasize the development of the whole person, and that it is much broader than just job training. As an educator myself, I agree wholeheartedly.

But even on narrow vocational grounds, a liberal arts education has enormous value because it builds a set of foundational capacities that will serve students well in a rapidly changing job market.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that students should avoid majoring in STEM fields. STEM graduates still tend to have high earnings throughout their careers, and most colleges require all students - including STEM majors - to take liberal arts courses.

But I do think we should be wary of the impulse to make college curriculums ever more technical and career focused. Rapid technological change makes the case for breadth even stronger. A four-year college degree should prepare students for the next 40 years of working life, and for a future that none of us can imagine.

David Deming is the director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section BU, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Engineers Start Fast, but Poets Can Catch Up. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Economic View For students chasing lasting wealth, the best choice of a college major is less obvious than you might think. The conventional wisdom is that computer science and engineering majors have better employment prospects and higher earnings than their peers who choose liberal arts.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

# data[].attributes.subject
Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

# data[].attributes.body
Amanda Ruggeri

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At university, when I told people I was studying for a history degree, the response was almost always the same: "You want to be a teacher?". No, a journalist. "Oh. But you're not majoring in communications?"

In the days when a university education was the purview of a privileged few, perhaps there wasn't the assumption that a degree had to be a springboard directly into a career. Those days are long gone.

Today, a degree is all but a necessity for the job market, one that more than halves your chances of being unemployed. Still, that alone is no guarantee of a job - and yet we're paying more and more for one. In the US, room, board and tuition at a private university costs an average of $48,510 a year; in the UK, tuition fees alone are £9,250 ($12,000) per year for home students; in Singapore, four years at a private university can cost up to SGD$69,336 (US$51,000).

Learning for the sake of learning is a beautiful thing. But given those costs, it's no wonder that most of us need our degrees to pay off in a more concrete way. Broadly, they already do: in the US, for example, a bachelor's degree holder earns $461 more each week than someone who never attended a university.

You might also like:
* The faster way to learn a new language
* How to teach a distracted generation
* The exam that brings a whole country to a standstill

But most of us want to maximise that investment - and that can lead to a plug-and-play type of approach to higher education. Want to be a journalist? Study journalism, we're told. A lawyer? Pursue pre-law. Not totally sure? Go into Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) - that way, you can become an engineer or IT specialist. And no matter what you do, forget the liberal arts - non-vocational degrees that include natural and social sciences, mathematics and the humanities, such as history, philosophy and languages.

This has been echoed by statements and policies around the world. In the US, politicians from Senator Marco Rubio to former President Barack Obama have made the humanities a punch line. (Obama later apologised). In China, the government has unveiled plans to turn 42 universities into "world class" institutions of science and technology. In the UK, government focus on Stem has led to a nearly 20% drop in students taking A-levels in English and a 15% decline in the arts.

But there's a problem with this approach. And it's not just that we're losing out on crucial ways to understand and improve both the world and ourselves - including enhancing personal wellbeing, sparking innovation and helping create tolerance, among other values.

It's also that our assumptions about the market value of certain degrees - and the "worthlessness" of others - might be off. At best, that could be making some students unnecessarily stressed. At worst? Pushing people onto paths that set them up for less fulfilling lives. It also perpetuates the stereotype of liberal arts graduates, in particular, as an elite caste - something that can discourage underprivileged students, and anyone else who needs an immediate return on their university investment, from pursuing potentially rewarding disciplines. (Though, of course, this is hardly the only diversity problem such disciplines have).
Soft skills, critical thinking
George Anders is convinced we have the humanities in particular all wrong. When he was a technology reporter for Forbes from 2012 to 2016, he says Silicon Valley "was consumed with this idea that there was no education but Stem education".

But when he talked to hiring managers at the biggest tech companies, he found a different reality. "Uber was picking up psychology majors to deal with unhappy riders and drivers. Opentable was hiring English majors to bring data to restauranteurs to get them excited about what data could do for their restaurants," he says.

"I realised that the ability to communicate and get along with people, and understand what's on other people's minds, and do full-strength critical thinking - all of these things were valued and appreciated by everyone as important job skills, except the media." This realisation led him to write his appropriately-titled book You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a "Useless" Liberal Arts Education.

Take a look at the skills employers say they're after. LinkedIn's research on the most sought-after job skills by employers for 2019 found that the three most-wanted "soft skills" were creativity, persuasion and collaboration, while one of the five top "hard skills" was people management. A full 56% of UK employers surveyed said their staff lacked essential teamwork skills and 46% thought it was a problem that their employees struggled with handling feelings, whether theirs or others'. It's not just UK employers: one 2017 study found that the fastest-growing jobs in the US in the last 30 years have almost all specifically required a high level of social skills.

Or take it directly from two top executives at tech giant Microsoft who wrote recently: "As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.

Of course, it goes without saying that you can be an excellent communicator and critical thinker without a liberal arts degree. And any good university education, not just one in English or psychology, should sharpen these abilities further. "Any degree will give you very important generic skills like being able to write, being able to present an argument, research, problem-solve, teamwork, becoming familiar with technology," says Dublin-based educational consultant and career coach Anne Mangan.

But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the liberal arts, in particular the humanities - whether that's by debating other students in a seminar, writing a thesis paper or analysing poetry.

Empathy is usually the biggest skill. That doesn't just mean feeling sorry for people with problems. It means an ability to understand the needs and wants of a diverse group of people - Anders

When asked to drill the most job market-ready skills of a humanities graduate down to three, Anders doesn't hesitate. "Creativity, curiosity and empathy," he says. "Empathy is usually the biggest one. That doesn't just mean feeling sorry for people with problems. It means an ability to understand the needs and wants of a diverse group of people.

"Think of people who oversee clinical drug tests. You need to get doctors, nurses, regulators all on the same page. You have to have the ability to think about what's going to get this 72-year-old woman to feel comfortable being tracked long term, what do we have to do so this researcher takes this study seriously. That's an empathy job."

But in general, say Anders and others, the benefit of a humanities degree is the emphasis it puts on teaching students to think, critique and persuade - often in the grey areas where there isn't much data available or you need to work out what to believe.

The biggest group of US humanities graduates, 15%, go on to management positions

It's small wonder, therefore, that humanities graduates go on to a variety of fields. The biggest group of US humanities graduates, 15%, go on to management positions. That's followed by 14% who are in in office and administrative positions, 13% who are in sales and another 12% who are in education, mostly teaching. Another 10% are in business and finance.

And while there's often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren't as good as the jobs snapped up by, say, engineers or medics, that isn't the case. In Australia, for example, three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations are sales assistants, clerks, and advertising, public relations and sales managers - all of which might look familiar as fields that humanities graduates tend to pursue.

Meanwhile, Glassdoor's 2019 research found that eight of the top 10 best jobs in the UK were managerial positions - people-oriented roles that require communication skills and emotional intelligence. (It defined "best" by combining earning potential, overall job satisfaction rating and number of job openings.) And many of them were outside Stem-based industries. The third best job was marketing manager; fourth, product manager; fifth, sales manager. An engineering role doesn't appear on the list until the 18th slot - below positions in communications, HR and project management.

One recent study of 1,700 people from 30 countries, meanwhile, found that the majority of those in leadership positions had either a social sciences or humanities degree. That was especially true of leaders under 45 years of age; leaders over 45 were more likely to have studied Stem.
Be career-ready
This isn't to say that a liberal arts degree is the easy road. "A lot of the people I talked to were five or 10 years into their career, and there was a sense that the first year was bumpy, and it took a while to find their footing," Anders says. "But as things played out, it did tend to work."

For some graduates, the initial challenge was not knowing what they wanted to do with their lives. For others, it was not having acquired as many technical skills with their degree as, say, their IT trainee peers and having to play catch-up after.

But pursuing a more vocational degree can come with its own risks too. Not every teenager knows exactly what they want to do with their lives, and our career aspirations often change over time. One UK report found that more than one-third of Brits have changed careers in their lifetime. LinkedIn found that 40% of professionals are interested in making a "career pivot" - and younger people are interested most of all. Focusing on broadly applicable skills like critical thinking no longer seems like such a moon shot when you consider how many different jobs and industries they can be applied to (though for a young person figuring out their career path, it's true that flexibility also can feel overwhelming).

One 2017 study found that the fastest-growing jobs in the US in the last 30 years have almost all specifically required a high level of social skills

Specialised technical skills are important in the job market too. But there are a number of ways to acquire them. "I'm very pro-internships and apprenticeships. We've seen that that can directly correlate to you having a more grounded skill base in the workplace," says career development coach Christina Georgalla.

"I even advocate that post-university, if you're not sure, take a year out and instead of going travelling, actually trial doing different internships. Even if it's the same field but in TV, say, broadcasting versus producing versus presenting, so you can see the difference."

But what about the other perceived pitfalls - like a higher unemployment rate and lower salaries?
Why broader matters
It's true that the humanities come with a higher risk of unemployment. But it's worth noting that the risk is slighter than you'd imagine. For young people (aged 25-34) in the US, the unemployment rate of those with a humanities degree is 4%. An engineering or business degree comes with an unemployment rate of a little more than 3%. That single additional percentage point is one extra person per 100, such a small amount it's often within the margin of error of many surveys.

Salaries aren't so straightforward either. Yes, in the UK, the top earnings are pulled in by those who study medicine or dentistry, economics or maths; in the US, engineering, physical sciences or business. Some of the most popular humanities, such as history or English, are in the bottom half of the group.

But there's more to the story - including that for some jobs, it seems that it's actually better to start with a broader degree, rather than a professional one.

Notable wage disparities persist in the humanities: US men who major in the humanities have median earnings of $60,000, for example, while women make $48,000

Take law. In the US, an undergraduate student who took the seemingly most direct route to becoming a lawyer, judge or magistrate - majoring in a pre-law or legal studies degree - can expect to earn an average of $94,000 a year. But those who majored in philosophy or religious studies make an average of $110,000. Graduates who studied area, ethnic and civilisations studies earn $124,000, US history majors earn $143,000 and those who studied foreign languages earn $148,000, a stunning $54,000 a year above their pre-law counterparts.

There are similar examples in other industries too. Take managers in the marketing, advertising and PR industries: those who majored in advertising and PR earn about $64,000 a year - but those who studied liberal arts make $84,000.

And even while overall salary disparities do remain, it may not be the degree itself. Humanities graduates in particular are more likely to be female. We all know about the gender pay gap, and notable wage disparities persist in the humanities: US men who major in the humanities have median earnings of $60,000, for example, while women make $48,000. Since more than six in 10 humanities majors are women, the gender pay gap, not the degree, may be to blame.

We also know that as more women move into a field, the field's overall earnings go down. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men?
Do what you love
This is a big part of why there is one major takeaway, says Mangan. Whatever a student pursues in university, it must be something that they aren't just good at, but they really enjoy.

"In most areas that I can see, the employer just wants to know that you've been to college and you've done well. That's why I think doing something that really interests you is essential - because that's when you're going to do well," she says.

No matter what, making a degree or career path decision based on average salaries isn't a good move. "Financial success is not a good reason. It tends to be a very poor reason," Mangan says. "Be successful at something and money will follow, as opposed to the other way around. Focus on doing the stuff that you love that you'll be so enthusiastic about, people will want to give you a job. Then go and develop within that job."

This speaks to a broader point: the whole question of whether a student should choose Stem versus the humanities, or a vocational course versus a liberal arts degree, might be misguided to begin with. It's not as if most of us have an equal amount of passion and aptitude for, say, accounting and art history. Plenty of people know what they love most. They just don't know if they should pursue it. And the headlines most of us see don't help.

This is part of why parents and teachers often need to take a step back, Mangan says. "There is only one expert. I'm the expert on me, you're the expert on you, they're the expert on themselves," she says. "And nobody, I really mean nobody, can tell them how to do what they should be doing."

Even, it seems, if that means pursuing a "useless" degree - like one in liberal arts.

--
Amanda Ruggeri is a senior journalist and editor at BBC.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @amanda_ruggeri.
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At university, when I told people I was studying for a history degree, the response was almost always the same: "You want to be a teacher?". No, a journalist. "Oh. But you're not majoring in communications?"

# data[].attributes.headline
4 reasons the future will rely on humanities majors

# data[].attributes.subject
4 reasons the future will rely on humanities majors

# data[].attributes.body
Tyrus Miller

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sign up for the March 5 webinar: "Unique ways to use your humanities degree"

Learn how to market and position your undergraduate or graduate degree by gaining insights and advice from UC alumni who've found career success as a result of their liberal arts education.

Featured speakers include:

Erin Gruwell (English, UC Irvine '91), founder and executive director, Freedom Writers Foundation

Carly Chittim (American studies & English, UC Santa Barbara '11), university recruiter for business and marketing internships, Facebook

Carol Kim (English, UCLA '98), director of community engagement, San Diego County Building Trades Council (SDBCTC) Family Housing Corporation

Arya Zarrinkelk (Communication studies & English, UC Davis '05), employment & training specialist III (Arts, Media + Entertainment), City College of San Francisco

The webinar runs from 12-1 p.m PST.

Register for the free March 5 webinar here.

Learn more about UC's 2019 Virtual Career series here.
The humanities are where many future leaders, communicators, scholars, CEOs, storytellers, creatives, directors, writers and entrepreneurs come to get their start. While the disciplines of the humanities themselves are distinct, together they provide students with a common set of skills that employers of today, and especially those of the future, will rely on.
This is, then, without question, the most exciting time ever to study the humanities and put them to work in the world!

Here are four reasons I believe the future will rely on humanities majors.
1. The credibility of information will only become harder to decipher.
As of 2018, social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans. As such, the continued expansion of social networks will make the ability to determine fact from falsehood a fundamental skill. By engaging with texts, documents and images from different timeframes, geographic regions and points of view, humanists are trained not only to interpret information, but also to assess its reliability and authenticity. Such skills are not just "nice to have" - they are imperative to our democracy that we as citizens can distinguish fact from falsity.

Consider: One of the values of engaging in philosophical and critical thought is thinking deeply through the frameworks that confine our decisions and knowledge itself. UC Irvine is ranked #9 in the nation for epistemology, which is the study of how we know what we know.
2. The humanities are a necessary partner to STEM.
Scientific facts require interpretation and dissemination to reach the public and to spark action. Because humanists study culture and values, they are equipped to uncover and analyze the underlying beliefs and motives that may prevent even irrefutable scientific evidence, like that pointing to man-made climate change, from sparking widespread action. One of the most valuable strengths humanists bring to the table is narrative-that is, storytelling. Stories are what spark connection and motivate change. Some of the most important shifts in cultural values and beliefs have been motivated by humanistic writing. Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" motivated people to question widespread agricultural and industrial practices and inspired change at the governmental level. It's not just books that do this-art and visual mediums like film and documentary are key parts of the humanist's toolbox.

Consider: The UC Irvine School of Humanities' recent climate change conference brought several storytellers, artists and communicators to the table with scientists to break down barriers between knowledge and to contribute together to solutions.
3. Technological and medical advancements will need humanists to ensure progress and ethical futures.
The humanities are not limited to just the disciplines that fall under their umbrella in university settings. Humanistic perspectives can illuminate any discipline, including technology and medicine, to ensure that human progress and the human experience are accounted for in decisions to advance technology and medicine. One of the fundamental juxtapositions between technological advancement and humanity is played out in Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein." Providing a framework from which to compare the scientific method against questions of humanity, the novel uses narrative to walk readers through the question: just because we can do something, should we? This is the power of the humanities - not to halt progress, but to inform the genuine progress that comes only from thoughtful reflection on human values and meaning.

Consider: Some of the topics humanists at UC Irvine have written about include: Asian Americans and mental illness; modern China and mental health; Japanese fiction about radiation; and Flint, Michigan's lead-in-water crisis.
4. The humanities help catalyze valuable innovations in society, government, business, culture and entertainment, and even science and technology.
Innovation arises from the discovery of new facets and hidden aspects of our world, as we confront challenging issues, solve problems, and imagine new designs. The disciplines and expertise of the humanities can train you to frame new questions, interpret texts and images more subtly and more deeply, understand nuances of human motivation and communication, bring together different cultural perspectives productively, and make ethical choices about the values that motivate publics and clients.

Consider: UC Irvine is a world leader in critical theory, interdisciplinary learning, and innovative thought in the humanities.

For students considering the humanities, know that the humanities teach you how to examine your beliefs and those of others, how to write persuasively across mediums (even in social media posts!), how to leverage historical context to inform today's decisions and mitigate conflict, and how to use your imagination to create something new and to appreciate something that others have created. These are just a few of the reasons I love the humanities - while, as a freshman undergraduate many years ago, I intended to become a biophysicist! My heart and mind were changed, though, when I saw what I could achieve through humanistic study. At the UC Irvine School of Humanities, I now have the joy of seeing our students working across the disciplines in exciting ways, to study the medical humanities, the environmental humanities, the digital humanities, humanities and law, and other innovative paths of new, future-making knowledge.
Tyrus Miller is dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to UC Irvine, he served as vice provost and dean of graduate studies and as co-provost of Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz, and as the director of the UC Education Abroad Program's Study Center in Budapest, Hungary. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, an M.A. in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a concurrent B.A./M.A. in humanities from Johns Hopkins. He is an internationally recognized scholar of 20th century art, literature, and culture, with a specialization in the innovative modernist and avant-garde literary and artistic movements of Europe and the United States. He is author of "Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars"; "Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde"; "Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in 20th-Century Theory, History, and Art"; and "Modernism and the Frankfurt School."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4 reasons the future will rely on humanities majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sign up for the March 5 webinar: "Unique ways to use your humanities degree" Learn how to market and position your undergraduate or graduate degree by gaining insights and advice from UC alumni who've found career success as a result of their liberal arts education.

# data[].attributes.headline
Goldman Sachs CEO reveals the valuable job skill he's finding 'less and less'

# data[].attributes.subject
Goldman Sachs CEO reveals the valuable job skill he's finding 'less and less'

# data[].attributes.body
Julia La Roche

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Goldman Sachs ( GS) CEO David Solomon said the one skillset that's becoming harder to find is the ability to write.

"I'll tell you one that we're finding less and less inside the firm that I think is an important skill set, but actually we find it from students that come from Hamilton or other liberal arts backgrounds, is an ability to write," Solomon said during a panel in response to a question from Yahoo Finance about the hardest skill to hire for today.

This week, Solomon and former Legendary Entertainment CEO Thomas Tull, now the founder of investment firm Tulco, returned to their alma mater, Hamilton College, to talk to students about technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Solomon is a big advocate for a liberal arts education, especially when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving, though he recognized that it's not the path for everyone.

Hamilton's curriculum emphasizes communication, both public speaking and writing. These skills had a profound impact on Solomon's career.

"How you communicate with other people, how you interact with other people, how you express yourself will have a huge impact on your success. And, when I try to point to things that have helped me, my ability to communicate, which was rooted in a lot of experience that I got here on the hill," Solomon told a group of students at the college's career center earlier in the day.

Academics and I.Q. are way overweighted

Solomon, who is six months into his tenure as CEO of Goldman, also explained that success isn't about intelligence, but rather how you relate to others.

"The other thing I'd point to that's so important is there is a real emphasis when people are interviewing around academics and I.Q. I think it's way overweighted," Solomon told the students. "There should be equal emphasis on E.Q. and how you interact with people, how you relate to people, and how you connect with people.

"And even in a world where more and more machines and technology are disrupting the way we do business and the way we all connect, a lot of the value is still created through human interaction and the ability to motivate people or get people to move in a direction with you. All of those are things in my experience here that had a meaningful impact on me and helped me along the way."

During the evening panel discussion, Tull also weighed in on the hardest skill set to find, explaining that a lot of people aren't interested in staying in one place for a long time.

"I might say finding folks who are looking for longer-term employment versus being transient, especially what we do. We put an awful lot into [Tulco] Labs and so forth so if people are in and out that's harder to kind of build up a knowledge set," Tull said.

Solomon agreed that a lot of young people are in a hurry and not focused on the long-term.

"There's a real benefit to being patient, a little more committed to things," Solomon said, "It's a long, winding road. In my career, I got some great advice a long time ago which was from my grandmother which was, 'Don't be in a hurry.'"

-

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Goldman Sachs CEO reveals the valuable job skill he's finding 'less and less'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Goldman Sachs ( GS) CEO David Solomon said the one skillset that's becoming harder to find is the ability to write.

# data[].attributes.headline
English majors, rejoice: Employers want you more than business majors

# data[].attributes.subject
English majors, rejoice: Employers want you more than business majors

# data[].attributes.body
Aimee Picchi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The liberal arts have become the Rodney Dangerfield of college degrees, getting no respect from many parents and politicians. Yet the joke may be on the naysayers, with a new study finding that English majors and other liberal arts students have a higher chance of finding a good job than more occupational majors such as business or biology.

While unemployment is at 3.7% -- the lowest jobless rate in half a century -- underemployment is a serious issue for college graduates, especially at a time when a private college degree can cost upwards of $200,000. Underemployment is indicated by whether a college graduate is employed in a job that requires a bachelor's degree, according to the study from employment data company Burning Glass. By that measure, 43 percent of college grads are underemployed in their first job, their analysis found.

A college degree "only pays off if graduates find college-level jobs," the analysis from Burning Glass noted. "In recent years, far too many students find that they are not able to put their degree to work in the labor market, with a troubling impact on their earning potential."

Underemployed college grads aren't only failing to use their skills, but tend to earn less than grads who found appropriate jobs, the researchers noted. Grads with a college-level job earn a starting salary of $46,000, but underemployed grads earn $36,000, or 22 percent less.

English majors have a 29 percent probability of being underemployed after graduation, compared with 31 percent for business majors, the report found. The field with the lowest probability of underemployment is engineering, at 18 percent. The highest? Homeland security, law enforcement and related protective services, at 50 percent.

Over a career, that pay differential can have a lasting impact, with underemployed grads losing out on $149,000 in income during the first 15 years in the job market, they found.

Problem majors

"Problematic majors" may require students to take on extra work to prepare themselves for the workforce, the researchers said.

Not all occupational degrees are practical, which may explain why some popular majors don't always guarantee a good labor force outcome. These majors include business, legal studies, public administration and social services professions and parks, recreation and fitness studies.

These degrees comprise 4 in 10 bachelor's degrees handed out by U.S. colleges, which the researchers called "troubling."

"Graduates in these majors make up nearly half of the underemployed in our study," they noted.

While these majors are aimed at preparing students for specific fields, they are failing to graduate "job ready" adults, the researchers said. Students in these majors may not be learning communication and critical thinking skills, which means they may lack the writing and reasoning abilities that employers want in new hires.

"You're not getting the hard skills and you're not getting the soft skills," Doug Webber, an associate professor of economics at Temple University, told the researchers.

That's not to say that business majors can't find good job opportunities after graduation. But the key is focusing on developing skills that will help them stand out when they go on the job market, such as concentrating on finance or accounting, the study noted.

"What students study at college often signals to employers the skills they have and the qualities they bring to a job," the researchers said. "Majors can help put students on the pathway to a long-term career, or they can dead-end them in underemployment."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
English majors, rejoice: Employers want you more than business majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The liberal arts have become the Rodney Dangerfield of college degrees, getting no respect from many parents and politicians. Yet the joke may be on the naysayers, with a new study finding that English majors and other liberal arts students have a higher chance of finding a good job than more occupational majors such as business or biology.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Reverse Declining English Enrollments

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Reverse Declining English Enrollments

# data[].attributes.body
Peter J. Kalliney

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Advice

iStock

Five years ago, I took on the task of course scheduling when I became associate chair of the English department at the University of Kentucky. We faced problems familiar to many humanities departments: declining enrollments, stagnant numbers of majors, politicians questioning the value of the humanities in higher education, institutional pressure to serve greater numbers of undergraduates, and faculty members who prefer to teach small specialized courses for majors rather than large intro classes full of nonmajors.

Since then, we haven't solved most of those problems, but we have managed to stem - and even reverse - our declining enrollments.

In my very first year as course scheduler, our enrollments plummeted about 20 percent. A combination of factors contributed to the pronounced dip: The university adopted a new general-education program that didn't include many English courses; part of the reorganization stripped English of its virtual monopoly on an important writing requirement; and, as we all know, enrollments in English were in decline across the country.

For the first time in five years, I did not have to cancel a single course this year.

It was a disaster. I spent the year canceling undersubscribed sections, reassigning instructors, waiting (vainly) for empty classes to fill, panicking about designing my first schedule, and wondering if the job was too big for me.

Soon thereafter, however, we stabilized and began clawing our way back. In 2017-18, our courses have more students enrolled than in 2012-13 - up 25 percent from the trough and climbing consistently. We have done that without an increase in faculty, and our department's increased enrollment has outpaced growth in the university's over all undergraduate population.

For the first time in five years, I did not have to cancel a single course this year. So how did we do it? Since academic tend to be skeptics, let's start with what we didn't do and actively tried to avoid:

Overhauling the major is not the answer. Curriculum reform is a reflex reaction for humanities departments facing declining numbers. Professors often assume, mistakenly I believe, that poor enrollments might be explained by a structural problem of some kind. But curriculum reform is taxing and does not necessarily lead to a spike in enrollment. In fact, there is often a lengthy transition period during which enrollments drop while students and instructors adjust to the new offerings, making it difficult to tell if the fix is working. At best, curriculum reform is a major distraction; at worst, it can hide or exacerbate the problem and delay a solution. Working within the existing curriculum - offering better classes and perhaps some new ones - is the way to go.

Don't get buried in the minutiae. Course scheduling is an incredibly detail-oriented job. It is easy to get lost in the weeds, as my chair is fond of saying. For instance, I often find myself fretting that our 400-level offerings in the fall are too focused on early-period topics and not enough on modern ones. I have to keep reminding myself to put that flaw in perspective: It's not as important as making sure the introductory courses are attractive and balanced topically, and the faculty teaching burden is equitably distributed.

Don't let required writing or language courses be an undergraduate's sole exposure to the humanities. Many students resent those requirements even if they need them. Complement them with course offerings on topics that lots of undergraduates are eager to study: film, creative writing, mythology, the Bible, science fiction, Shakespeare, and Great Books. All of those have tremendously broad appeal.

Don't assume that certain professors are incapable of teaching a popular intro course. Chairs and course schedulers may jump to that conclusion because of faculty disposition or areas of scholarly interest, but all faculty members should strive to teach upper- and lower-division courses. Striking a balance between student demand and faculty wishes is difficult but of the highest priority for two reasons: (1) Giving in entirely to student demand forces instructors into some awkward courses, and (2) the strong temptation to satisfy the desires of peers usually produces a top-heavy schedule.

Now for the positive steps that course schedulers and chairs can take to turn around an enrollment decline.

Bring out the big guns to teach nonmajors. The most crucial thing - and perhaps the hardest change to effect - is to have the department's best and most experienced professors teach introductory and general-education courses on a regular basis. Gen-ed courses are where humanities departments fight for majors and should be used as recruiting opportunities.

In our department, that involved expanding our film and creative-writing offerings. We have increased our film offerings every semester for the past five years to take full advantage of faculty members who are able to teach in this area. A new introductory creative-writing course, which meets a gen-ed requirement, also proved extremely popular. Many first-year students who never thought much of writing fall in love with the idea after a semester with one of our novelists or poets.

The goal: Make such popular classes gateways into the major and use the captive audience to recruit students. These courses should go down first on the teaching schedule - assigned to the most engaging instructors. Without those offerings, our upper-division and graduate courses will wither and die.

Our new gen-ed curriculum has a diversity requirement. So we also tinkered with our women's-studies and African-American literature courses to reach more nonmajors and diversify our pool of majors.

Provide incentives for teaching at the intro level. I don't just mean financial ones, though that always helps. Here are some options: Give faculty members a boost in their annual merit reviews if they teach a successful intro course; offer a bonus to professors who teach large intro classes; link the teaching of the most desirable classes (senior seminars and graduate courses) to the teaching of a "service" course; and offer small, enrollment-capped seminars for first-year students.

Some of those ideas we've tried in our department (a merit "bump" for teaching large classes), and some I'm still pushing for (first-year seminars). And of course, people's schedules cannot always accommodate a gen-ed course assignment. If, for instance, they've just accepted a part-time administrative post that comes with a reduced teaching load, they're going to want to keep an upper-division course and drop an intro one. The chair and I work together closely to build a schedule that works for the department.

Practice what you preach. It is extremely important for the chair, the course scheduler, and the senior professors to teach intro and gen-ed courses on a regular basis. You cannot ask faculty members to do things that you are unwilling to do yourself. Since becoming associate chair, I have taught a 100-level class every year, which is more frequently than any other faculty member. Exempting senior faculty and administrators from teaching "service" courses weakens morale. Having a chair, course scheduler, and senior professors who support all of these measures is essential to changing internal attitudes about teaching intro and gen-ed courses.

It's worth noting: Teaching such classes can be incredibly rewarding. I routinely have students from other majors take additional courses with me after the one they were "required" to take. And it's always gratifying to hear students who will never take another literature course say they learned something in my class.

Adopting some of these strategies depends on appointing department leaders who have demonstrated their commitment to whatever the department values. If research is important to the department, having a chair and a scheduler who are active researchers promotes the idea that research and teaching are compatible activities. If the institution values teaching over research, having a chair and scheduler who understand the demands of the classroom is essential. It helps to have full professors in these positions, too, if staffing permits.
Peter J. Kalliney is associate chair and a professor of English at the University of Kentucky.
Finally, make the effort to thank colleagues who are willing to share the teaching load equitably.

Department administrators sometimes feel squeezed - both by faculty members (some of whom look only at their own teaching schedules and miss the big picture) and by deans and provosts (who emphasize that new resources will not be plowed into fields with declining enrollments). Attracting new majors is just as important as serving the ones who have already declared. Humanities courses have plenty to offer all students: We simply need to get our best faculty on the job.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We Reversed Our Declining English Enrollments. Here's How.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Advice Five years ago, I took on the task of course scheduling when I became associate chair of the English department at the University of Kentucky.

# data[].attributes.headline
Eliminating the Humanities Decimates Every Student's Education

# data[].attributes.subject
Eliminating the Humanities Decimates Every Student's Education

# data[].attributes.body
Willard Dix

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Share to email

Share to facebook

Share to twitter

Share to linkedin

Share to google

I cover the college admission process and how it affects families. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Tweet This

Attempts to strip "non-productive" majors and programs from colleges goes back many years. Amputating sociology, English, history, philosophy, the classics, and even art and music, always done in the name of "economizing," has been a theme of politicians who claim simply to be applying business principles to higher education. In reality, the motivation is often trying to get rid of troublesome departments that sometimes inspire students to think critically about social systems, culture and history.

After I wrote about the University of Wisconsin--Stevens Point controversy a few entries back, I was amazed at the response. I began to look for other examples where politicians had tried to cut the heart out of their university systems. I was surprised to see how often it's happened. Not always successful, it still demonstrates a hostility to higher education that, unfortunately, seems to fit well with the anti-factual, anti-science and anti-reality attitude of the current administration and the far right. It also reflects a growing idea that colleges and universities should be run like businesses (much the way some insist that government should be run by businessmen).

Of course, every institution has to be fiscally responsible to ensure its future. Plenty of colleges, especially small ones, haven't survived for any number of reasons. But when states slash the budgets of their university systems, focusing on eliminating humanities in favor of more "productive" majors and departments, they are erasing their reason for being.

Whatever you think of higher education, one of its main roles is to preserve and transmit culture while adapting to and being changed by it. From libraries to classrooms, each generation of teachers and students communicates ideas and demonstrates theories that have evolved over thousands of years of civilization, now more and more including non-Western and non-white cultures. Since education isn't a zero-sum game, all of the collected wisdom and foolishness of the world comes crashing together in college. One way or another, students leave (ideally) with a greater sense of the world and who they are in it. The back and forth of educated debate is both a cause and a result of where we have come from and where we are now.

Shearing off humanities because they don't deliver the goods impoverishes every student no matter what his or her background. And it's a mistake to set up a humanities vs STEM contest either. Both are important. Anyone who's watched Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson knows that. We need all of these things, even if they aren't packed with students. Looking at them solely with a bookkeeper's gimlet eye makes no sense.

And yet, it's happening, more and more often. College presidencies are being turned over to businesspeople and even big donors instead of individuals who have come up through the ranks as if anyone can run a university. The University of Oklahoma just announced that James L. Gallogly, former oil executive and a major donor, will be the institution's next president. Edinboro University, one of Pennsylvania's public universities, has just forced its president, a former Navy man and RIT dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology, to resign. His idea of taking a chainsaw to a surgery didn't sit well with the faculty or students, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Like many such plans, Edinboro's cuts low-enrolled programs and places bets on familiar cash cows, such as a new master's in business administration. ...News leaked about a few programs, particularly the beloved music major. But Edinboro did not acknowledge that it had done away with 31 degree programs or concentrations within majors, some of which had scarcely any students, until The Chronicle obtained the information through a public-records request. Anticipating this article, Walker sent out a campuswide email this month, listing the programs that the university had cut.

Other examples of governors and politicians riding roughshod over academia include:

In 2008, " Indiana State Indiana State University was among the first schools to undertake a comprehensive review of its offerings, from 2006 to 2008, which resulted in the elimination or suspension of 48 academic programs, including art history, German, and journalism as it sought to trim a bloat of offerings that had led to 8,000 empty seats in classes."

Also in 2008, the Washington Post reported on Texas Gov. Rick Perry's efforts to "reform" education in that state.

That day [May 28, 2008] marked the beginning of an effort - spearheaded by the governor, one of his six-figure campaign donors and a conservative think tank - to re-engineer Texas's leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability. The initiative stayed pretty much under the radar until last fall [2010], when it became public that Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M University, had compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations...

In 2010, The New York Times report ed on the elimination of foreign languages at colleges and universities across the country.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida in 2011 ridiculed the need for anthropologists (despite his daughter's being one) in the Herald Tribune:

Future anthropology majors be warned, Gov. Rick Scott does not believe such programs contribute much to Florida's economy and wants them on the losing end of university funding decisions....

Leading Scott's list of changes: Shifting funding to degrees that have the best job prospects, weeding out unproductive professors and rethinking the system that offers faculty job security.

It's not just public universities, either.

Late last month (Oct. 2012), administrators [at Our Lady of the Lake College] announced plans to phase out majors in religious studies, art, drama, human sciences, human sciences (graduate program), marketing, Mexican American studies, natural science, organizational leadership (undergraduate program), philosophy, social studies and Spanish over the next four years, after current students graduate. A sociology graduate program has been mothballed, too.

And it's not always the humanities that get cut. In 2013, according to Inside Higher Ed, The University of Southern Maine proposed eliminating its physics department, using what it calls the "rule of five," which targets departments with five or fewer majors for elimination.

Some proponents of the discipline say it's a shortsighted move, and, like similar initiatives in other states, could contribute to the country's dearth of qualified candidates for science-related jobs. The value of physics - a "foundational" science - isn't tied to enrollment alone, they say.

In 2015, Rider University in NJ slashed 13 majors, including

...art and art history, advertising, American studies, business education, French, geosciences, German, marine science, philosophy, piano and web design. The bachelor of arts program in economics and the graduate program in organizational leadership will also be eliminated. ( nj.com)

The University of North Carolina system eliminated 46 degree programs in 2015. A revealing statement from a Board member in the Daily Tar Heel: "We're capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."

According to the unanimously [in 2016] to Daily Nous, the Board of Trustees of Western Illinois University (WIU), following up on its previously announced plans, ignored substantial opposition and voted eliminate its school's philosophy major (along with majors in African-American studies, religious studies, and women's studies).

Page 1 / 2 Continue

Share to email

Share to facebook

Share to twitter

Share to linkedin

Share to google

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eliminating The Humanities Decimates Every Student's Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The drive to eliminate the humanities & other courses from colleges and universities is more than just financial; it's political. And it's been going on at an ever-increasing pace since the financial crisis of 2008. That's a dangerous sign of cultural decay.

# data[].attributes.headline
Google finds STEM skills aren't the most important skills

# data[].attributes.subject
Google finds STEM skills aren't the most important skills

# data[].attributes.body
Lou Glazer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Terrific Washington Post column on research done by Google on the skills that matter most to its employees success. Big surprise: it wasn't STEM. The Post writes:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both brilliant computer scientists, founded their company on the conviction that only technologists can understand technology. Google originally set its hiring algorithms to sort for computer science students with top grades from elite science universities.

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company's incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google's top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one's colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

This, of course, is consistent with the findings of the employer-led Partnership for 21st Century Learning who describe the foundation skills for worker success as the 4Cs: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. And the book Becoming Brilliant which adds to those four content and confidence for the 6Cs.

And consistent with the work on the value of a liberal arts degree of journalist George Anders laid out in his book You Can Do Anything and in a Forbes article entitled That Useless Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket.

It's far past time that Michigan policymakers and business leaders stop telling our kids if they don't get a STEM related degree they are better off not getting a four-year degree. It simply is not accurate. (Not to mention that many of their kids are getting non-STEM related four-year degrees.) And instead begin to tell all kids what is accurate that the foundation skills--as Google found out--are not narrow occupation-specific skills, but rather are broad skills related to the ability to work with others, think critically and be a lifelong learner. The kind of skills that are best built with a broad liberal arts education.

The Post concludes:

No student should be prevented from majoring in an area they love based on a false idea of what they need to succeed. Broad learning skills are the key to long-term, satisfying, productive careers. What helps you thrive in a changing world isn't rocket science. It may just well be social science, and, yes, even the humanities and the arts that contribute to making you not just workforce ready but world ready.

Exactly!

Lou Glazer is President and co-founder of Michigan Future, Inc., a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Michigan Future's mission is to be a source of new ideas on how Michigan can succeed as a world class community in a knowledge-driven economy. Its work is funded by Michigan foundations.

We continue our look at the components of income data from our new annual report...

If you've been following this blog, you know we recently released the second in-depth topic...

We are working on our next report: an assessment of the national, Michigan, metro Detroit...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Google finds STEM skills aren't the most important skills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Terrific Washington Post column on research done by Google on the skills that matter most to its employees success. Big surprise: it wasn't STEM. The Post writes: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both brilliant computer scientists, founded their company on the conviction that only technologists can understand technology.

# data[].attributes.headline
STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

# data[].attributes.subject
STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

# data[].attributes.body
Richard Lachman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups - scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.

Those divisions within the university seem now more deeply entrenched than ever before. And those working within the arts and the sciences face a third antagonist in society: Populism, with its attendant and increasing distrust of intellectuals.

This powder keg occurs in a context of growing economic disparity and, incongruously, the increasing role of technological innovations in our daily life.

I'm a computer scientist who studies digital culture. I try my best to bridge the divides, but constantly ask the question: How can universities train our scientists, technologists and engineers to engage with society, as Snow suggested, rather than perform as cogs in the engine of economic development?

I believe we need our educational system to engage students with issues of ethics and responsibility in science and technology. We should treat required arts and humanities courses not as some vague attempt to "broaden minds" but rather as a necessary discussion of morals, values, ethics and responsibility.

Identifying society's grand challenges

I was recently part of a conversation at the Fields Institute at the University of Toronto which asked another question: " What does the A stand for in STEAM? "

STEAM inserts arts into the acronym for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). I chose to frame the arts more widely to include the humanities, and asked the attendees: How do we identify the challenges we wish to work on?

(AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, File)

In the 1960s, Alan Ginsberg bemoaned what he saw as the dominant culture oppressing artistic creativity. Written today, his poem Howl might cry something like this:

"I saw the best minds of my generation spend their lives optimizing microseconds out of their high-frequency trading algorithms, or devising routing-algorithms for drone-delivered burritos."

Are these the biggest problems for our society?

Graduates of science and engineering programs understandably chase positions in start-ups or high-salaried finance jobs. Their knowledge of algorithmic development, data analysis or simply structured scientific thinking may net them fantastic jobs at a variety of private-sector employers.

But the problems they engage with, while impacting a large number of citizens, may not improve the lot of those citizens.

Our graduates' entire careers might develop advertising software that reaches millions, without engaging the larger questions of our lifetime for those millions.

Technology raises moral questions

There are major issues of debate in our scientific and technological community, with serious questions about bias, power and control.

Let's take a few examples from the headlines of this year:

1. We are increasingly seeing the influence of software algorithms in applications with life-changing impacts, such as criminal sentencing or employment. These software systems remain unmonitored "black boxes" that may be influenced by racial bias, special interests or simply bad science. We can't tell, as the systems are protected from scrutiny by intellectual property law. Or, in the case of deep learning, they are evolved systems too complex to be decoded by their very developers.

2. In biotechnology we see conversations about the use of CRISPR for germ-line editing - a domain in which genetic edits affect not just a patient but carry through to future generations. Others are debating gene drives, a way to short-circuit nature's checks and balances, allowing gene edits to spread to an entire population far more quickly than natural evolution could manage.

3. We're seeing the science community and major nations seek to address the challenge of climate change through geoengineering, making massive-scale edits to our planet's most fundamental systems.

These are not technological issues. They contain technological issues but they are not fundamentally technological issues. They are ethical ones. They require sophisticated experts to debate issues of ethics and society - to plan what, and if, we need to create.

(Shutterstock)

It's as if we've encountered several simultaneous Manhattan Projects through the application of military DARPA funding, venture-capital investment and advancements in cloud-computing. We are seeing a whole host of life-changing technologies come to fruition after decades of basic research - and the rapid prototyping tools and production pipelines of the modern era have let us scale these new inventions faster than ever before.

And, as with the questions about ethics and the atomic bomb that led to the formation of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, we suddenly have important moral questions that only those creators have unique and important insights into.

We need to make sure STEM graduates working in these fields are able to engage with the toughest questions of our time: What, where and how should our new inventions be engaged?

Grounding experiments in empathy

I would like to see university curricula in STEM subjects expanded - to discuss whether we should develop certain technologies at all, with ethical concerns a common thread throughout our studies. The risks to society of anything else seem paramount.

I don't argue that all policy-makers should be scientists, but rather that scientists should include the world of policy and social impact in their remit. They should be able to credibly think about and discuss those impacts with the rest of the world.

Snow thought the scientific mind "impatient to see if something can be done" - which echoes the "bias to action" so prevalent in start-up culture.

Action can be important, and even governments, not known for agile movement, are starting to embrace learning-through-doing. Finland, for example, has a department of experimentation which aims to bring design-thinking experimentation into policy work.

(AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade, File)

But even design thinking, the darling methodology-of-the-moment, grounds experiments in empathy. The developers of solutions should themselves be engaged with those affected by their works, co-creating through a direct engagement with users, with customers, with clients, with citizens.

Teaching ethics through the arts

And how else do our universities teach empathy, ethics and citizenship than through our arts and humanities fields?

There may be specific questions of citizenship, of responsibility, that we feel any and all STEM graduates should engage with (as there may be basic numeracy, stats or scientific literacy required for any non-STEM-trained citizen of the digital age).

I make no special claim to know the precise content of these classes, or to prescribe the curriculum of our degree program. We must develop them together. Tangible examples include this crowd-sourced list of Computer Science Ethics courses compiled by Casey Fiesler at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Crises in medical research, such as the Tuskegee Syphllis Study, helped jump-start the fields of medical ethics and bioethics as well as concepts such as informed consent. Medical professionals now engage with complex questions of inclusion, representation, voice and agency.

These aren't elements of dosage or measurement, but rather touch upon more abstract ideas of rights, values, and meaning - core elements in our study of the humanities. It's time for the rest of the STEM field to engage with the same issues.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups - scientists and the literary world.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Med Schools Are Requiring Art Classes

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Med Schools Are Requiring Art Classes

# data[].attributes.body
Casey Lesser

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"It's a richer experience than just, 'Check, I know how to observe now,'" says Dr. Taylor, regarding the courses Columbia offers, where students visit museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She notes that by verbally reacting to the art they see, and developing hypotheses around factors like what the artist was thinking or why they used a certain shade of red, students can prepare for future scenarios with patients and colleagues that will be uncomfortable and uncertain. These classes, which are most often led by museum educators, also serve to engender curiosity, to encourage students to ask questions, and, importantly, to consider the perspectives of others.

One of the oldest courses of this type was begun at Yale in the late 1990s by dermatology professor Dr. Irwin Braverman and curator Linda Friedlaender, who created a class that takes place at the Yale Center for British Art, and continues to be taught today. After taking that course in 2013, current Yale med student Robert Rock, who studied art history as an undergraduate, took the initiative to develop his own art tour of the Yale Center for British Art.

"The point is to create a critical consciousness," Rock explains. "I think in medical culture there's a deference to authority that holds people back from asking important questions about things that can mean life or death." He notes that the museum is neutral territory where students, who often don't have much experience with art, can feel comfortable voicing opinions or asking questions. His tour, called " Making the Invisible Visible," has since been incorporated into the Yale curriculum.

Beyond looking at and discussing art, students are also making it. At Columbia, students can take a comics course taught by Dr. Benjamin Schwartz, assistant professor of medicine and chief creative officer at Columbia's Department of Surgery, who is also a contributing cartoonist to The New Yorker. In his classes for first- and fourth-years, students learn to create their own comics and, in the process, gain insights into the different vantages from which to see and understand real-life situations. Perhaps most importantly, they learn to practice effective storytelling.

"When you become a doctor, you train really hard to learn another vocabulary and it really is almost like its own language," says Dr. Schwartz. "You become so well-versed in it that you can forget that you're speaking it and words that are common to you might be confusing jargon to the person you're speaking with." Making comics, he explains, can help to prevent these types of scenarios, and engender mindfulness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Med Schools Are Requiring Art Classes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"It's a richer experience than just, 'Check, I know how to observe now,'" says Dr. Taylor, regarding the courses Columbia offers, where students visit museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

# data[].attributes.body
Scott Jaschik

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What's the worst college major for your career, according to ? Anthropology and archaeology. Kiplinger's says to stay away from religious studies, music, anthropology and art history.

Such warnings are common these days. And liberal arts professors and admissions deans at liberal arts colleges will tell you that plenty of students (and an even larger share of parents) believe them. Many colleges with liberal arts roots are rushing to add preprofessional programs.

But a study being released today by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences -- based on data from the U.S. Census and other government sources, plus Gallup polling of workers nationwide -- challenges the myth of the underemployed, unhappy humanities graduate.

The report doesn't contest that those who majored in engineering or natural sciences earn more, on average, than do humanities graduates do. But it shows humanities grads to be gainfully employed and holding positions of authority, and finds that only a slightly smaller share of them than of their better-paid counterparts think they have enough money. When it comes to measures of career satisfaction, humanities grads are as satisfied as those who majored in STEM.

Robert B. Townsend, director of the Washington office of the academy, said he hopes these data change the public discussion, which tends to fixate on stereotypical images of unemployed humanities graduates. "I think the top-line numbers about earnings still tend to drive much of the conversation, while the counterexamples are too often anecdata. Hopefully, these numbers will provide for a better-grounded discussion," he said.

The report starts off with the negative side of things for humanities advocates. Humanities graduates do earn less, on average, than those in many other fields. But they are in fact employed, and earning. The median salary for those with a terminal bachelor's degree in the humanities was $52,000 in 2015, less than the median for all graduates ($60,000) and much less than those in engineering ($82,000). As previous studies have shown, the report notes that the pay gaps narrow over time.

Turning away from pure financial figures, the report finds that humanities majors are succeeding in the work force by a range of measures. Almost 87 percent of all workers with a bachelor's degree in the humanities reported they were satisfied with their jobs in 2015, comparable to graduates from almost every other field. The figure was 90 percent for those with a bachelor's degree in the humanities and then an advanced degree (in any field).

Humanities majors also are employed. Only 4.3 percent of those with terminal bachelor's degrees were unemployed in 2015, and the figure was under 3 percent for those with a bachelor's in a humanities field and an advanced degree in any field.

The data in the report also show that large percentages of humanities majors are in supervisory roles, with 60 percent reporting that managing or supervising others is part of their job (a comparable percentage to those graduating in other fields).

And while the data do show some gaps between the perceptions of humanities graduates and others about financial matters, the gaps are much smaller than one would expect to find from articles about dead-end majors leading to jobs at Starbucks.

When it comes to general questions from Gallup about being "deeply interested" in their jobs, the vast majority of humanities grads are -- slightly more than is the case for business or the social sciences, but not far behind engineering.

And for those who think being "deeply interested" would correlate with being well compensated, that does not appear to be the case. Education was the only major where 80 percent of grads were deeply interested.

On another Gallup question, "At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day," humanities graduates were more likely than engineering graduates to answer in the affirmative.

The new report does point to one area where humanities graduates do suffer in comparison with nonhumanities graduates. Thirty percent of graduates with a bachelor's in humanities said their job was closely related to their degree in 2014, while more than a third saw no relationship. Graduates who had majored in business, education and natural sciences were much more likely to view their degree and work as closely related.

Of course, a flip side of that finding is that many humanities students study English or history or philosophy for insights and a way of analyzing the world, without intending their careers to be specifically in English, history or philosophy.

To accompany the report, the academy is releasing an essay by William D. Adams, senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In the essay, Adams writes that "defenders of the humanities in higher education tend to bristle when the topics of work and the economy come up. The humanities must be about more than jobs and compensation, they reason; we need to prepare students for all of the principal domains of adult life." While Adams writes that such defenders of the humanities are "right, of course," he adds that "questions about the economic returns on investments in higher education are not going away." And he notes that politicians continue to suggest that there may not be a need to educate more people outside of strictly vocational programs.

Reflecting this reality, he writes, projects like the academy's study are important, for showing how humanities graduates are faring, and for improving the quality of education humanities students receive. "In this climate, and for the foreseeable future, several things are true," he writes. "First, we need to know more about how graduates with humanities degrees are doing in the workplace. Second, we need to know more about how the skills the humanities seek to impart -- critical thinking and communication skills, for instance -- actually matter in the workplace. And third, we need to be willing to adjust our views about which humanities aptitudes are significant (or not) in the extraordinarily dynamic workplace of the coming decades. Along the way, we're also going to have to get a better grip on just how well we're doing in fostering the capabilities we deem most relevant to work readiness and success."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Study finds humanities majors land jobs and are happy in them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What's the worst college major for your career, according to ? Anthropology and archaeology. Kiplinger's says to stay away from religious studies, music, anthropology and art history. Such warnings are common these days. And liberal arts professors and admissions deans at liberal arts colleges will tell you that plenty of students (and an even larger share of parents) believe them.

# data[].attributes.headline
Liberal Arts Majors Needed for Future of Tech

# data[].attributes.subject
Liberal Arts Majors Needed for Future of Tech

# data[].attributes.body
Richard Feloni

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Business Insider

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In their new book "The Future Computed," Microsoft president Brad Smith and EVP of AI and research Harry Shum discuss the future of artificial intelligence.

They argue that one of "the most important conclusions" they drew was the need for more liberal arts majors in tech.

As consumer-ready AI reaches human parity, they say, lessons from disciplines like psychology will be increasingly important.

In 2011, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told a panel of American governors that a liberal arts education would hold back college graduates in the modern economy.

A few days later, late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs declared that "it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."

Seven years later, Gates' company is siding with Jobs.

Microsoft president Brad Smith and EVP of AI and research Harry Shum wrote in their new book " The Future Computed" that "one of the most important conclusions" of Microsoft's recent research into artificial intelligence is that lessons from liberal arts will be critical to unleashing the full potential of AI.

Smith and Shum wrote:

"At one level, AI will require that even more people specialize in digital skills and data science. But skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering, and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions."

The two executives imagine a world in which our daily lives will be inextricably linked to AI.

For example, developers of driverless cars are already confronting ethical challenges like how a car should rank safety priorities of passengers and pedestrians in unavoidable accidents.

Ultimately, Smith and Shum argued, teams developing new uses for AI with human parity will need to include members with both engineering and liberal arts backgrounds. And both sides will need to know aspects of the other, as well.

"If AI is to reach its potential in serving humans, then every engineer will need to learn more about the liberal arts and every liberal arts major will need to learn more about engineering," Smith and Shum wrote.

You can download the book "The Future Computed" for free at Microsoft's website. Print copies will also be available at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting for 2018 in Davos.

Get the latest Microsoft stock price here.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft execs say in 20 years we'll all have digital assistants that will be our alter egos - and we need to set ground rules while we still can

NOW WATCH: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says companies need to take stances on controversial issues

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Microsoft's president says liberal arts majors are necessary for the future of tech

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In their new book "The Future Computed," Microsoft president Brad Smith and EVP of AI and research Harry Shum discuss the future of artificial intelligence. They argue that one of "the most important conclusions" they drew was the need for more liberal arts majors in tech.

# data[].attributes.headline
English Majors Among Most Desirable Employees, says Google

# data[].attributes.subject
English Majors Among Most Desirable Employees, says Google

# data[].attributes.body
Emer McKeon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. If you have been thinking about applying to universities and have been focusing on the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics for no reason other than you think they will make you more employable upon graduation, you might want to reconsider. Take a step back and re-evaluate where you want to put your mental energy, everyday, for four plus years, because as recent studies have shown, these subjects are not the be-all and end-all of starting a career.

Cathy N. Davidson, a professor in the doctoral program in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux and appointed by former President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, has written a piece worth reading about the clouded assumptions of those wishing to start a career and the type of studying they should be doing beforehand, based on two recent studies carried out by Google on their own employees and hiring data.

These two recent studies, called 'Project Oxygen' and 'Project Aristotle', show that studies of workplace success contradict the conventional wisdom about "hard skills" and their maximal benefit to us on our career path. The research has been carried out by technology titan Google.

From this study, Google was able to learn more about its employees, of whom there are over 72,000 worldwide. According to Davidson

Computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google on the conviction that only technologists can understand technology, and originally set its hiring algorithms to sort for computer science students with top grades from elite science universities.

However, when 'Project Oxygen' was carried out in 2013, the results gathered came as a shock to the industry. 'Project Oxygen' concluded that among the eight most important qualities of Google's top employees, STEM expertise comes in last. The top characteristics of success at Google are so-called "soft skills," such as communication, good leadership, possessing insight into others' values and points of view, having empathy and a supportive nature towards others and possessing good critical thinking and problem solving skills, along with the ability to create connections across complex ideas.

These are the skills that actually make you indispensable to employers, so don't worry if you never learnt rocket science or even coding skills, because these attributes can get you the job you dream of, be it in the tech industry or not.

While these traits are certainly applicable to having studied in the field of technology, they are especially reflective of a degree such as English or theatre, or really anything from the humanities category. Davidson further acknowledges the question of whether Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training and not because of it.

On top of that, Google also carried out 'Project Aristotle' last spring, which analysed data on its inventive and productive teams, and supports the importance of soft skills, even in high tech environments. This study showed that the most innovative and productive ideas were actually coming from Google's B-teams instead of their highly professional counterparts and esteemed scientists who would be categorized as A-teams, which further consolidates the fact that the best teams at Google exhibit soft skills such as generosity, curiosity, empathy and emotional intelligence with a keen emphasis on emotional safety, also.

What can we learn from these studies? Only that no student should be prevented from majoring in an area they love based on a false idea of what they need to succeed. In order to thrive in a changing world we must be sure of ourselves and our skills, and if rocket science isn't your thing, then social science should be. As Davidson remarks
Featured Image Via Latuff Cartoons

The humanities and the arts and the pleasure in studying them make us not only work ready, but world ready too, and the world is in desperate need of the expertise of those who are educated to the human, cultural, and social as well as the computational.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
English Majors Among Most Desirable Employees, says Google

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
STEM skills are vital to the world we live in today, but technology alone, as Steve Jobs famously insisted, is not enough. If you have been thinking about applying to universities and have been focusing on the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics for no reason other than you think they will make you more employable upon graduation, you might want to reconsider.

# data[].attributes.headline
Studying Humanities Teaches You How to Get a Job

# data[].attributes.subject
Studying Humanities Teaches You How to Get a Job

# data[].attributes.body
Ilana Gershon and Noah Berlatsky

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

"If you're studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there's not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set," Kentucky governor Matt Bevin declared in September, at a conference about higher education. Bevin's skepticism about the humanities and arts isn't an anomaly; politicians regularly joke about the supposed uselessness of non-STEM training. In 2014, President Barack Obama told students to major in trades rather than art history. In 2011, Governor Rick Scott of Florida said that it wasn't of " vital interest" to his state to have students major in anthropology. And so on. Math, engineering, science, trades: Those are practical, politicians agree. Literature, art, and anthropology? Those don't help you get jobs.

In fact, the reverse is true: The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search. The humanities teach students to understand the different rules and expectations that govern different genres, to examine social cues and rituals, to think about the audience for and reception of different kinds of communications. In short, they teach students how to apply for the kinds of jobs students will be looking for after college.

This is not the usual argument in defense of the humanities. Usually, those rebutting STEM-obsessed politicians point to the spiritual role of the arts, or evoke the general benefits of critical thinking. "The humanities conserve and safeguard those aspects of our being that intersect with the meanings of human existence beyond industry," Sarah Churchwell, chair of public humanities at the University of London, writes. Churchwell isn't wrong: The humanities do have value that isn't easily reflected in dollars and cents on the market. So do non-humanities fields, for that matter. Math and science and nursing and engineering can all create a sense of curiosity, wonder, and civic engagement. But these fields also have potential career benefits-and the humanities have as well.

Even politicians crafting anti-humanities propaganda are using techniques associated with the humanities.

In particular, the humanities teach the skills needed for applying for jobs. These skills are specific to the task of getting hired, and can be distinct from the skills you need to actually perform a job successfully. Someone following Obama's advice and majoring in a trade, for example, may still need to produce a cover letter. Even if you're looking for a job in STEM, you need to be able to write persuasively.

Most people grudgingly admit that writing is a necessary skill, however tainted by the humanities it might be. But applying for a job doesn't just involve composing a single essay. Today, to apply for a job, you need to create a range of writings in different genres. You need to have a business card, a LinkedIn profile, a resume, and a cover letter, and often you need to fill out a separate application as well. Each of these documents is supposed to support and refer to the others, to create an overarching narrative about who you are and why you deserve the job. That narrative, in turn, is supposed to inform, and be buttressed by, one or more interviews. Text and performance have to fit together.

Study in history, literature, anthropology, and other fields in the humanities is designed to teach students to master just such tasks. Students in humanities classes are asked to examine and synthesize multiple sources to create written or oral presentations. They are also asked to think about the different requirements of different genres. Identifying the characteristics of a successful sonnet isn't that different from identifying the characteristics of a successful resume. Resumes involve creating a story about who you are-and part of the point of the humanities is teaching that this requires both attention to detail and creativity.

In creating a cover letter or a resume, you want to make yourself look like everyone else, and you also want to make yourself stand out. The study of literature (as one example) is designed to teach students to recognize broad categories of works, and successful individual variation. It helps students understand how to approach a writing task with one eye on generic conventions, and one on creating an individual, particular impression. The job process requires students to take a great deal of information and squish it into a small, ill-fitting container. That's also a fair description of writing a research paper. Doing the second is good practice for the first.

Studying humanities also teaches students about anticipating and understanding audiences. When you apply for a job, you read a job description, search online, and try to put together a picture of what the people at the company are like, and what they want from you. These skills are precisely what disciplines like anthropology and history teach. Students in these fields gather information from books, interviews, and observation to put together a picture of a different culture. In the arts, students create works in an effort to impress, or move, an imagined audience. In the job search, you are looking at yourself from the outside, and trying to think about how some other particular group, with particular needs and interests, will judge your work. You are essentially turning yourself into a work of written-and-performance art to be evaluated.

Studying humanities allows you to see yourself through others' eyes by teaching you about other cultures and other ways of viewing the world. By understanding others and entering into their worlds, we become better and broader people. This is valuable in itself. But it is also an important skill because understanding how someone else thinks is essential if you are trying to get them to like you, or give you a job.

Even politicians crafting anti-humanities propaganda are using techniques associated with the humanities as part of their job application process. When Bevin sneers at dance majors, he's betting that the electorate doesn't tend to like dance majors. He's turning a complex issue into an aesthetically striking slogan in order to sway his employers (i.e. voters), whom he hopes to convince to renew his contract. He's engaged in a kind of dance of his own. And that dance, despite Bevin's protests to the contrary, is familiar to humanities majors and job seekers alike.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Studying Humanities Teaches You How to Get a Job

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"If you're studying interpretive dance, God bless you, but there's not a lot of jobs right now in America looking for people with that as a skill set," Kentucky governor Matt Bevin declared in September, at a conference about higher education.

# data[].attributes.body
Matthew Steward

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don't get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

Susana Vera / Reuters

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy-nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn't seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like "out-of-the-box thinking," "win-win situation," and "core competencies." When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to "process" my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I'd think, like, I'd rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: "How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?" The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business.

Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons' worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

Taylor stormed down to the yard with his assistants ("college men," he called them) and rounded up a group of top-notch lifters ("first-class men"), who in this case happened to be ten "large, powerful Hungarians." He offered to double the workers' wages in exchange for their participation in an experiment. The Hungarians, eager to impress their apparent benefactor, put on a spirited show. Huffing up and down the rail car ramps, they loaded sixteen and a half tons in something under fourteen minutes. Taylor did the math: over a ten-hour day, it worked out to seventy-five tons per day per man. Naturally, he had to allow time for bathroom breaks, lunch, and rest periods, so he adjusted the figure approximately 40 percent downward. Henceforth, each laborer in the yard was assigned to load forty-seven and a half pig tons per day, with bonus pay for reaching the target and penalties for failing.

When the Hungarians realized that they were being asked to quadruple their previous daily workload, they howled and refused to work. So Taylor found a "high-priced man," a lean Pennsylvania Dutchman whose intelligence he compared to that of an ox. Lured by the promise of a 60 percent increase in wages, from $1.15 to a whopping $1.85 a day, Taylor's high-priced man loaded forty-five and three-quarters tons over the course of a grueling day-close enough, in Taylor's mind, to count as the first victory for the methods of modern management.

Taylor went on to tackle the noble science of shoveling and a host of other topics of concern to his industrial clients. He declared that his new and unusual approach to solving business problems amounted to a "complete mental revolution." Eventually, at the urging of his disciples, he called his method "scientific management." Thus was born the idea that management is a science-a body of knowledge collected and nurtured by experts according to neutral, objective, and universal standards.

At the same moment was born the notion that management is a distinct function best handled by a distinct group of people-people characterized by a particular kind of education, way of speaking, and fashion sensibility. Taylor, who favored a manly kind of prose, expressed it best in passages like this:

... the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

From a metaphysical perspective, one could say that Taylor was a "dualist": there is brain, there is brawn, and the two, he believed, very rarely meet.

Taylor went around the country repeating his pig iron story and other tales from his days in the yard, and these narratives formed something like a set of scriptures for a new and highly motivated cult of management experts. This vanguard ultimately vaulted into the citadel of the Establishment with the creation of business schools. In the spring of 1908, Taylor met with several Harvard professors, and later that year Harvard opened the first graduate school in the country to offer a master's degree in business. It based its first-year curriculum on Taylor's scientific management. From 1909 to 1914, Taylor visited Cambridge every winter to deliver a series of lectures-inspirational discourses marred only by the habit he'd picked up on the shop floor of swearing at inappropriate moments.

Yet even as Taylor's idea of management began to catch on, a number of flaws in his approach were evident. The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. The most significant variable in Taylor's pig iron calculation was the 40 percent "adjustment" he made in extrapolating from a fourteen-minute sample to a full workday. Why time a bunch of Hungarians down to the second if you're going to daub the results with such a great blob of fudge? When he was grilled before Congress on the matter, Taylor casually mentioned that in other experiments these "adjustments" ranged from 20 percent to 225 percent. He defended these unsightly "wags" (wild-ass guesses, in M.B.A.-speak) as the product of his "judgment" and "experience"-but, of course, the whole point of scientific management was to eliminate the reliance on such inscrutable variables.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results. Yet Taylor never published the data on which his pig iron or other conclusions were based. When Carl Barth, one of his devotees, took over the work at Bethlehem Steel, he found Taylor's data to be unusable. Another, even more fundamental feature of science-here I invoke the ghost of Karl Popper-is that it must produce falsifiable propositions. Insofar as Taylor limited his concern to prosaic activities such as lifting bars onto rail cars, he did produce propositions that were falsifiable-and, indeed, were often falsified. But whenever he raised his sights to management in general, he seemed capable only of soaring platitudes. At the end of the day his "method" amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!

The trouble with such claims isn't that they are all wrong. It's that they are too true. When a congressman asked him if his methods were open to misuse, Taylor replied, No. If management has the right state of mind, his methods will always lead to the correct result. Unfortunately, Taylor was right about that. Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies).

Curiously, Taylor and his college men often appeared to float free from the kind of accountability that they demanded from everybody else. Others might have been asked, for example: Did Bethlehem's profits increase as a result of their work? Taylor, however, rarely addressed the question head-on. With good reason. Bethlehem fired him in 1901 and threw out his various systems. Yet this evident vacuum of concrete results did not stop Taylor from repeating his parables as he preached the doctrine of efficiency to countless audiences across the country.

In the management literature these days, Taylorism is presented, if at all, as a chapter of ancient history, a weird episode about an odd man with a stopwatch who appeared on the scene sometime after Columbus discovered the New World. Over the past century Taylor's successors have developed a powerful battery of statistical methods and analytical approaches to business problems. And yet the world of management remains deeply Taylorist in its foundations.

At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it. The managerial revolution must be counted as part of the great widening of economic opportunity that has contributed so much to our prosperity. But, insofar as it pretends to a kind of esoteric certitude to which it is not entitled, management theory betrays the ideals on which it was founded.

That Taylorism and its modern variants are often just a way of putting labor in its place need hardly be stated: from the Hungarians' point of view, the pig iron experiment was an infuriatingly obtuse way of demanding more work for less pay. That management theory represents a covert assault on capital, however, is equally true. (The Soviet five-year planning process took its inspiration directly from one of Taylor's more ardent followers, the engineer H. L. Gantt.) Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest-not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class.

I can confirm on the basis of personal experience that management consulting continues to worship at the shrine of numerology where Taylor made his first offering of blobs of fudge. In many of my own projects, I found myself compelled to pacify recalcitrant data with entirely confected numbers. But I cede the place of honor to a certain colleague, a gruff and street-smart Belgian whose hobby was to amass hunting trophies. The huntsman achieved some celebrity for having invented a new mathematical technique dubbed "the Two-Handed Regression." When the data on the correlation between two variables revealed only a shapeless cloud-even though we knew damn well there had to be a correlation-he would simply place a pair of meaty hands on the offending bits of the cloud and reveal the straight line hiding from conventional mathematics.

The thing that makes modern management theory so painful to read isn't usually the dearth of reliable empirical data. It's that maddening papal infallibility. Oh sure, there are a few pearls of insight, and one or two stories about hero-CEOs that can hook you like bad popcorn. But the rest is just inane. Those who looked for the true meaning of "business process re-engineering," the most overtly Taylorist of recent management fads, were ultimately rewarded with such gems of vacuity as "BPR is taking a blank sheet of paper to your business!" and "BPR means re-thinking everything, everything!"

Each new fad calls attention to one virtue or another-first it's efficiency, then quality, next it's customer satisfaction, then supplier satisfaction, then self-satisfaction, and finally, at some point, it's efficiency all over again. If it's reminiscent of the kind of toothless wisdom offered in self-help literature, that's because management theory is mostly a subgenre of self-help. Which isn't to say it's completely useless. But just as most people are able to lead fulfilling lives without consulting Deepak Chopra, most managers can probably spare themselves an education in management theory.

The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it's worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants' recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it's almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.

In one episode, when I got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank, I noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5 million in fees from the same subsidiary. "They were supposed to save the business," said one client manager, rolling his eyes. "Actually," he corrected himself, "they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job." Was my competitor held to account for failing to turn around the business and/or violating the rock-solid ethical standards of consulting firms? On the contrary, it was ringing up even higher fees over in another wing of the same organization.

And so was I. In fact, we kind of liked failing businesses: there was usually plenty of money to be made in propping them up before they finally went under. After Enron, true enough, Arthur Andersen sank. But what happened to such stalwarts as McKinsey, which generated millions in fees from Enron and supplied it with its CEO? The Enron story wasn't just about bad deeds or false accounts; it was about confusing sound business practices with faddish management ideas, celebrated with gusto by the leading lights of the management world all the way to the end of the party.

If you believed our chief of recruiting, the consulting firm I helped to found represented a complete revolution from the Taylorist practices of conventional organizations. Our firm wasn't about bureaucratic control and robotic efficiency in the pursuit of profit. It was about love.

We were very much of the moment. In the 1990s, the gurus were unanimous in their conviction that the world was about to bring forth an entirely new mode of human cooperation, which they identified variously as the "information-based organization," the "intellectual holding company," the "learning organization," and the "perpetually creative organization." "R-I-P. Rip, shred, tear, mutilate, destroy that hierarchy," said über-guru Tom Peters, with characteristic understatement. The "end of bureaucracy" is nigh, wrote Gifford Pinchot of "intrapreneuring" fame. According to all the experts, the enemy of the "new" organization was lurking in every episode of Leave It to Beaver.

Many good things can be said about the "new" organization of the 1990s. And who would want to take a stand against creativity, freedom, empowerment, and-yes, let's call it by its name-love? One thing that cannot be said of the "new" organization, however, is that it is new.

In 1983, a Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, beat the would-be revolutionaries of the nineties to the punch when she argued that rigid "segmentalist" corporate bureaucracies were in the process of giving way to new "integrative" organizations, which were "informal" and "change-oriented." But Kanter was just summarizing a view that had currency at least as early as 1961, when Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker published an influential book criticizing the old, "mechanistic" organization and championing the new, "organic" one. In language that eerily anticipated many a dot-com prospectus, they described how innovative firms benefited from "lateral" versus "vertical" information flows, the use of "ad hoc" centers of coordination, and the continuous redefinition of jobs. The "flat" organization was first explicitly celebrated by James C. Worthy, in his study of Sears in the 1940s, and W. B. Given coined the term "bottom-up management" in 1949. And then there was Mary Parker Follett, who in the 1920s attacked "departmentalized" thinking, praised change-oriented and informal structures, and-Rosabeth Moss Kanter fans please take note-advocated the "integrative" organization.

If there was a defining moment in this long and strangely forgetful tradition of "humanist" organization theory-a single case that best explains the meaning of the infinitely repeating whole-it was arguably the work of Professor Elton Mayo of the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Mayo, an Australian, was everything Taylor was not: sophisticated, educated at the finest institutions, a little distant and effete, and perhaps too familiar with Freudian psychoanalysis for his own good.

A researcher named Homer Hibarger had been testing theories about the effect of workplace illumination on worker productivity. His work, not surprisingly, had been sponsored by a maker of electric lightbulbs. While a group of female workers assembled telephone relays and receiver coils, Homer turned the lights up. Productivity went up. Then he turned the lights down. Productivity still went up! Puzzled, Homer tried a new series of interventions. First, he told the "girls" that they would be entitled to two five-minute breaks every day. Productivity went up. Next it was six breaks a day. Productivity went up again. Then he let them leave an hour early every day. Up again. Free lunches and refreshments. Up! Then Homer cut the breaks, reinstated the old workday, and scrapped the free food. But productivity barely dipped at all.

Mayo, who was brought in to make sense of this, was exultant. His theory: the various interventions in workplace routine were as nothing compared with the new interpersonal dynamics generated by the experimental situation itself. "What actually happened," he wrote, "was that six individuals became a team and the team gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to cooperation ... They felt themselves to be participating, freely and without afterthought, and were happy in the knowledge that they were working without coercion." The lessons Mayo drew from the experiment are in fact indistinguishable from those championed by the gurus of the nineties: vertical hierarchies based on concepts of rationality and control are bad; flat organizations based on freedom, teamwork, and fluid job definitions are good.

On further scrutiny, however, it turned out that two workers who were deemed early on to be "uncooperative" had been replaced with friendlier women. Even more disturbing, these exceptionally cooperative individuals earned significantly higher wages for their participation in the experiment. Later, in response to his critics, Mayo insisted that something so crude as financial incentives could not possibly explain the miracles he witnessed. That didn't make his method any more "scientific."

Mayo's work sheds light on the dark side of the "humanist" tradition in management theory. There is something undeniably creepy about a clipboard-bearing man hovering around a group of factory women, flicking the lights on and off and dishing out candy bars. All of that humanity-as anyone in my old firm could have told you-was just a more subtle form of bureaucratic control. It was a way of harnessing the workers' sense of identity and well-being to the goals of the organization, an effort to get each worker to participate in an ever more refined form of her own enslavement.

So why is Mayo's message constantly recycled and presented as something radically new and liberating? Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn't a new world order that the management theorists are after; it's the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they're fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution-civil war and Stalinism being good bets-could not be of less concern.

Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we're talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it's just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.

The tragedy, for those who value their reading time, is that Rousseau and Shakespeare said it all much, much better. In the 5,200 years since the Sumerians first etched their pictograms on clay tablets, come to think of it, human beings have produced an astonishing wealth of creative expression on the topics of reason, passion, and living with other people. In books, poems, plays, music, works of art, and plain old graffiti, they have explored what it means to struggle against adversity, to apply their extraordinary faculty of reason to the world, and to confront the naked truth about what motivates their fellow human animals. These works are every bit as relevant to the dilemmas faced by managers in their quest to make the world a more productive place as any of the management literature.

In the case of my old firm, incidentally, the endgame was civil war. Those who talked loudest about the ideals of the "new" organization, as it turned out, had the least love in their hearts. By a strange twist of fate, I owe the long- evity of my own consulting career to this circumstance. When I first announced my intention to withdraw from the firm in order to pursue my vocation as an unpublishable philosopher at large, my partners let me know that they would gladly regard my investment in the firm as a selfless contribution to their financial well-being. By the time I managed to extricate myself from their loving embrace, nearly three years later, the partnership had for other reasons descended into the kind of Hobbesian war of all against all from which only the lawyers emerge smiling. The firm was temporarily rescued by a dot-com company, but within a year both the savior and the saved collapsed in a richly deserved bankruptcy. Of course, your experience in a "new" organization may be different.

My colleagues usually spoke fondly of their years at business school. Most made great friends there, and quite a few found love. All were certain that their degree was useful in advancing their careers. But what does an M.B.A. do for you that a doctorate in philosophy can't do better?

The first point to note is that management education confers some benefits that have little to do with either management or education. Like an elaborate tattoo on an aboriginal warrior, an M.B.A. is a way of signaling just how deeply and irrevocably committed you are to a career in management. The degree also provides a tidy hoard of what sociologists call "social capital"-or what the rest of us, notwithstanding the invention of the PalmPilot, call a "Rolodex."

For companies, M.B.A. programs can be a way to outsource recruiting. Marvin Bower, McKinsey's managing director from 1950 to 1967, was the first to understand this fact, and he built a legendary company around it. Through careful cultivation of the deans and judicious philanthropy, Bower secured a quasi-monopoly on Baker Scholars (the handful of top students at the Harvard Business School). Bower was not so foolish as to imagine that these scholars were of interest on account of the education they received. Rather, they were valuable because they were among the smartest, most ambitious, and best-connected individuals of their generation. Harvard had done him the favor of scouring the landscape, attracting and screening vast numbers of applicants, further testing those who matriculated, and then serving up the best and the brightest for Bower's delectation.

Of course, management education does involve the transfer of weighty bodies of technical knowledge that have accumulated since Taylor first put the management-industrial complex in motion-accounting, statistical analysis, decision modeling, and so forth-and these can prove quite useful to students, depending on their career trajectories. But the "value-add" here is far more limited than Mom or Dad tend to think. In most managerial jobs, almost everything you need to know to succeed must be learned on the job; for the rest, you should consider whether it might have been acquired with less time and at less expense.

The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills-one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call "problem solving"). But do they manage to teach such skills?

I once sat through a presentation in which a consultant, a Harvard M.B.A., showed a client, the manager of a large financial institution in a developing country, how the client company's "competitive advantage" could be analyzed in terms of "the five forces." He even used a graphic borrowed directly from guru-of-the-moment Michael Porter's best- selling work on "competitive strategy." Not for the first time, I was embarrassed to call myself a consultant. As it happens, the client, too, had a Harvard M.B.A. "No," he said, shaking his head with feigned chagrin. "There are only three forces in this case. And two of them are in the Finance Ministry."

What they don't seem to teach you in business school is that "the five forces" and "the seven Cs" and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think. Case studies may provide an effective way to think business problems through, but the point is rather lost if students come away imagining that you can go home once you've put all of your eggs into a two-by-two growth-share matrix.

Next to analysis, communication skills must count among the most important for future masters of the universe. To their credit, business schools do stress these skills, and force their students to engage in make-believe presentations to one another. On the whole, however, management education has been less than a boon for those who value free and meaningful speech. M.B.A.s have taken obfuscatory jargon-otherwise known as bullshit-to a level that would have made even the Scholastics blanch. As students of philosophy know, Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure.

Beyond building skills, business training must be about values. As I write this, I know that my M.B.A. friends are squirming in their seats. They've all been forced to sit through an "ethics" course, in which they learned to toss around yet more fancy phrases like "the categorical imperative" and discuss borderline criminal behavior, such as what's a legitimate hotel bill and what's just plain stealing from the expense account, how to tell the difference between a pat on the shoulder and sexual harassment, and so on. But, as anyone who has studied Aristotle will know, "values" aren't something you bump into from time to time during the course of a business career. All of business is about values, all of the time. Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor's pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality-how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription-how many tons should a worker lift? The real issue at stake in Mayo's telephone factory was not factual-how can we best establish a sense of teamwork? It was moral -how much of a worker's sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes?

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don't know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

The idea that philosophy is an inherently academic pursuit is a recent and diabolical invention. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and most of the other great philosophers of history were not professors of philosophy. If any were to come to life and witness what has happened to their discipline, I think they'd run for the hills. Still, you go to war with the philosophers you have, as they say, not the ones in the hills. And since I'm counting on them to seize the commanding heights of the global economy, let me indulge in some management advice for today's academic philosophers:

■ Expand the domain of your analysis! Why so many studies of Wittgenstein and none of Taylor, the man who invented the social class that now rules the world?

■ Hire people with greater diversity of experience! And no, that does not mean taking someone from the University of Hawaii. You are building a network-a team of like-minded individuals who together can change the world.

■ Remember the three Cs: Communication, Communication, Communication! Philosophers (other than those who have succumbed to the Heideggerian virus) start with a substantial competitive advantage over the PowerPoint crowd. But that's no reason to slack off. Remember Plato: it's all about dialogue!

With this simple three-point program (or was it four?) philosophers will soon reclaim their rightful place as the educators of management. Of course, I will be charging for implementation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don't get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Case for Studying the Humanities in a Time of Neo-Fascism 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Case for Studying the Humanities in a Time of Neo-Fascism 

# data[].attributes.body
Kristen Hanley Cardozo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you are in graduate school studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature during the Trump administration, are you fiddling while Rome burns?

Some might say that studying the humanities in the twenty-first century was already a questionable choice before 2016 brought with it the vivid sight of a dystopian future running headlong to embrace us. The future is STEM, we were told. To major in English, many said, was to look backward, probably with unforgivable nostalgia, to a time when the written word was tangible, metal and ink warping paper. A man on the train, upon learning that I study Victorian literature, once told me, "No one has the attention span for that anymore. No one reads."
But this is untrue. We read all the time. I read for grad school, and the rest of the time I'm reading on Twitter, or seeing texts on my phone, or devouring takes hot, cool, and tepid. Most people I know are similarly engaged with the written word, all day, every day. The STEM-dominated future we were promised is an open maw that needs content-words-and words, in turn, need interpretation and study. Words are only of use when they can be understood. While I loved the subject of English, I didn't have any real attachment to academic English as a discipline. I'd always loved reading and writing, but had found English class a bit of a chore. The things I loved about books didn't seem to be celebrated in those classes, and there was often a dogmatic prescriptivism around interpretation. We were taught that something was symbolic because someone in authority (the author, a teacher, a critic) said it was symbolic, and I came away with a sense that interpretation was a hacky business meant to burnish the gates of knowledge, the keys of which were guarded by our teachers. When I got into school, however, I found that English-as-a-discipline was very different from anything I'd previously experienced. I had expected more rigidity and tortured wringing of texts for universal truths. Instead, taking English classes as a college student in my thirties was liberating: Interpretation was separated from authorial intent, pattern recognition became an exciting game, and my own situational truths were prioritized in my own textual readings. And yet this is a strangely naked moment we're living in. If there has That difference in how we hear and read the same words is one that is also exposed by studying literature. My first year of grad school, a year in which I had no idea that Donald Trump would become president, I constantly read Understanding the difference between intent and impact is an important part of studying text, whether that text is a book, a speech, or a disinformation campaign. I study eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, a subject that sounds remote, precious, and distant from my current place and time. When I say I study the Victorian era, most people have one of two responses: They admire the aesthetic of the period, or they expect me to share in their despair that no one reads the great Victorian classics anymore. But I'm not a fan of the aesthetic; I fell into studying this period because The myths we tell ourselves are revealed in our fictions, and in the erasures that occur in our fictions. Although nineteenth-century Britain was an empire and England itself was deeply multicultural, many nineteenth-century novels show an inaccurately white England focused primarily on the problems of the middle class. Even as the number of women working in factories climbed, the factory girl largely disappeared from the British factory novel, replaced by male workers and represented only by dying The Trump administration produces text in ways that many of us now find baffling. The media has struggled with how to cover Most politicians are honest We know he wants to build the wall. We know that he rolled out his campaign on anti-Mexican hatred, and has stuck to his guns on that count even when the details of the wall-how much it will cost, who will pay for it, how long it will take, whether it will be beautiful-have been in constant flux. We know that Trump loves torture, because he has told us so many times, even though his specific claims of its effectiveness and that unnamed experts support him on this, are lies. We know that Trump was supportive of the violence at his campaign rallies, because I can interpret much of what is happening to my country now because I study what happened in the past, and because I study language. Although the 2016 election is a vastly different topic than my area of study, it was using research and reading skills gained through that study that allowed me to look at historical patterns of white women's votes and see that it was likely It is harder to generate confusion in a society that actively reads for interpretation. It is harder to undermine shared evidence and shared values when people are trained to look for manipulation through language and the muddying of language. George Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language" in 1946, after a period in which language had been used to sanitize the unforgivable. In another essay on language, George Saunders's "Thank You, Esther Forbes," Saunders quotes a member of the SS describing the gassing of Jews: The language that sanitized the murders of millions of Jews and Romani did not die with its victims. Today we contend not just with political language, which sanitizes our own state-sanctioned murders of Black and Native people, but with what Colin Dickey has termed "We are often subject to confusion not because we "don't read anymore," but because we are contending with competing types of reading. A large part of our citizenry is now partitioned off into a space that deliberately regards critical reading as illegitimate, even though it engages in a form of critical reading of its opponents. While it is essential to understand truth as positional, if we are to advance any sort of social justice, it is also essential to have some basis for shared reality, without which, all opinions are equal, even when based on a wrongly understood premise. the bureaucratic style," "a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at the expense of objective truth." Political language today is a blend of the political language of Orwell's time, and the corporate lingo of our present, language that has been finessed by advertisers and hired thinkers to sell products and unburden the institution of blame. It's language that nods to you as a savvy reader, tells you you're too smart to be tricked by language, even as it picks your pocket. white women would vote for Trump. he overtly said so on many occasions and never did anything to stop it, even though he occasionally made a half-hearted claim that he didn't think there was any violence happening at his rallies. We saw this adherence to violence again after Charlottesville; Trump sees loyalty to himself as the true moral barometer, and violence committed on his behalf, or by his supporters, is acceptable and often welcomed. As Margaret Talbot notes in the New Yorker, his long-repeated admiration for dictators and tyrants led to his decision to pardon Joe Arpaio, the tyrant and terrorist of Maricopa County, as a catastrophic hurricane rolled in on the fourth-largest metropolitan area of the country. in the sense that most politicians say what they mean and try to enact what they say. We ignore their overt claims and shaded subtext, as many observers did with Trump, at our peril. This is not to ignore that Trump lies-he does, for reasons large and small; he has, on his own and through spokespeople, lied about issues as small as the crowd size at his inauguration and as large as an illegal act of espionage by his predecessor. But in other ways, he has been remarkably, terribly consistent. a president who lies constantly, for seemingly any reason, and who crams so many lies into his every utterance that it becomes difficult for an interlocutor to counter all of them. The humanities help us with that. Reading about the past, learning history, studying context and subtext, searching for the intended audience as well as the actual audience, considering and discarding intent, thinking about the larger projects of colonialism, empire, government, and culture-all of this has prepared me for the daily reading and responding I must do now, as a citizen of the United States. former factory girls who had been killed by their work. When our fictions avoid certain realities and political issues, this isn't an accident or a coincidence. I hadn't read much of it. about reading: How is text generated? How much of a role is played by authors, how much by readers? How is the same text read by different people? Should we care about the author's intent? Moreover, why should we care to consider this topic at all? To me, the biggest argument against affording the author's intent much weight is made by politicians, not academics. Politicians constantly run into the divide between their intent and the actual weight of their words and actions. A politician puts up a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and then has to contend with the fact that the war isn't over and the body bags are still coming home. been a historical progression, it has been in language, moving away from an open declaration of our alignments and into euphemism. Now, in Trump's America, our euphemisms are being set aside in favor of the open, forthright bigotry modeled by officials in the highest offices in the land. We live in an America where a sitting US president has insisted that some people marching under a Nazi flag, at a rally where an American woman was murdered, are good, a president who has referred to a "they" who are stealing "'our' history and 'our' heritage," as Confederate monuments tumble. The president, in his first major policy decision post-Charlottesville, cancelled the wildly popular DACA program that allows undocumented people brought to this country as children to work, presumably because it will play to his rapidly shrinking and base, as well as thwart the will of the first Black president. Trump's alignment to white supremacy is expressed loudly, not in a polite whisper.
I didn't intend to major in English when I applied to college the second time around. I'd dropped out of art school at the age of twenty to have my first child, and in the decade that followed, in between the births of two more children, I took classes at community colleges as I was able, in hopes of one day going back full-time.

When it came time to apply to schools, I knew I didn't want to major in art any longer, but what I wanted to major in wasn't entirely clear to me. I had a rather spotty academic record. My grades were good, but I'd gotten them over a very long period, and since I'd been at home with my kids I didn't have a career I could point to. Since I was trying to transfer in as a junior, I needed to show a specific proclivity for something. And what I had done consistently over the years since art school was write. I could show a record of creative production. I applied to schools as an English major, hoping my writing portfolio would override the gaps in my schooling.

I didn't have to separate my English studies from my passion for history, because to study literature is to constantly balance textual creation with historical situation. My memory tends to gather together anecdotes and historical scenes that I find interesting, and they all came back in useful ways when I began studying literature in earnest. My years of reading nonfiction histories were all relevant, for American history is a history of blood and injustice; of the rhetoric of liberty and the reality of racial dictatorship.

The struggle for the soul of the United States has always been fought through words as well as action. The need to define history as a "progression" is, itself, a struggle for dominance through words that become widely accepted history.

Our president literally opened his campaign with a claim that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. As Trump won primary after primary, repeatedly, the moment that Trump took office, that his bigotry "wasn't funny anymore." That it could ever have been seen as "funny" at all shows a divide in how people of different races read. For people who have been on the receiving end of American racism, the blunt declaration of a candidacy predicated on open hatred of brown bodies was another sign that, to white people, the fundamental American was always white. White Americans found Donald Trump's overt racism humorous because too many of us saw it as an aberration, one that had no place or purchase in our egalitarian culture. People of color, who live under a daily onslaught of micro and macro aggressions, saw it as a clear reveal of the racism that underlies American culture.

In creating my own educational plan while I was out of school, I realized that there was a gap in my literary knowledge. I kept picking up Victorian novels and reading them, and at some point, I started to like them. It might have been Vanity Fair, or a Barchester novel by Trollope, or an early detective story, but one way or another, I started to make more pointed observations about my reading. And this is what struck me: Many of the things we call "traditional" in the United States are cultural and social forms that were brand-spanking-new in the nineteenth century. Our ancient customs, behaviors we assume to be natural because they represent how things have always been, turn out to be born in the same fires as the industrial revolution. Consider "traditional marriage": one man, one woman, married for love and procreation, formed around a nuclear family in a single family home; the father the head, the mother the heart; the father as breadwinner, the mother as homemaker. It's how it has always been, forever and ever, world without end, amen. Except that it hasn't. That's Victorian marriage, but family units prior to the period were rarely nuclear, and rarely was love a ranking priority.

In other words, Trump and his administration are readable. And we must read them carefully.

They utilize strategies that work to make reading harder; by undermining shared evidence, by actively and regularly contradicting themselves, they undermine any sort of shared reality or reading, and in the end that serves them well because most of their goals relate to dismantling rather than building. But the humanities offer ways to read even the deliberately misleading and obscure. Indeed, as with all of academia, the humanities are often couched in deliberately obscure language. This gatekeeping is problematic in a multitude of ways, but learning the different gated languages of the academy is a good start to reading the gated language of a neo-fascist administration.

Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in. This is because the load naturally rushes toward the light when darkness sets in, which makes closing the doors difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. (63)

"The load," the screaming that somehow just "occurs," the problem of a terrified group of human beings about to be summarily murdered, is reduced to a clinical matter of production and efficiency, in which all qualms, all human recognition is eliminated. "Political language," Orwell writes, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." No one more brutally utilized political language than the Nazis, but Orwell was concerned about its post-war proliferation.

Rome is burning, but studying language and learning about the past, training ourselves to read critically and to think against the grain, is not fiddling. It is joining those who are carrying water and digging trenches. It is one crucial line of resistance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Catapult | A Case for Studying the Humanities in a Time of Neo-Fascism | Kristen Hanley Cardozo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you are in graduate school studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature during the Trump administration, are you fiddling while Rome burns? Some might say that studying the humanities in the twenty-first century was already a questionable choice before 2016 brought with it the vivid sight of a dystopian future running headlong to embrace us.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

# data[].attributes.subject
Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

# data[].attributes.body
Pramod K. Nayar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The humanities call upon us to rediscover that cooperation across difference, and not competition, drives community, the nation and life itself.

There has never been a time when there was a greater need for the humanities. We can never have enough of the humanities, especially now.

When Prasanta Chakravarty recently wrote in The Wire that the "new seminaries of humanities studies ... act as a conduit to industry - now engaged in producing a horde of fideistic, supine, glossy work force," he puts it mildly at best. As neoliberalised spaces of learning set about questioning the 'purpose' and use value of a discipline that they say has fetishised intellectualism and commodified abstract thought while alienating the 'real' (the real, presumably being the 'glossy workforce' for the industry) and squeezing the humanities, then humanities in the university fight their rearguard action (the vanguard has moved into 'administration', such as it is).

There are two reasons why we need the humanities now more than ever:

1. Diminishing welfare and security nets (resulting from run-away privatisation, abolition of subsidies, benefits (like pensions) and protective laws) ensure that there are more precarious lives produced through disenfranchisement, displacement, silencing, massacres, more left out from the very category of the human and

2. The humanities are concerned with the excluded, the outsider.

In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum inventoried the constituents that make up the 'spirit of the humanities': "critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experiences of many different kinds, understanding the complexity of the world we live in". Empathetic understanding, acquired through critical thinking and close reading of the lives of other, different people, demands an attention and response to their vulnerabilities. Indeed, the spirit of the humanities, as it has been reinvented since the traditional humanists were exposed as racists and less enlightened than they presented themselves as, lies, perhaps, in the assumption that all humans are inherently vulnerable to lesser or greater degrees. This vulnerability depends on their emplaced embodiment - along axes of ability, gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, skin colour and so on. When examining the diversity of human experience, the new humanities examine those whose experiences are primarily of vulnerability and helplessness. When it looks at other - different - people, it teaches us to look at the excluded, through vulnerability.

The spirit of this new humanities stems from an intense awareness that humanist principles that might set the agenda for the rights regime in nascent nations need to guard against the erosion of the universalism (rights and equality for 'all') with which such nascent democracies have set out on the path of nationhood. In the embryonic stages of nation building - India is at this stage, perhaps - the recognition of vulnerability of large numbers of people is far more crucial to the rights regime than any construction of grand narratives of national pride, national identity or national progress. Such a humanities is concerned primarily with those who do not count within the nation and questions grand narratives that exclude segments of the already-vulnerable population from the ambit of the nation even as it enunciates universalising terms such as 'all Indians'.

Today's humanities are more than ever politico-philosophical projects grounded in differential living environments, unequal economies (of labour, sexuality, affect) and political disenfranchisement, aka democracy.

Democracy is constituted by different versions of the public and the public sphere. But when dominant classes, castes, elites and ideologies seek, and obtain, control over the public sphere, humanities initiate a distinctive public sphere that resists. Often termed the subaltern public sphere, this sphere is characterised by the social imaginaries of the oppressed: a 'precariat public sphere'. The 'precariat public sphere' is a public sphere made up of 'precarious lives', as Judith Butler has said. Here lives are lived in the shadow of displacement, starvation, social exclusion, unemployment and even massacres. The humanities are interested in this public sphere.

Literature (I take this to mean the humanities, no doubt to the chagrin of the others in the field), as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, former director of the National Endowment of the Humanities, said, is "a genre [that] seems especially committed to an exploration of outsiderhood". The humanities examine the process whereby nations construct outsiderhood by delimiting the 'public', especially when, technically, a country's constitution declares itself a democracy - and yet the ' demos' (public) is what is constantly left outside or, if inside, heavily monitored and regulated. When we read the lives of people unlike us (called 'characters' in literary studies) in literature classrooms, we read difference. Hence the parochial turn in literary research - reading only about one's own well-mined backyard is disturbing - not because of poor research quality (there is that, of course) but because of the insularity and closed-border 'expertise', the indifference to difference and the localised identity politics it enables and empowers.

The humanities value difference and call upon us to rediscover that cooperation across difference and not competition drives community, the nation and life itself. Nussbaum suggests that "human experiences of many different kinds" are central to the humanities. The humanities point out that we live in plural conditions, whether economic, political or cultural, in which personhood emerges. We coexist with life forms that we do not always choose to cohabit with, as Butler puts it. Culturally different people and communities are vulnerable in postcolonial contexts, where the narrative of belonging is often coded as a narrative of uniform, homogenised identities. Cultural differences produce vulnerability when these are treated as 'wrong' when they are simply different or when they are subsumed in the name of uniformity. Humanities introduce cultural differences into the very structure of teaching, learning and thinking, and introduce us to modes of reading that entails responding with respect to that difference: to see Igbo cultures as Igbo and not as lesser versions of European cultures, for instance. Cultures are similar - puberty, birthing, death, sex occur in all cultures, although their meanings vary for different cultures - but not identical in this scheme of things and the humanities emphasise what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has called "differentiated similitude".

Amartya Sen, tracing the histories of dissenting thought in the subcontinent, notes how dialogue and exchanges were integral to the history of ideas, so that a difference of opinion or point of view was seen as a valuable contribution to the shaping of the intellectual universe. This plurality of thought, reflected in the best of humanities, accounts for radical/different/minoritarian thinking - Kabir, Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, Syed Ahmed Khan - in every era as well as conservative/traditional thinking. The debates in contemporary India around the demise of this plurality point the finger at the increasing monolithic and monologic interpretation of history, tradition, religion and the very idea of Indianness by the BJP. The BJP, in retaliation, underscores the long-standing dominance of Marxist interpretations of the same. But it is only within the humanities that both of these positions can be at least debated: from the Wahabis to Madanmohan Malviya, Ambedkar and Vinayak Savarkar.

For this debate to be even conceived of, the humanities need to be strengthened in universities. A university is a place where nothing is beyond question, not even the idea of a university or the idea of democracy, Jacques Derrida has said. This questioning is the province of the humanities, and the place of the humanities is the university where both democracy and the public sphere are forged.

Precarity as a condition of life is the subject of human rights studies, Derrida wrote, and the subject of

"the question of man, of what is proper to man, of human rights, of crimes against humanity ... must be in principle find its space of unconditional discussion and ... its legitimate space of research and reelaboration, [is] in the university and, within the university, above all, in the Humanities."

The humanities remain the last public space even within the public space of the university - and when the university shrinks in its public-ness, the last free space would, or should, still be the humanities.

This is an extract from a longer essay, 'The Postcolonial Humanities: A Manifesto', forthcoming in Rendezvous.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why We Need the Humanities Now More Than Ever

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There has never been a time when there was a greater need for the humanities. We can never have enough of the humanities, especially now. When Prasanta Chakravarty recently wrote in The Wire that the "new seminaries of humanities studies ...

# data[].attributes.headline
Silicon Valley to Liberal Arts Majors: We Want You

# data[].attributes.subject
Silicon Valley to Liberal Arts Majors: We Want You

# data[].attributes.body
Tom Slee

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tech billionaires love to declare the death of liberal arts, but could they instead be the future of Silicon Valley?

If you are a student of the liberal arts, is there a place for you in our increasingly-digital world? Not really, according to many. Bill Gates thinks your programs should be cut in favor of STEM subjects, his fellow tech-billionaire Vinod Khosla says "little of the material taught in liberal arts programs today is relevant to the future," and Marc Andreesen says you will end up working in a shoe store. Maybe you should just learn to code.

Tech billionaires claim that fuzzies-students of the liberal arts and social sciences-are doomed to working in shoe stores, but two new books pin the future of tech on them.

Or maybe not. Two new books make a case that the technology industry can no longer be driven purely by software engineer hackers, and that you have a critical role to play in guiding it in more ethical and humane directions. That said, their authors differ dramatically about what that role is. Scott Hartley wants you to bring your skills and insights to the world of technology startups, to unlock the full potential of technological innovation. Ed Finn, on the other hand, seeks to hold the technology industry to account: he believes we need "more readers, more critics," posing questions about who technology serves, and to what ends.
* * *
Hartley's The Fuzzy and the Techie ("fuzzy" being a Stanford nickname for humanities and social science students) is a clarion call for you to join the world of digital disruption, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The author contends that Silicon Valley needs you if it is to fulfill the next stage of its disruptive vision: your creativity and your skills of "critical thinking, logical argumentation, and complex problem solving" will make for better technology; your insights into our public institutions and what makes us human will guide technology to build a better world.

The book's early chapters explore how, underappreciated and largely unnoticed, "fuzzy" skills have already proven themselves to be complements to coding talent. Numerous examples, from Palantir's national security insights to Stitch Fix's wardrobe recommendations, make the point that combining human and algorithmic intelligences often leads to better results than a purely automated approach. Fuzzy insights provide the driving force for new businesses, whether it is social messaging application Slack or school/parent communication tool Remind. In later chapters, Hartley uses example after example to make the case that the liberal arts' concerns for ethics, understanding of human motivations, and insights into social dynamics can find a productive home in the technology world.

But there is a critical failure at the heart of The Fuzzy and the Techie: in his eagerness to portray fuzzies doing well by doing good in the technology industry, Hartley too readily accepts Silicon Valley's flattering self-descriptions of its values and vision for the world. The positivity of entrepreneurship does not sit comfortably with the skeptical outlook that the liberal arts nurture, and Hartley fully embraces entrepreneurship.

It is never about the money in Silicon Valley. The fact is: they have plenty of it.

His choice is surely a product of his own life story and incentives. Hartley tells us he went to Palo Alto High School, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he was taught by Esther Wojcicki. She is a "pioneer in the field of blended learning" and the mother of three high-profile Silicon Valley women, one of whom owned a garage where Google was created. Hartley went on to study political science at Stanford and is now a venture capitalist and advisor to tech startups. Even if he lives on the East Coast, he is Silicon Valley through and through: it is hardly surprising that he persists in believing in its values.

I reluctantly admit that my own beliefs may also have been shaped by my upbringing. I am, after all, an atheist son of atheist parents, a social democrat from a Labour Party family, and before entering the software industry I was a student of chemistry at a time when the Future was to be shaped by men in lab coats. I would love to think that my disagreements with Hartley are purely the product of my independent search for rational and objective truth-but let's face it, that seems unlikely.

Still, if you are a budding fuzzy entrepreneur, I have a request: please do not put aside your critical thinking in the way that Hartley himself seems to have done. It is not enough to say technology can help build a better world: we must ask what a better world actually looks like. If you think, as Scott Hartley does, that making the U.S. military more efficient is making the world a better place, and that the only problem with the U.S./Israeli Stuxnet cyberwarfare virus is that "the code could be repurposed by our enemies and turned against our own infrastructure," then we have different views on what "making our technology more ethical" involves.

For many of us, Silicon Valley's "Don't Be Evil" proclamations have lost credibility as the technology industry has grown from scrappy underdog to seemingly unaccountable colossus. Hartley interprets the industry's stumbles only as well-meaning mistakes rather than any sign of deeper problems. He refers to Cathy O'Neil's excellent 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction, which exposed the many ways that algorithms can perpetuate discrimination, and concludes only that "errors in the collection and interpretation of data must be corrected by human analysis, and this is work for which those trained in the humanities and social sciences are well equipped." Hartley believes that liberal arts insights can right the ship: "We can pair fuzzies and techies to train our algorithms to better sift for, and mitigate, our shared human foibles." He is optimistic about Facebook's attempts to solve the "filter bubble" problem by hiring "a vast complement of fuzzies . . . to work alongside its techies." But Upton Sinclair explained long ago why the right set of perspectives alone will not solve the problem: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Silicon Valley's "Don't Be Evil" proclamations have lost credibility as the technology industry has grown from scrappy underdog to seemingly unaccountable colossus.

Take Chapter 5, on "making our technology more ethical." Hartley tells us about Talkspace, a company whose founders "are on a mission to inspire all those who are suffering from mental pain." Talkspace is a sort of Uber for therapy: clients gain text-message access to therapists who provide their services through the Talkspace platform. It is an affordable, lightweight, and discreet form of therapy for those who may not otherwise reach out for it, and Hartley enthuses, "Therapists have been as avid about Talkspace as the clients."

But skepticism is in order. Cat Ferguson painted a different portrait of Talkspace in a lengthy and detailed December 2016 investigation in The Verge. Talkspace therapists do not have access to clients' real names or contact information, a practice which risks putting them in conflict with their profession's legal and ethical standards. Ferguson describes how the policy of patient anonymity left one therapist unable to alert authorities in case of emergencies:

I get to live knowing a [young] baby is being driven around by a drunk woman, I have no way to file on them, and Talkspace has put me in this position," the therapist said in an interview in October, her voice breaking. . . . Multiple former workers told The Verge they had reported a safety concern, and were denied access to client contact information.

Ferguson reports other problems. Talkspace therapists are independent contractors (like Uber drivers), but the company provided therapists with scripts advertising additional Talkspace services, and denied their pay if they did not deliver the script to their clients. Talkspace has punished therapists if too many clients leave the platform (and leaving therapy may, of course, be a good outcome), and pay has apparently been erratic.

Ferguson's article is careful, well sourced, and serious. For my money, it is a lot more convincing than the Talkspace CEO's rebuttal. I find it disturbing that Hartley uses Talkspace as an example of the ethical use of technology without even acknowledging that there might be real dangers in providing a for-profit mental health app with uncertain regulation.

Alternative credit is a particular theme of Hartley's book. It praises Tala's use of phone data to establish credit ratings and PayJoy's financing of smartphone purchases. Hartley also praises Lenddo, a credit scoring company that "has created an algorithm that assesses credit risk and verifies identity based on non-traditional sources, such as social networking data. . . . [P]eople who may not have the traditional qualifications to be approved [but Lenddo can find] signals in the data that broaden access to life's bounty."

If we learned anything in 2008 it was that easy credit is not an unambiguous social good. We are also learning that using social media data to assess character and reputation is a terrible idea. Lenddo is exactly the kind of algorithm Cathy O'Neil warned about, prone to bias and redlining (by friend network rather than by zip code). The involvement of "fuzzies" in the company does nothing to change that.

This view of the world is post-political: powerful technologies can fix the world's biggest problems if only well-meaning people design the right kind of algorithm.

Hartley also leaves Lenddo's unorthodox "social enforcement" techniques unmentioned, but surely he read in The Economist that "the credit scores of those who have vouched for a borrower" from Lenddo "are damaged if he or she fails to repay." PayJoy also has a history of coercive enforcement. You do not have to be a cynic to at least wonder about the terms under which these companies are broadening access to life's bounty.

In the end, Hartley's view of the world is consistently post-political: powerful technologies can fix the world's biggest problems if only well-meaning people design the right kind of algorithm. He falls into the "technical-fix" line of thinking that Evgeny Morozov has called "solutionism," a technological successor to the idea of "incentive-compatible mechanisms" that has intrigued public-choice economists. The idea is that if we could only be clever enough to design systems such that participants have no incentive to deceive, then we could make good collective decisions without the need for central government. A post-politics world could then become a reality.

Twenty years ago, political scientists Gary Miller and Thomas Hammond noted a fly in the solutionist ointment. Their 1994 paper Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics (admittedly not an unexpected belief for a pair of political scientists) argues that "incentive-compatible mechanisms are not credible" because "the central decision-maker who implements the incentive-compatible mechanism will have a stake (and presumably an opportunity) for self-serving perversion of the system."

Miller and Hammond were not writing about Internet platforms, but their argument helps to answer Ed Finn's question: "What do algorithms want?" Rephrased as "What kind of behavior must commercial algorithms exhibit to survive?" the answer is simple: algorithms must make money. If Google's revenue falls, the company's AdWords and AdSense algorithms will go quiet, along with the other ambitious projects with higher motivations. If Lenddo's alternative credit scoring does not make money, it too will vanish.

In What Algorithms Want Finn shows how algorithms make money by placing themselves in the middle of our interactions, taking a small slice out of each. In doing so, algorithms have moved the place where serious money is made "from end result to process." Monetary value is no longer attached to the content we are searching for, but to the search itself: Uber has moved value from the taxi drive to the hailing process, Apple from music making to music distribution. In a detailed analysis, Finn shows how Bitcoin's digital currency algorithms make computation a form of financial value, storing transactions on its distributed ledger and creating new coins by digital "mining."

There's a lot in this book, including detailed analyses of the blurring boundary between work and play, and of how computers are becoming increasingly our intimate companions. Finn takes imaginative creations such as the Star Trek computer or Netflix's House of Cards as starting points to explore the increasingly tangled worlds of computing and culture. He leads us along some fascinating pathways, but whereas Hartley is optimistic about the emerging sophistication of user interface design (to take one topic of overlap), Finn does not trust it: "Behind the façade of the facile, friendly computational interface, there is a world of labor translation, remediation, and exploitation at work." The ideas are often provocative, but Finn's dense academic prose and reliance on abstract metaphor sometimes gets in the way not just of clear explication but, I fear, of clear thinking.

Finn's concern about platforms and their algorithms comes down to politics and conflicting interests: the algorithm designers and platform owners have an incentive to distort their mechanisms in their own favor. One form this distortion takes is "corrupt personalization": Netflix inserts its own shows prominently into its recommendations, Facebook promotes products "liked" by our friends. More dramatically, Uber uses the data it has about its drivers to nudge their behavior, distorting the incentives around riding and driving in the interest of its own bottom line. A lot of criticism has been directed at Uber's values as a company, but Uber's algorithmic incentives are the root of the problem.

Algorithms have ensured that monetary value is no longer attached to the content we are searching for, but to the search itself.

Corrupt personalization has no place in Hartley's book save as a mistake to be corrected by liberal arts majors, who are particularly "driven to explore how our families and public institutions could . . . operate better." His lack of skepticism when startups claim to build a better world takes me back to one of my favorite quotations from Bertolt Brecht: "Amongst the highly-placed / It is considered low to talk about food. / The fact is: they have / Already eaten."

It is never about the money in Silicon Valley. The fact is: they have plenty of it.
* * *
Both The Fuzzy and the Techie and What Algorithms Want explore the broader question of work in a digital world. It is an old argument, whether technology will replace human labor or complement it, but it has been given new life by the recent dramatic developments in artificial intelligence.

In one of the better chapters in The Fuzzy and the Techie, Hartley argues that liberal arts are in general a complement to technology, not a substitute. The more tech we have, the more work there is those trained in the humanities. Hartley shows that the demand for many STEM careers is actually falling in the United States: the big growth is in areas such as health care and personal care, which are heavily social and full of non-routine, difficult-to-specify tasks-in other words, fields that are not well-suited for algorithmic solutions.

Finn is more worried that much work falls into what he calls an "implementation gap": doing what machines cannot yet do but will do sooner or later. Sometimes the boundary between the two perspectives seems to vanish: Facebook and YouTube moderators and Uber drivers owe their jobs to technology platforms, even as they train their digital replacements by their own efforts.

There is no doubt that humans will become increasingly dependent on machines. Even when it comes to creative work, Finn describes how Netflix's algorithms and detailed metrics frame the creative efforts of auteurs. But as they look to the future, Finn and Hartley part company on the nature of that dependence. Hartley sees technological innovation as an opportunity for the sciences and humanities to join together in harmony. Finn hopes for a more tension-filled relationship, in which "the role of the curator, the editor, and the critic is more important than ever." I am with Finn, but then, I would be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
silicon valley to liberal arts majors: we want you

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Silicon Valley to Liberal Arts Majors: We Want You

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tech billionaires love to declare the death of liberal arts, but could they instead be the future of Silicon Valley? If you are a student of the liberal arts, is there a place for you in our increasingly-digital world? Not really, according to many.

# data[].attributes.headline
What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?

# data[].attributes.subject
What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?

# data[].attributes.body
Elizabeth Segran

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Can You Do With a Humanities Ph.D., Anyway?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The choice to leave academia does not have to mean life as a barista.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities

# data[].attributes.subject
Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities

# data[].attributes.body
Emma Pierson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare, and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I was given, as a teenager, weapons both elegant and lethal-algorithms that could pick out the terrorists most worth targeting in a network, detect someone's dissatisfaction with the government from their online writing.

WIRED OPINION

About

Computer science is wondrous. The problem is that many people in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that matters. You see this when recruiters at career fairs make it clear they're only interested in the computer scientists; in the salary gap between engineering and non-engineering students; in the quizzical looks humanities students get when they dare to reveal their majors. I've watched brilliant computer scientists display such woeful ignorance of the populations they were studying that I laughed in their faces. I've watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can't reason about whether you should be shooting them at all.

The fact that so many computer scientists are ignorant or disdainful of non-technical approaches is worrisome because in my work, I'm constantly confronting questions that can't be answered with code. When I coded at Coursera, an online education company, I developed an algorithm that would recommend classes to people in part based on their gender. But the company decided not to use it when we discovered it would push women away from computer science classes.

It turns out that this effect-where algorithms entrench societal disparities-is one that occurs in domains from criminal justice to credit scoring. This is a difficult dilemma: In criminal justice, for example, you're confronted with the fact that an algorithm that fulfills basic statistical desiderata is also a lot more likely to rate black defendants as high-risk even when they will not go on to commit another crime.

I don't have a solution to this problem. I do know, however, that I won't find it in my algorithms textbook; I'm far more likely to find relevant facts in Ta-Nehisi Coates's work on systemic discrimination or Michelle Alexander's on mass incarceration.

My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people.

Perhaps it's more efficient to allow computer scientists to do what we're best at-writing code-and have other people regulate our products? This is insufficient. Coders push products out at blinding speed, often cloaked in industry secrecy; by the time legislation catches up, millions of people could be harmed. Ethics training is required for professionals in other fields in part because it's important for doctors and lawyers to be able to act ethically even when no one's looking over their shoulders. Further, computer scientists need to help craft regulations because they have the necessary technical expertise; it's hard to regulate algorithmic bias in word embeddings if you have no idea what a word embedding is.

Here are some steps forward. Universities should start with broader training for computer science students. I contacted eight of the top undergraduate programs in computer science, and found that most do not require students to take a course on ethical and social issues in computer science (although some offer optional courses). Such courses are hard to teach well. Computer scientists often don't take them seriously, are uncomfortable with non-quantitative thinking, are overconfident because they're mathematically brilliant, or are convinced that utilitarianism is the answer to everything. But universities need to try. Professors need to scare their students, to make them feel they've been given the skills not just to get rich but to wreck lives; they need to humble them, to make them realize that however good they might be at math, there's still so much they don't know.

A more socially focused curriculum would not only make coders less likely to cause harm; it might also make them more likely to do good. Top schools squander far too much of their technical talent on socially useless, high-paying pursuits like algorithmic trading. As Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer scientist, admonished a roomful of Stanford students he was trying to recruit to Coursera: "You have to ask yourself, why did I study computer science? And for a lot of students, the answer seems to be, so I can design the latest social media app...I believe we can build things that are more meaningful than that."

There are many steps tech companies should take as well. Organizations should explore the social and ethical issues their products create: Google and Microsoft deserve credit for researching algorithmic discrimination, for example, and Facebook for investigating echo chambers. Make it easier for external researchers to evaluate the impacts of your products: be transparent about how your algorithms work and provide access to data under appropriate data use agreements. (Researchers also need to be allowed to audit algorithms without being prosecuted.) Ask social or ethical questions in hiring interviews, not just algorithmic ones; if hiring managers asked, students would learn how to answer them. (Microsoft's CEO was once asked, in a technical interview, what he would do if he saw a baby lying in an intersection: the obvious answer to pick up the baby did not occur to him).

Companies should hire the people harmed or excluded by their products: whose faces their computer vision systems don't recognize and smiles their emojis don't capture, whose resumes they rank as less relevant and whose housing options they limit, who are mobbed by online trolls they helped organize and do little to control. Hire non-computer-scientists, and bring them in for lunchtime talks; have them challenge the worldviews of the workforce.

It's possible that listening to non-computer scientists will slow the Silicon Valley machine: Diverse worldviews can produce argument. But slowing down in places where reasonable people can disagree is a good thing. In an era where even elections are won and lost on digital battlefields, tech companies need to move less fast and break fewer things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare, and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul B. Sturtevant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the past 20 years, warnings from a variety of sources-from career counselors to administrators to government officials-have convinced many prospective college students (and their parents) that the only safe path to a well-paying job is through a STEM major. Members of the academy-including STEM faculty themselves-have repeatedly challenged assertions that majoring in the humanities is useless. And employers of STEM graduates say that they value skills cultivated in a wide-ranging curriculum.

But the sense persists that the push toward STEM comes at the direct expense of humanities majors; history enrollments have declined sharply since at least 2011. As Julia Brookins reported in the March 2016 issue of Perspectives on History: "The number of history BAs and BSs completed in the United States fell for the third time in four years, this time by 9.1 percent from the previous year, from 34,360 to 31,233 [in 2014]." According to the most recent data, this steep decline has continued, with only 28,157 history majors graduating in 2015 (a decline of 9.8 percent from 2014).

In advising students, talking to parents, and listening to the priorities articulated by state legislatures, we continue to encounter widespread myths about the lives of people who graduate with history BAs. These myths are largely based on misinformation about the prospective lives of those who major in history. They paint life with a degree in history as a wasteland of unemployment and underemployment-that careful study of Asoka's conquests or the Industrial Revolution leads to a life of "Would you like fries with that?"

A potent way to combat these myths is with concrete data. Thankfully, a massive repository of data, the American Community Survey (ACS), tells us much about the lives of history majors. Conducted by the US Census Bureau each year since 2000, the ACS is a statistical survey of 3.5 million American households. It includes questions on a wide range of topics, from demographic details like age and race/ethnicity to situational data like housing and employment status. Most usefully for us, it also records individuals' undergraduate majors. These data are then compiled and aggregated into one-, three-, and five-year estimates.

From the ACS, we know that over the years 2010-14, some 29.7 percent of all American adults over 25 completed a bachelor's degree or higher. Of those, 2.21 percent received a bachelor's in history or US history. The ACS data offer us a snapshot of these history majors across the country and at different phases of life: from recent graduates to those in retirement.

Overall, the ACS data suggest that the picture for history majors is far brighter than critics of the humanities would have you believe, even those who think the sole purpose of a college degree is to achieve a well-paying job.

Myth 1: History Majors Are Underemployed

One fear is that history degrees do not offer a life of gainful employment or the job security that other careers might. The truth is very different. The ACS found that 4.6 percent of history majors between the ages of 25 and 64 were unemployed at the time they were surveyed. The national average, by comparison, was 7.7 percent. Against all holders of a college degree, however, there was a modest difference: degree-holders overall had 4.1 percent unemployment, half a percentage point lower. While history majors do have a slightly higher unemployment rate, the data show that someone interested in the field should not be deterred; the difference is very slight.

Myth 2: A History Major Does Not Prepare You for Gainful Employment

Most myths begin with a kernel of truth that is then warped beyond recognition. The idea that a history degree doesn't lead directly into a profession is true only for students who expect to become professional historians or to work in a closely related occupation. The vast majority of history majors, of course, do not become professional historians; according to the ACS, only 4.5 percent of history majors become educators at a postsecondary level (that is, mostly college professors). The proportion who become museum professionals-0.5 percent of the total-is a very small slice of the overall pie as well.

But the ACS data imply that many history majors do not expect to become historians and that they find meaningful careers in a wide range of fields. A history degree provides a broad skillset that has ensured that history majors are employed in almost every walk of life, with some notable trends (see fig. 1).

History majors seem particularly well-prepared for, and attracted to, certain careers. Nearly one in five goes into education-just over half as primary-, middle-, and high-school teachers. Another 15 percent enter management positions in business, and 11 percent go into the legal professions (most becoming lawyers). The "fries" myth is definitely not backed up by the data; only 1.7 percent of history majors work in food preparation, compared to 5 percent of the overall population.

It's important to note that nearly half of the history majors identified by the ACS went on to graduate school (see fig. 2)-a much higher percentage than the national average (37 percent) and higher than majors in English (45 percent) and the liberal arts (26 percent). This might be because law, management, and education require advanced study. It could also mean that students interested in careers that require graduate training see a history major as a springboard. Likely it is a combination of the two. But knowing this, history departments must understand that it is imperative that they prepare majors for graduate school and offer guidance in educational and career choices.

Myth 3: History Majors Are Underpaid

Again, we start with a kernel of truth. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators project released an analysis of ACS data showing that those with degrees in the humanities earn less (in terms of median income) than those with degrees in engineering, health care, business, and the sciences (see fig. 3).

Part of this is based more on field than on level of achievement; the work of engineers and computer programmers is better remunerated than that of, for example, elementary school teachers-even though our society demands good teachers. But history fares well in terms of compensation when compared to other humanities majors. The differences in median income among the humanities disciplines are not significant; the disparity between highest- and lowest-paid humanities majors in the workforce is only a few thousand dollars (see fig. 4).

Data suggest prospects for potential history majors are good, but history departments must offer guidance in career and graduate school choices.

Because of the diversity of careers that humanities majors-particularly history majors-go into, there is a wider-than-average distribution of incomes based upon field of work (see fig. 5). As in the general workforce, it is the occupation of college graduates in the humanities, rather than their undergraduate major, that accounts for differences in income. For history majors between the ages of 25 and 64 who are neither unemployed nor out of the workforce, the median income is currently $60,000 per year. But for those in managerial positions, the median is $80,000. For those in the legal occupations, the median is $100,000. But for those in education, it is $47,000, and for those who go into community and social services, the median is $45,000.

In short, it is not that history majors are underpaid. It is that the diverse range of occupations that a history degree prepares them for includes several important, but vastly undervalued, public service careers. If the only consideration when choosing a major is whether you will be earning six figures by the age of 30, then history may not be the best field. But for students who are inspired by work in which the greatest rewards may not necessarily be financial, a history major remains an excellent option.

The ACS data shed fascinating light on some of the myths about life with a history degree. Majoring in history does not doom a graduate to a life of unemployment or underemployment. In fact, history majors go on to become much better educated than the average person, filling roles in a wider range of careers than holders of many other degrees. The worst that can be said of this situation is that many of those careers are socially undervalued. But that does not mean that a degree in history is any less valuable.

Methodological note: All ACS data cited in this article include only those individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 who were in full-time employment, who achieved a bachelor's degree or higher, and who stated that their field of study for their bachelor's degree was either history or US history. All data were taken from the ACS's 2010-14 5-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Data on the number of history bachelors' degrees awarded in 2015 were gleaned from the annual National Center for Education Statistics via the NSF's WebCASPAR system at https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/webcaspar.

Paul B. Sturtevant is a medievalist, social scientist, and public historian. He received a PhD in medieval studies from the University of Leeds and is a social science analyst at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as editor in chief of The Public Medievalist; http://www.publicmedievalist.com/. Follow him on Twitter @publicmedieval.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.

The American Historical Association welcomes comments in the discussion area below, at AHA Communities, and in letters to the editor. Please read our commenting and letters policy before submitting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
History Is Not a Useless Major: Fighting Myths with Data

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over the past 20 years, warnings from a variety of sources-from career counselors to administrators to government officials-have convinced many prospective college students (and their parents) that the only safe path to a well-paying job is through a STEM major. Members of the academy-including STEM faculty themselves-have repeatedly challenged assertions that majoring in the humanities is useless.

# data[].attributes.headline
Critical thinking instruction in humanities reduces belief in pseudoscience

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical thinking instruction in humanities reduces belief in pseudoscience

# data[].attributes.body
Matt Shipman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Critical thinking instruction in humanities reduces belief in pseudoscience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A recent study by North Carolina State University researchers finds that teaching critical thinking skills in a humanities course significantly reduces student beliefs in "pseudoscience" that is unsupported by facts.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul T. Corrigan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you want to major in English, you might feel some pressure. Folks might warn you against it. Folks might tell you that you can't get a job with an English degree, might advise you that a "practical" degree is the safe bet in a rough economy, might crack jokes about you working at Starbucks while writing a novel in your...

# data[].attributes.body
Andrew Simmons

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

Yet poetry enables teachers to teach their students how to write, read, and understand any text. Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions. Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.

Students who don't like writing essays may like poetry, with its dearth of fixed rules and its kinship with rap. For these students, poetry can become a gateway to other forms of writing. It can help teach skills that come in handy with other kinds of writing-like precise, economical diction, for example. When Carl Sandburg writes, "The fog comes/on little cat feet," in just six words, he endows a natural phenomenon with character, a pace, and a spirit. All forms of writing benefits from the powerful and concise phrases found in poems.

I have used cut-up poetry (a variation on the sort "popularized" by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) to teach 9th grade students, most of whom learned English as a second language, about grammar and literary devices. They made collages after slicing up dozens of "sources," identifying the adjectives and adverbs, utilizing parallel structure, alliteration, assonance, and other figures of speech. Short poems make a complete textual analysis more manageable for English language learners. When teaching students to read and evaluate every single word of a text, it makes sense to demonstrate the practice with a brief poem-like Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool."

Students can learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by studying how poets do-and do not-abide by traditional writing rules in their work. Poetry can teach writing and grammar conventions by showing what happens when poets strip them away or pervert them for effect. Dickinson often capitalizes common nouns and uses dashes instead of commas to note sudden shifts in focus. Agee uses colons to create dramatic, speech-like pauses. Cummings of course rebels completely. He usually eschews capitalization in his proto-text message poetry, wrapping frequent asides in parentheses and leaving last lines dangling on their pages, period-less. In "next to of course god america i," Cummings strings together, in the first 13 lines, a cavalcade of jingoistic catch-phrases a politician might utter, and the lack of punctuation slowing down and organizing the assault accentuates their unintelligibility and banality and heightens the satire. The abuse of conventions helps make the point. In class, it can help a teacher explain the exhausting effect of run-on sentences-or illustrate how clichés weaken an argument.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.

# data[].attributes.body
Colleen Flaherty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A major 2013 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned that at "the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education," including the humanities, the U.S. was instead "narrowing" its focus and abandoning its "sense of what education has been and should continue to be."

The paper caught the attention of policy makers, including members of Congress. Four Republicans and four Democrats asked the academy to dig deeper into the state of language education in the U.S. They wanted to know what the U.S. could do to ensure excellence in language education, especially how it might more efficiently use existing resources. They also asked how language learning influences economic growth, cultural diplomacy, productivity for future generations and a sense of personal fulfillment.

Political winds now seem even more foul to the humanities (and more inward-blowing) than they were in 2013. And many foreign language departments at all kinds of colleges and universities have found their budgets threatened and, in some cases, eliminated. But those involved in the resulting report are hopeful their findings in support of language education opportunities for all students will gain traction.

" America's Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century," released today, doesn't call for "massive increases in funding at the local, state or federal levels," said Paul LeClerc, director of Columbia University's Global Center in Paris and chair of the academy's Commission on Language Learning. "For the most part, we ask for sustained funding and encourage creative partnerships to increase teaching capacity, not massive government spending programs."

The commission acknowledges its greatest challenge in making foreign language learning accessible to all students is teaching capacity, and it recommends upping the number of teachers in pre- and K-12 schools. But it hopes such instruction will be supplemented with partnerships among schools, governments, businesses and nonprofits. The Chicago Public Schools system, for example, offers an Arabic language program that's guided by Chicago's Center for Arabic Language and Culture, and supported by local Arabic speakers, local and international businesses, and the Qatar Foundation International.

The report also calls for more teaching of heritage languages spoken by immigrants to the U.S. and their families, in part to help those skills persist from one generation to the next. It urges additional, targeted support for the many Native American languages.

The commission calls, too, for more opportunities for students to learn languages -- and, with them, cultures -- abroad. One specific recommendation is to restructure federal financial aid to help students from low-income backgrounds study abroad during the summer, as well as the academic year.

As for what's at stake in such efforts, LeClerc said having more Americans with competency in languages other than English "is essential from virtually any point of view you can think of" -- from economic growth and competitiveness to national defense to increased academic achievement and what he called "successful functioning in a global economy."

Rosemary Feal, fellow commissioner and executive director of the Modern Language Association, was more pointed. "The greatest risk for failing to implement the key recommendations in this report is to further aggravate national isolationism," which is not only detrimental for business purposes, she said, "but downright dangerous in an era in which immigration bans and a physical barrier with Mexico are being instituted or threatened."

In the current political climate, Feal added, "the recommendations of the report are even more relevant than when it was commissioned." She said language learning is one of the best ways to cultivate empathy, and the earlier in children's education the process starts, "the more likely they are to become well-functioning global citizens."
Making the Case
The report notes that national law enforcement offices and the State and Defense Departments all have increased their foreign language capacities in recent years, citing national security. "The message in each case was clear: effective communication is the basis of international cooperation, and a strong national defense depends on our ability to understand our adversaries as well as our friends," it says.

Regarding business, nearly 30 percent of executives say they've missed out on opportunities over a lack of on-staff language skills, according to a 2014 NAFSA: Association of International Educators study quoted in the report. Some 40 percent said they'd failed to reach their international potential due to language barriers.

"America's Languages" includes profiles of professionals who've thrived due to their language skills -- whether they originally understood their value or not. "When I was in high school, I thought learning a foreign language was a complete waste of time and effort," said James Tobyne, who works in strategic partnerships and business development at alibaba.com, which is often referred to as China's Amazon.com. Yet now, he told the commission, "as an employee of one of the world's largest internet companies, my language skills -- including proficiency in Mandarin Chinese -- are an essential component of my job."

Globally, the commission says, some 300 to 400 million Chinese students are studying English, and about two-thirds of all European adults know more than one language. That's compared to some 200,000 U.S. students studying Chinese in K-12, according to government estimates, and the approximately one-fifth of Americans who know a language other than English.

The report also calls for an expanded capacity in world languages "a social imperative," with the provision of language access to social services mandated under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Affordable Care Act.

"Growing numbers of American citizens speak languages other than English, and in some major urban areas, as many as half of all residents speak a non-English language at home," it says. "But all too often, their access to vital services, including health care, and even their ability to exercise simple rights are limited not only by their inability to communicate in English," but also by service providers' inability to speak or secure the help of those who speak other languages.

The commission also cites additional research suggesting that foreign language study has numerous cognitive benefits for children and adults, and has been linked to higher academic achievement in other disciplines.

The academy hinted at these findings in December with a data-based national "snapshot" of U.S. language capacity, and the picture wasn't pretty: language education is dwindling at every level, from K-12 to postsecondary, and a diminishing share of U.S. residents speak languages other than English. That's despite an "emerging consensus among leaders in business and politics, teachers, scientists, and community members that proficiency in English is not sufficient to meet the nation's needs," the paper read.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data included in that report and again in "America's Languages," more than 60 million residents over age 5 -- or about 20 percent of the population -- speak a language other than English at home. But other research suggests that just 10 percent of the population speaks a second language proficiently, and most are "heritage speakers," meaning they speak it for family or cultural reasons. Of those who speak a language other than English at home, 57 percent were foreign born.

Public elementary and middle school language education options have decreased within the last decade, and only a small minority of high school students are taking intermediate or advanced language courses. The number of college students enrolled in the most commonly studied languages -- with the exception of American Sign Language -- also has fallen in recent years.
Building Language Learning Capacity
Like Feal, the commission as a whole believes that instructional opportunities in other languages should be offered as early in life as possible. Its primary goal is that every school in the U.S. offer meaningful instruction of languages other than English as part of their standard curricula. The commission encourages colleges and universities to offer beginning and advanced language instruction to all students, and to reverse recent programmatic cuts "wherever possible." It also applauds recent efforts to expand undergraduate language requirements.

Some 44 states and Washington, D.C., report that they can't find enough qualified K-12 teachers to meet current needs, but all districts respond to shortages in different ways, the commission says. It encourages further study and better data of the scope of the problem.

As for creatively increasing capacity, the commission calls for federal loan forgiveness plans to attract qualified teachers. While the federal Perkins Loan program will forgive up to 100 percent of a need-based loan for students training to become language teachers, the report says, the Education Department offers no such forgiveness for Direct Loans, offered irrespective of need.

The report also advises coordination of state credentialing systems so that qualified teachers can more easily find work in areas that need them. It imagines that technology will play a role in expanding capacity, including in offering blended-learning models in understaffed areas.

Within college and universities -- for students who wish to become language teachers and those who don't -- the commission calls for a "recommitment" to language instruction.

While language programs were particularly vulnerable to cuts during the Great Recession, the report says, two- and four-year colleges and universities should now find new ways to provide opportunities for advanced study in languages, including through blended-learning programs and the development of new regional consortia that allow colleges and universities to pool resources. A number of such collaborations exist, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Fourteen member universities use a distance-learning program to offer online classes in some 65 less commonly taught languages, including Uzbek and Dutch.

Such efforts will be particularly important "as we increase the number of learning opportunities in less commonly taught languages like Arabic, Persian and Korean," the commission wrote. "Only by maintaining such offerings in higher education can we ensure that we will have the teachers and linguistic and cultural experts we need for life and work in the 21st century."

The report praises institutions that have instituted mandatory language study even for those undergraduates who took Advanced Placement courses in high school. Such institutions recognize that this kind of course work is "a qualification for higher-level language courses, rather than an exemption from language requirements," the report says. "Not every college or university has the resources to institute such a policy immediately, but it is a laudable goal and worthy of serious consideration."

The commission also encourages college and university curricula designed for Native American and heritage language speakers, and supports offering course credit for proficiency in these languages. The Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Houston, for example, offers specific courses for heritage Spanish speakers. Students who have successfully completed the intermediate level fulfill the university's foreign language requirement but are encouraged to enroll in more advanced classes.

Feal said that the report strongly emphasizes a "K-16" approach, with schools working with colleges and universities to promote language learning. It also promotes as "glocal" (local-to-global) approach. Still, she said, as far as funding and other resources are concerned, the new report "outlines a clear and compelling case for the value of language learning in the postsecondary system, where language study at the most advanced levels takes place."

The report ends by saying that in the past, the U.S. has only focused on language education "in times of great need, such as encouraging Russian studies during the Cold War or instruction in certain Middle Eastern languages after the terrorist attacks of 2001." At such moments, it says, "enrollments increase dramatically, but students require years of training before they can achieve a useful level of proficiency, often long after the immediate crisis has faded and national priorities have changed."

A wiser, more forward-thinking strategy, then, "would be to steadily improve access to as many languages as possible for people of every age, ethnicity and socioeconomic background -- to treat language education as a persistent national need like competency in math or English, and to ensure that a useful level of proficiency is within every student's reach."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Academy of Arts and Sciences makes case for increasing foreign language learning capacity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A major 2013 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned that at "the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education," including the humanities, the U.S. was instead "narrowing" its focus and abandoning its "sense of what education has been and should continue to be."

# data[].attributes.headline
Liberal Arts College Students Are Getting Less Artsy

# data[].attributes.subject
Liberal Arts College Students Are Getting Less Artsy

# data[].attributes.body
Colleen Flaherty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Liberal arts colleges promise students a well-rounded education in core disciplines that will prepare them for a variety of careers and lifelong learning - not just a first job. Increasingly, though, even attending a liberal arts institution doesn't inoculate students from anxieties about the job market that may push them toward the math and the sciences, at the expense of arts and humanities.

"What liberal arts colleges historically have said to students is, 'Do what you love, and the rest will take care of itself,'" said Sarah Bolton, president of the College of Wooster. Increasingly, though, that message isn't resonating with students, who instead think they'll be best served later on by taking as many quantitative courses as possible - including as electives, she said. So it's statistics instead of theater, for example, or another science course over one in literature.

As a physicist, Bolton doesn't object to more science - until it compromises a student's overall experience. "I firmly believe that the sciences are part of the liberal arts, but I also believe that the arts are part of the liberal arts, as well," she said.

Bolton said the challenge for colleges like hers going forward will be to encourage students to make the most of the curriculum based on what they want to do when they graduate, while not limiting themselves or sacrificing what they really want to study. Wooster is currently reviewing its curricular requirements to encourage students to do just that. It's also gathering long-term data on enrollment and major choices. There's already anecdotal evidence to suggest that some students are skimping on the arts and humanities courses they came to liberal arts institution to try out.

At Wellesley College, that's definitely the case. The college surveyed recent graduates and asked which of the 12 degree components they wished they'd taken more or less of. About half of respondents said they wouldn't change anything. But about half said they would, with the most "wish I'd taken more" comments relating to the arts, languages and non-Western cultures. The most "wish I'd taken fewer" comments were about courses in math and the physical sciences.

"I wouldn't say it was students' biggest regret, but when they looked at their academic programs, they wished they had done more arts and humanities," said Ann Velenchik, dean of academic affairs at Wellesley and an associate professor of economics.

Between 2008 and 2016, for example, there was a 14 percent decline in enrollments in the humanities and an 8 percent decline in enrollments in the social sciences. At the same time, there was a 29 percent increase in enrollments in math and the sciences, especially computer science and neuroscience. Interdisciplinary courses are also on the rise, with an 18 percent jump in enrollments.

In terms of majors, 27 percent of Wellesley graduates majored in the arts and humanities in 2008. In 2016, it was 23 percent. Social sciences, historically Wellesley's most popular area, saw a smaller decline, from 44 percent 42 percent. Majors in math and the sciences jumped, meanwhile, from 18 percent to 23 percent.

"There's definitely been a movement from the humanities to the sciences," Velenchik said. Yet she noted that enrollments in particular are more "balanced" than they used to be - meaning that they're more evenly represented now across the arts and sciences.

Is that good or bad? Velenchik was somewhat neutral, saying that at Wellesley, at least, students tend to "overfulfill" their distribution requirements, regardless of major. Those requirements include three courses in the humanities, three in the social sciences, three in math and the physical sciences, two years of a foreign language and a first-year writing course.

William Deresiewicz, author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life and current National Endowment for the Humanities-Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Distinguished Fellow at Bard College, was less neutral about national trends away from the humanities.

"It's a terrible thing, and it bespeaks the destructive attitude that is ubiquitous in education today, which is that the sole purpose of education is to set you up for job and career and that you should therefore study something practical, understood in the narrowest terms," he said.

Deresiewicz said he's studied major - not enrollment - data at top-20 colleges and universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and noticed an "enormous shift" toward economics, even more so at liberal arts colleges than at research institutions. In 1995, for example, English was the most popular major at 9 of the top 20 liberal arts colleges, compared to just one in 2013. Economics and the other social sciences - namely political science - surged from the most popular majors at four colleges to 13 over the same period.

Because liberal arts institutions usually don't offer the kinds of "explicitly vocational majors that most schools do (communications, education, business - the last of which accounts for between a fifth and a quarter of all majors across the country), students at fancy schools tend to choose one of the next best things: biology, engineering, computer science, and for those not inclined to the sciences, economics," Deresiewicz added via email.
What Can Be Done?
Part of Bolton's thinking is informed by having served as dean until recently at Williams College. That campus has seen a decline the number of majors in a few humanities and arts fields - namely studio art and art history. But that's been coupled with a sharp increase in the number of students who choose to double major (currently 42 percent of students), with at least one major in the sciences, technology, math or engineering (STEM), according to information from Williams. So even as the sciences have surged, the net impact on the humanities has been minimal.

Beyond encouraging students to double-major, George Shuffleton, associate dean and professor of English at Carleton College, advised talking to students about what they want to learn. "We work really hard to dispel the notion" that students have to fine-tune their studies to particular career aspiration, he said. "Students come to a place like Carleton because they really are committed to getting a liberal arts education, and sometimes it's a question of reminding them that if they'd wanted to pursue a narrowly professional education, there are other places they could have gone to instead. The mission is reminding them why they made that choice in the first place."

Carleton has seen slight declines in some non-physical science fields within the last decade. English accounted for 9 percent of majors in 2006, for example, compared to 6 percent in 2016; social sciences and history shrank from 31 percent to 26 percent of majors over the same period. But surges in STEM fields were centralized, seen in just math and computer science (the latter was 2 percent of majors in 2006, and now it's about 10 percent).

To that point, Shuffleton said there was probably a something a bit more nuanced going on than a much-lamented decline of the humanities: gender. At Carleton and nationwide, more women are enrolling in disciplines in which they've historically been underrepresented, he said. "In fields like math and computer science, we see that as a success."

Velenchik, at Wellesley, said trends toward the sciences probably also reflect her institution's efforts to enroll more first-generation students - many of whom have a different, perhaps more practical idea of what college is and should accomplish than do students whose parents and grandparents attended liberal arts institutions.

Silvia L. López, David and Marian Adams Bryn-Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at Carleton, said via email that numbers alone don't do the conversation justice. "Our curriculum design requires students to learn a second language and ensures that the students take classes distributed in all areas of knowledge and artistic practice offered," she said, while about 75 percent of students go abroad. "Carleton's liberal arts education is exactly that: an education. It can't be measured by the number of majors in the hard sciences, but must be understood through the transformative experiences that students have in and out of the classroom that teach them that a rich and full life can only be one if lived in an examined and generous way."

It's true that many liberal arts colleges have distribution requirements that ensure students are learning within a variety of disciplines, regardless of their majors. Some colleges have also layered thematic requirements on disciplinary requirements. Barnard College, for example, this year debuted new curriculum called "Foundations," which promoted six "modes of thinking" - technologically and digitally; quantitatively and empirically; social difference; global inquiry; locally (New York); and historical perspective - in addition to requirements in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. (Computer science enrollments and majors are up significantly at Barnard.)

Extracurricular opportunities - typically plentiful on liberal arts campuses - only enrich those studies. Some campuses also have added courses, majors and programs that ensure students are studying the liberal arts even when they're not taking courses within the traditional liberal arts disciplines.

Carol Quillen, president of Davidson College, said her campus has moved increasingly toward problem-centered learning in recent years, such as by adding programs like digital studies. The minor emphasizes digital creativity, culture and methodology through coursework in design, ethics, quantitative literacy and other elements of the liberal arts. Health and human values is another popular program.

"These are the kinds of questions that are inspiring faculty and students, and our curriculum is becoming and less departmentally focused," she said. "We're thinking about a liberal arts curriculum that looks much more transdisciplinary and pulls courses and faculty members from across the disciplines together."

Liberal arts colleges, with their typically small faculties, are uniquely suited for collaboration and being nimble to students' needs and interests, Quillen said. She noted that a group of faculty members had responded to waning interest in a four-semester Western traditions humanities sequence by cutting the time commitment and adding a global focus, for example.

Surely such updates will draw criticism from those who advocate for a traditional liberal arts core, and who blame any decline of the humanities on new, more critical approaches. But Quillen said she had no patience for arguments that change inevitably waters down the liberal arts, and suggested that the key to maintaining educational quality is rigor, not stasis.

The notion that adding Zora Neale Hurston, for example, to a course in Western literature - which traditionally would have been dominated by white male authors - somehow means sacrificing rigor "is ridiculous," she added. "Plus we live in a world where fields of inquiry are constantly expanding."

Carleton isn't the only college adding new programs. Williams, for instance, has added a concentration in public health and new majors in Arabic, environmental studies and statistics in the past decade.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities, which promotes liberal education, advocates inquiry-based, integrative learning and high-impact teaching practices over core curricula and stringent distribution requirements, "where students' proficiencies are practiced and demonstrated across all learning experiences," said Lynn Pasquerella, president.

General education now also requires "signature work," in which students "integrate and apply their learning to questions that matter, she said. "Signature work prepares students to grapple with complex, unscripted problems for which the answers are yet unknown and to use strategies of inquiry, analysis and collaboration to construct a course of action and take responsibility for the results."

Over all, the association's vision for ged ed "is grounded in guided preparation for students to identify and build capacity for addressing significant questions and challenges that matter to the student and to the broader society," Pasquerella said. Disciplinary work "remains foundational, but students are provided with practice connecting their discipline with others, with the co-curriculum, and with the needs of society - in preparation for work, citizenship and life."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Liberal arts students' fears about the job market upon graduation are increasingly informing what they choose to study, even as electives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liberal arts colleges promise students a well-rounded education in core disciplines that will prepare them for a variety of careers and lifelong learning - not just a first job. Increasingly, though, even attending a liberal arts institution doesn't inoculate students from anxieties about the job market that may push them toward the math and the sciences, at the expense of arts and humanities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.subject
Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mark Cuban Sees Greater Demand for Liberal Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, discusses his views on the Trump administration and the future of jobs. He speaks with Bloomberg's Cory Johnson at the NBA All-Star Technology Summit in New Orleans. (Source: Bloomberg)

# data[].attributes.headline
Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

# data[].attributes.subject
Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

# data[].attributes.body
Rajini Srikanth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was the sense of their having been economically abandoned for several decades. Trump has promised to restore their economic dignity. That is a laudable goal.

However, through his corrosive campaign rhetoric, Trump has also made it acceptable to speak in hateful ways about many groups of people including Mexicans, Muslims and blacks. These groups are now feeling extremely vulnerable: Their fears are about the safety of their bodies and their lives.

This is anxiety that most white Americans - regardless of their economic status - are insulated from.

In the United States, whiteness confers power and privilege even when undercut by economic destitution. As the nation prepares itself for a Trump presidency, it is important to remember that this power and privilege will intensify.

Feminist Peggy McIntosh enumerated 50 of the things white people can take for granted in her 1988 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," including:

"I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider."

Twenty-eight years later, this, it would seem, is one of the white privileges that is not being accorded to the black athletes who have chosen to kneel, sit or raise a fist during the playing of the national anthem before a game. Just consider this reader's email to USA Today and note the ease with which the rage is articulated:

"When these (expletive) take a knee they are spitting in the faces of soldiers ... They are spitting on the graves of everyone killed on 9/11."

The commentator's rage makes no room for the non-violent expression of the athletes' outrage at the injustice experienced by black males.

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

My research on empathy, antipathy and how we perceive those who are unfamiliar makes clear that there has been no meaningful acknowledgment by politicians or the mainstream media of the power and privilege of whiteness. And yet if we as a country want to ensure "equal justice for all" then it is crucial for groups with power to recognize the advantage they have and address that imbalance.

From discussions in my classrooms and from my research, I have learned that there is relative "safety" in using literary texts to practice "what if" scenarios about our own capacity for understanding the "pain of others" and for recognizing how our power and privilege can contribute to others' injury, whether that be material, political or emotional.

White on black justice

The first literary example I want to use broke ground at the time of its publication by drawing attention to the automatic and unexamined privileges conferred on whiteness.

In Richard Wright's 1940 novel "Native Son," the white attorney general tells the prisoner Bigger Thomas, a native of the south side of Chicago:

"I know how you feel, boy. You're colored, and you feel that you haven't had a square deal, don't you? ... I know how it feels to walk along the streets like other people, dressed like them, talking like them, and yet excluded for no reason except that you're black."

Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress

Despite the psychological manipulation of the prisoner that this superficial display of empathy demonstrates, even the limited acknowledgment that being black is a frustrating disadvantage is a rare admission.

But here is what the fictional attorney general does not do.

He does not acknowledge the historical and political forces that have created the institutions that automatically give the advantage to people like him.

Juries in the 1940s were entirely composed of white men. That did not, however, strike those in power as being inherently unjust, because white men were deemed capable of being able to weigh the evidence and make fair and unbiased decisions.

"Native Son" sold an astonishing 215,000 copies within three weeks of its publication. Its primary impact was that it offered white readers a searing look into the black protagonist's deep pain and fierce anger. But it did not lead to change, if we are to judge from the housing discrimination in Chicago in the 1940s that created deep and entrenched economic, social and political segregation.

Several years after its publication, some black readers, most notably novelist James Baldwin, were infuriated at what they saw as the two-dimensional portrayal of Bigger's fury and enraged despair.

Yet, over the years since its publication, "Native Son" has continued to be reassessed and reconsidered - performed on stage in 2014 and re-reviewed in 2015 - so powerful has been its message of systemic and pervasive racism.

The privilege of being unaware

Unthinkingness is a central theme in the poem "To the Lady," by Mitsuye Yamada.

An anonymous woman (we don't know much about her other than that she is from the group in power) asks about the Japanese-Americans whose loyalty was questioned following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and who were incarcerated in camps:

"Why did the Japanese Americans let/ the government put them in/ those camps without protest?"

She is blissfully unaware of the political context that made it impossible for them to protest. Though two-thirds of the Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II were American citizens, they did not have the basic power to demand that their constitutional rights be upheld. They did not have the support of their neighbors, who were bystanders at best and hostile enemies at worst in this violation of their constitutional rights.

AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

It is the power and privilege of the poem's lady that offer her the luxury of being unaware of the asymmetry of influence.

It is telling that after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Japanese-Americans came forward to offer support to Muslims, Muslim-Americans, and Arab-Americans so that their constitutional rights would not be violated in the same way.

Refusing to be willfully ignorant

Studying how power is hidden or revealed, understated or boldly displayed in the two examples above can set us on the path to introspection.

How does one become complicit in ignoring unequal power? What can we carry from literature into life?

Take the following instance in which an individual in a position of power appears to have engaged in introspective analysis and responded with nuance and complexity.

It takes place in an airport, a public space that has increasingly become associated with danger and where different groups of people are in different positions of power.

In a memoir essay by former sports broadcaster Varun Sriram that he submitted for a collection I edited, we learn of his airport experience.

Sriram, a young Indian-American man - looking, as he says, with his unshaven face and brown skin like everybody's stereotypical image of the "terrorist" - tells how he foolishly left his carry-on bag unattended at an airline gate while he went to purchase a pizza.

A white woman who had been giving him hostile looks summoned a security guard who picked up his bag and left the area. When Sriram returned, he was told by the white woman that she had called the guard. In a panic, he went in pursuit and luckily saw the guard at a distance.

AP Photo/Alan Diaz

Sriram apologized profusely for his carelessness and politely asked the guard if he could have his bag back. Sriram accurately described the contents of the bag, and the security guard returned it to him.

We will never know the exact reasons that led the guard to make the unusual gesture of returning the bag to Sriram and treating him as harmless rather than as a threat. But in "reading" this incident as one would a literary text, one can readily acknowledge that the guard, despite his obvious power advantage over Sriram, nonetheless appears to have used that advantage to make an empathetic decision.

Through literature to empathy and righteous outrage

Like airports, urban streets have been scenes of violence and danger. The merest gesture of a "wrong" move can mean death for an African-American male, as the recent events in Minnesota, Oklahoma and North Carolina have all too sadly revealed.

When we hear recommendations for training police officers, what exactly do we want?

I would argue that training must engage the imaginative capacity of those in power. It must lead them to acknowledge their power and privilege, and it must then give them opportunities to exercise their imagination in deepening understanding of themselves and of those individuals and groups over whom they hold this power.

Literature allows for such practice.

In the hands of a skillful facilitator, for example, it is impossible not to be outraged at what one can learn about the stranglehold of white power in an essay like "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which novelist Richard Wright shows us how the simple act of riding an elevator as a black busboy in the presence of white men can be fraught with life-threatening danger.

The question to be asked then is how that situation compares to the one on our streets today - nearly 70 years later.

A recent initiative in New York City has police officers visiting the Museum of Modern Art and being trained, through looking at paintings, in how to observe carefully and critically.

That we don't similarly use literature to enlarge empathetic capacity and evoke righteous outrage is surprising and inexplicable. The times cry out, I would argue, for bold initiatives that bring literature into our courtrooms, banks, town halls, housing offices, police departments, health care centers and political venues to initiate necessary discussions about asymmetrical power and its corrosive impact. It will be particularly imperative in the times ahead.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why literature matters in debate about race and immigrants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The people who voted for Donald Trump did so for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was the sense of their having been economically abandoned for several decades. Trump has promised to restore their economic dignity. That is a laudable goal.

# data[].attributes.headline
Liberal Arts vs. STEM: The Right Degrees, the Wrong Debate

# data[].attributes.subject
Liberal Arts vs. STEM: The Right Degrees, the Wrong Debate

# data[].attributes.body
Sergei Klebnikov

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Share to email

Share to facebook

Share to twitter

Share to linkedin

Share to google

I write about money's driving role in the sports industry

In the shifting landscape of higher education today, critical questions continue to be raised about the value of a liberal arts education. There is a constant drumbeat claiming that STEM subjects -science, technology, engineering and math - are far more valuable in today's digital economy and culture than a traditional liberal arts major such as philosophy or history.

"There has been an increase in awareness simply because that is where the jobs are at today and where we foresee them to be in the future," says Vince Bertram, president and CEO of non-profit Project Lead the Way, a leading provider of K-12 STEM programs that delivers to over 6,500 schools across the nation.

Many public officials have recently fueled the debate by publicly questioning the value of degrees in traditional liberal arts subjects. President Barack Obama famously called into question the usefulness of an art history degree in January before later apologizing. Several Republican governors, including those in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, have also spoken out against the liberal arts. Also among those who have adopted this stance are North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

For decades the liberal arts and sciences lived harmoniously. They went about their business, for the most part, largely in their own labs and lecture halls. And while much of the recent conversation pitting STEM against the liberal arts has arisen out of this current media interest, says Eugene Tobin, senior program officer at the Mellon Foundation, has one truly overshadowed the other?
A False Dichotomy?
"The emerging and new emphasis on science and engineering is valid, but you still need liberal arts thinkers applied in other fields," said Alison Byerly, president of Lafayette College, an elite liberal arts school in suburban Pennsylvania. She described the debate as a "false dichotomy."

"One needs to understand that in many instances this is a false choice between the two," John McCardell Jr., vice chancellor of Tennessee's Sewanee University of the South, similarly argues. English lit, economics and international studies are among the Tennessee's school most popular majors."But this is not the first time that the liberal arts have been under siege," he says, pointing to the historical examples of the Land Grant Act of 1862 and the GI Bill of 1944.

Page 1 / 3 Continue

Share to email

Share to facebook

Share to twitter

Share to linkedin

Share to google

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Liberal Arts vs. STEM: The Right Degrees, The Wrong Debate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share to email Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Share to google I write about money's driving role in the sports industry In the shifting landscape of higher education today, critical questions continue to be raised about the value of a liberal arts education.

# data[].attributes.body
R. Derek Black

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I could easily have spent the night of Nov. 8 elated, surrounded by friends and family, thinking: "We did it. We rejected a multicultural and globalist society. We defied the elites, rejected political correctness, and made a statement millions of Americans have wanted to shout for decades."

I'd be planning with other white nationalists what comes next, and assessing just how much influence our ideology would have on this administration. That's who I was a few years ago.

Things look very different for me now. I am far away from the community that I grew up in, and that I once hoped could lead our country to a moment like this.

I was born into a prominent white nationalist family - David Duke is my godfather, and my dad started Stormfront, the first major white nationalist website - and I was once considered the bright future of the movement.

In 2008, at age 19, I ran for and won a Palm Beach County Republican committee seat a few months before Barack Obama was elected president. I received national media attention and for a while couldn't go out without being congratulated for "telling them what's what."

I grew up in West Palm Beach across the water from Donald J. Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, and he was always a loud presence in the neighborhood. I would drive a pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker past his driveway each morning on my way to the beach and my family would walk out into the front yard to watch his fireworks on New Year's Eve.

It surprises me now how often Mr. Trump and my 19-year-old self would have agreed on our platforms: tariffs to bring back factory jobs, increased policing of black communities, deporting illegal workers and the belief that American culture was threatened. I looked at my white friends and family who felt dispossessed, at the untapped political support for anyone - even a kid like me - who wasn't afraid to talk about threats to our people from outsiders, and I knew not only that white nationalism was right, but that it could win.

Several years ago, I began attending a liberal college where my presence prompted huge controversy. Through many talks with devoted and diverse people there - people who chose to invite me into their dorms and conversations rather than ostracize me - I began to realize the damage I had done. Ever since, I have been trying to make up for it.

For a while after I left the white nationalist movement, I thought my upbringing made me exaggerate the likelihood of a larger political reaction to demographic change. Then Mr. Trump gave his Mexican "rapists" speech and I spent the rest of the election wondering how much my movement had set the stage for his. Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking the nation.

People have approached me looking for a way to change the minds of Trump voters, but I can't offer any magic technique. That kind of persuasion happens in person-to-person interactions and it requires a lot of honest listening on both sides. For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn't understand why anyone would fear me. I thought I was only doing what was right and defending those I loved.

I think the "Hamilton" cast modeled well one way to make that same connection when they appealed to Vice President-elect Mike Pence from the stage: "We, sir - we - are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us." Afterward, the actor Brandon Victor Dixon explained, "I hope he thinks of us every time he has to deal with an issue or talk about a bill or present anything." I'm sure Mr. Pence believes his policies are just. But now he has heard from individuals who are worried about those policies. That might open him to new conversations.

I never would have begun my own conversations without first experiencing clear and passionate outrage to what I believed from those I interacted with. Now is the time for me to pass on that outrage by clearly and unremittingly denouncing the people who used a wave of white anger to take the White House.

Mr. Trump's comments during the campaign echoed how I also tapped into less-than-explicit white nationalist ideology to reach relatively moderate white Americans. I went door-to-door in 2008 talking about how Hispanic immigration was overwhelming "American" culture, how black neighborhoods were hotbeds of crime, and how P.C. culture didn't let us talk about any of it. I won that small election with 60 percent of the vote.

A substantial portion of the American public has made clear that it feels betrayed by the establishment, and so it elected a president who denounces all Muslims as potential conspirators in terrorism; who sees black communities as crime-ridden; who taps into white American mistrust of foreigners, particularly of Hispanics; and who promises the harshest form of immigration control. If we thought Mr. Trump himself might backtrack on some of this, we are now watching him fill a cabinet with people able to make that campaign rhetoric into real policy.

Much has been made of the incoherence of Mr. Trump's proposals, but what really matters is who does - and doesn't - need to fear them. None of the ideas that Mr. Trump has put forward would endanger me, and I once enthusiastically advocated for most of what he says. No proposal to put more cops in black neighborhoods to stop and frisk residents would cause me to be harassed. A ban on Muslim immigration doesn't implicate all people who look like me in terrorism. Overturning Roe v. Wade will not force me to make a dangerous choice about my health, nor will a man who personifies sexual assault without penalty make me any less safe. When the most powerful demographic in the United States came together to assert that making America great again meant asserting their supremacy, they were asserting my supremacy.

The wave of violence and vile language that has risen since the election is only one immediate piece of evidence that this campaign's reckless assertion of white identity comes at a huge cost. More and more people are being forced to recognize now what I learned early: Our country is susceptible to some of our worst instincts when the message is packaged correctly.

No checks and balances can redeem what we've unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy, though saying that makes me a hypocrite. I was a much more extreme partisan than a vast majority of Trump voters and I never would have recognized that label.

The motivations that led to this choice are more complex. I have no doubt many of his supporters voted thinking he'd soften his rhetoric, that his words didn't really matter. The words were not disqualifying for them because they don't see, or refuse to see, what the message of hate will reap.

Most of Mr. Trump's supporters did not intend to attack our most vulnerable citizens. But with him in office we have a duty to protect those who are threatened by this administration and to win over those who don't recognize the impact of their vote. Even those on the furthest extreme of the white nationalist spectrum don't recognize themselves doing harm - I know that because it was easy for me, too, to deny it.

That is the opening for those of us who disagree with Mr. Trump. It's now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option.

There are millions of Americans who don't understand why anyone might worry about the effects of this election. They see it as "feelings" versus their own real concerns. Those of us on the other side need to be clear that Mr. Trump's callous disregard for people outside his demographic is intolerable, and will be destructive to the entire nation.

If I had not changed, I would have been jubilant after this election and more certain than ever that anxiety from a shrinking white majority would result in the election of more people who tap into this simple narrative. Now I'm convinced this doesn't have to be our destiny.

Mr. Trump's victory must make all Americans acknowledge that the choice of embracing or rejecting multiculturalism is not abstract. I know this better than most, because I've followed both paths. It is the choice of embracing or rejecting our own people.

R. Derek Black is a graduate student in history, focusing on the early Middle Ages.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I could easily have spent the night of Nov. 8 elated, surrounded by friends and family, thinking: "We did it. We rejected a multicultural and globalist society. We defied the elites, rejected political correctness, and made a statement millions of Americans have wanted to shout for decades."

# data[].attributes.body
Jonathan Basile

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After my first year of graduate school, I developed a chronic illness and had to withdraw from my program. For the next two years, I was homebound and cut off from the communities of intellectual exchange I had been part of, as well as the resources (the libraries, the online databases) they provided. Access to academic materials is notoriously expensive: a single journal article may cost thirty-five dollars for someone without institutional support, and the average price of an academic monograph is approaching eighty dollars. My research would have stagnated were it not for an open-access database that remains available to the ever-growing ranks of scholars who, by choice or necessity, make their home outside the university. AAARG, a straightforward file-sharing platform, advanced my studies and rescued me from three years of indolence. And so, when I see it come under attack from publishers and authors who consider it a platform for piracy, I always wonder: who would it have benefited to prevent me from reading?

AAARG developed its focus on academic work in the humanities organically, as a response to the inaccessibility of those texts. The primary means of communicating humanities research is the book-length monograph, which has traditionally been published by university presses and purchased by university libraries. While individuals have always been priced out of this market, libraries are increasingly unable to afford these texts as well. The culprits in this story are not the university presses, but rather scientific journal aggregators like Elsevier, which owns thousands of academic journals and sells subscriptions to university libraries at prices that keep their profit margin close to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the budgets of these libraries have stagnated due to government spending cuts and questionable priorities at some universities. In the 2017-2018 year, UC Santa Barbara, for example, will have its entire library acquisitions budget exhausted by these digital subscriptions; it anticipates being unable to purchase a single book. In response to dwindling demand, publishers of academic monographs are selling fewer and fewer copies of books for more and more money. Even the richest institutions in the world say this system is no longer affordable

As humanities research becomes expendable, so do those who would teach these undervalued subjects.

As humanities research becomes expendable, so do those who would teach these undervalued subjects. Like university libraries, many professors exist in a state of constant budgetary instability: more than half of faculty in the US are contingent, meaning they have no guarantee of continued employment. Many scholars who have spoken out in AAARG's defense have held such positions, and depend on the website to continue their research through periods of unemployment. Advancing their career beyond a contingent role (such as adjunct professor, postdoc, or visiting lecturer) depends more than anything on their ability to produce a monograph, and thus depends on completing research during periods of instability. The many discontents of the academy, those who would be students or professors but cannot afford to live in either role, now form a vast para-academic horde that organizes and supports itself, among other ways, through AAARG. The platform remains controversial, however, and often faces moral or legal opposition from those who feel it exacerbates the financial untenability of humanities publishing.

AAARG was created in the early 2000s by Sean Dockray, an American who is currently doing a practice-led Ph.D. in Visual Art at the University of Melbourne. At the time, he was an artist who had just moved to LA, hoping to form an intellectual community of para-academic practitioners in fields with shared theoretical underpinnings. His projects display a beautiful interplay of the universal and the particular, creating globally accessible or reproducible platforms for local and peculiar interventions. In 2007, he founded The Public School for Architecture in Los Angeles, now known simply as The Public School. It describes itself as a "school with no curriculum," a free education collective that helps interested students propose and organize classes. It began as a way for members of Dockray's community to share and develop their thought outside the confines of the academy, and has since grown into a global network of local collectives. Branches have formed in fourteen cities around the world, including Berlin, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, and New York, where I was involved for a few years as an organizer.

This type of local, para-institutional learning is what he hopes to foster with AAARG as well. For example, Public School classes depend on AAARG's resources to create syllabi and share reading materials. In a conversation we had by e-mail, Dockray described in vivid terms the role the website has come to play as a counterbalance to the neoliberal university's role as gatekeeper of academic research:
The humanities are being decimated, largely through capitalist restructuring of universities and knowledge, but also through the humanities' incapability or unwillingness to articulate a role for itself within the financialized university. AAARG plays a role inasmuch as this restructuring creates uneven distribution of access to knowledge and resources-as libraries are shut in austerity governments or books are destroyed in dictatorships, but hopefully it also plays a role in providing writers, artists, designers, philosophers, and organizers with some theoretical tools for producing the humanities that we need to confront what is to come (conceptually, ecologically, politically, etc.).

Dockray is no longer wedded to the acronym, and says the name more resembles a cry of frustration at this point: aaaaargh!

The name AAARG was originally an acronym that spoke to its founder's intentions, Artists, Architects, and Activists Reading Group. The site's eventual legal troubles forced it to change domains frequently, usually adding or subtracting a single letter (Dockray is no longer wedded to the acronym, and says the name more resembles a cry of frustration at this point: aaaaargh! At the time of writing, its domain is aaaaarg.fail.).

The conflict surrounding AAARG's existence, though similar to the battle between copyright holders and other file-sharing sites, bears some traits unique to the economics of academic publishing. While AAARG plays a relatively uncontroversial role in the sharing of out-of-print or unpublished work, there are some authors who object to their copyrighted work appearing on the site. The debate is less straightforward than it might be for the music or film industries, however. The economics of academic publishing are such that copyright is often more of a deprivation of the author than a protection. Most academics have to sign away their copyright and accept little or no royalties to get their work accepted by a university press. To justify this practice, presses cite the narrow profit margins of academic publishing, and scholars have no choice but to agree-they are dependent on the prestige and possibility of professional advancement which is their only compensation. Of course, the impact of their work (another important factor for an academic career) depends on how widely it is read and cited, which produces the odd situation that authors, in many cases, are the ones posting their own published work on AAARG, in violation of a university press's copyright.

The site's perennial legal troubles stem from those authors or publishers who consider AAARG's dissemination of their work to be piracy. Dockray says that he did not create the site for that purpose and respects the wishes of authors and publishers who serve the site with takedown notices. His most recent legal battle has come from a translator of André Bazin's What Is Cinema?, who has sued Dockray and the site's registrant for 500,000 dollars. In response to the lawsuit, a campaign to support AAARG and raise funds for its legal defense has sprouted. The site's users have submitted testimonials to the court that offer an at times quite touching glimpse of the community dependent on the site. In addition to academics in wealthy countries who rely on it for research needs their libraries can't meet, there are scholars from countries whose university libraries can't maintain an up-to-date collection of academic research; scholars who would be unable to purchase these books even if they had the resources, as they live in countries unserved by Amazon or eBay; an academic who lost their personal library in a fire; and one person who lives on a boat. One of the more poignant letters had the plot of a Harold Ramis movie: a high school debate team from a poorer district had trouble competing against teams from schools with access to resources like JSTOR, until they found AAARG, set district records, and made it to several national competitions. Reading these testimonials emphasizes the diversity of needs that AAARG can meet: translators who need to look up quotations from works cited in their source text, researchers who want a searchable copy of a work they already own in print, publishers who upload their own work because they find the discoverability boosts sales, and communities that would like to organize educational reading groups.

At present, the lawsuit is ongoing, and the fate of AAARG remains uncertain. Dockray's success in court will depend on proving that his primary motivation in creating AAARG was not copyright infringement. As his ever-lengthening cry of frustration has shown in the past, however, the principle of the site will not perish even if its name does. Regardless of this lawsuit's outcome, like-minded readers will always find a forum to share information when official channels fail them.

The ironies and injustices of academic publishing, as focused through the lens of AAARG, mirror those in other aspects of our society. Dwindling public funds are supporting the bottom line of major corporations like Elsevier instead of our public institutions, while a profit-driven management model forces the majority of its participants into debt, precarity, or unemployment. In this case, the public good, both in the sense of what we consume and what benefits us, is knowledge. Who deserves knowledge? What should it cost? What is it worth to a society (or to globalized humanity) to make it available to its members?

In the sciences, whose funding is better but still threatened under current models, the inaccessibility of knowledge could lead to slower development of treatments for diseases, for example, and to the desultory global dissemination of important clinical information. We should keep in mind that without open access archives like AAARG (or Sci-Hub and LibGen in the sciences), this information is inaccessible to most people around the world. The universities of poorer nations cannot afford to develop a collection akin to those of research libraries in the world's richest countries.

The humanities threaten to disrupt the very logic and smooth functioning of a neoliberal state whose only measure of value is GDP.

The humanities possess no less social value, even if it is not always measurable in economic terms. If we feel otherwise, that sense may come from right-wing austerity governments, who have a vested interest in disparaging the work of the humanities. Marco Rubio gave us the most salient example from the recent election cycle, making the dubious and beside-the-point claim that welders earn more than philosophers. This rhetoric of fiscal conservatism cloaks an assault on the public assembly and free expression of liberals: a political witch hunt is disguised as a budgetary issue, a situation similar to Wisconsin's 2011 fight against public sector unions (who traditionally endorse Democratic candidates) or congressional Republicans' repeated efforts to defund NPR. The humanities threaten to disrupt the very logic and smooth functioning of a neoliberal state whose only measure of value is GDP. Perhaps the humanities' most important offering is the ability to transform the frame of reference, to recast economic issues in moral terms, for example. The humanities are the locus, among other things, of the questions of justice or ethics-the very questions we are posing here-on which our public institutions must be founded lest we accept arbitrary authority.

The future of the humanities depends on the sort of local and fragmentary proliferation that AAARG makes possible. The site's success offers an antidote to the prevalent narrative of a decline of the humanities-clearly this work is not undesired, merely inaccessible. Similarly, AAARG disturbs the myth that culture and history are monolithic, that art and literature form a single lineage to which each new work adds itself, and that a single audience receives them univocally. Such reasoning is often implicit in the arguments made against the humanities, which assert that its lack of universal appeal is a sign of its being out of touch.

This or that work of art or criticism may not interest everyone, but it does not thereby become useless and expendable. A study of Nubian linguistics, for example, will not interest everyone, but it will interest someone who studies Nubian linguistics. So long as such researchers can find each other and share their work, the humanities will continue to teach respect for all that resides at the margins. As long as the academic publishing industry remains in opposition to the goals of the authors and readers it is meant to bring together, those interested in learning will continue to congregate outside its confines, by means of a platform like AAARG or one still to come.

I've often considered it a strange, capitalist perversion of the will that artists and authors fight to prevent people from viewing their work. Of course, the present organization of our economy is such that there may be authors who are poorly served by AAARG's distribution of their texts (though research suggests that open access availability boosts a text's citations without harming sales). I only wish that we would frame our thinking in terms of how we could transform our economy to better serve accessibility, rather than how we can shutter our commons to better serve our economy.

We don't have to live in a world where our economic and academic interests are in direct contradiction. If public funds spent on education and research could pay for non-profit open access publishing rather than padding the bottom line of major corporations, a platform like AAARG wouldn't need to exist, or would play an uncontroversial role collecting and organizing open access work. For this shift to take place, we would have to reach a consensus on the value of humanities education that seems today like an ever more distant fantasy. But if we're to imagine a more rational and just organization of our economy, as well as the rhetoric and activism necessary to bring it about, where else will we do so but the humanities?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After my first year of graduate school, I developed a chronic illness and had to withdraw from my program. For the next two years, I was homebound and cut off from the communities of intellectual exchange I had been part of, as well as the resources (the libraries, the online databases) they provided.

# data[].attributes.headline
Poems in Prison: The Survival Strategies of Romanian Political Prisoners

# data[].attributes.subject
Poems in Prison: The Survival Strategies of Romanian Political Prisoners

# data[].attributes.headline
Hunting for Soft Skills, Companies Scoop Up English Majors

# data[].attributes.subject
Hunting for Soft Skills, Companies Scoop Up English Majors

# data[].attributes.body
Nikki Waller

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Heads up, business majors: Employers are newly hot on the trail of hires with liberal arts and humanities degrees.

Class of 2015 graduates from those disciplines are employed at higher rates than their cohorts in the class of 2014, and starting salaries rose significantly, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers' annual first-destination survey of recent graduates in the workforce.

Degree holders in area studies-majors like Latin American Studies and Gender Studies-logged the largest gains in full-time employment and pay, with average starting salaries rising 26% to $43,524 for the class of 2015, compared with the previous year's graduates. Language studies posted the second-highest salary gains.

Though area studies majors comprise less than 1% of all graduates in the survey, the pay numbers show employers are seeking hires with communication skills and comfort in multicultural environments, said Edwin Koc, NACE's director of research, public policy and legislative affairs.

Overall, pay for liberal arts graduates rose sharply for the class of 2015, moving closer to business graduates' starting pay, according to Mr. Koc.

"I'll be interested to see if it's a one-year quirk or whether it continues to boom in that direction," he said.

Those with degrees in English and in foreign languages also brought home bigger paychecks, with starting salaries rising 14.3% and 13.6%, respectively.

Behind the numbers is a growing desire among employers for hires with strong communication skills, said Mr. Koc. After complaining that new hires' soft skills are not up to par, "employers may be reconsidering how they're approaching recruiting college graduates, and may not be so focused on hiring a particular major," he said.

Computer-science graduates posted the highest starting salaries in the survey, reporting an average of $69,214. They unseated petroleum engineering majors, who usually top starting-salary rankings but have dipped amid the energy-industry crisis.

Not all liberal arts majors are enjoying boom times. History majors' starting pay rose 3.7% year-over-year, and visual and performing arts majors were the sole group of humanities students for whom employment declined, with 2.3% fewer graduates employed six months after graduation.

NACE collected employment and salary information from 279 U.S. colleges and universities and 244,000 bachelor's degree graduates. Overall, more than 80% of 2015 bachelor's degree holders were employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation, according to NACE.

Write to Nikki Waller at Nikki.Waller@wsj.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
national association of colleges and employers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hunting for Soft Skills, Companies Scoop Up English Majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Heads up, business majors: Employers are newly hot on the trail of hires with liberal arts and humanities degrees. Class of 2015 graduates from those disciplines are employed at higher rates than their cohorts in the class of 2014, a survey shows.

# data[].attributes.body
John McCumber

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tim Foley for The Chronicle

As academe's hoped-for recovery from the 2008 financial crisis recedes before it like the shimmer of water on a hot roadway, the problems of its humanities component are up close and all too real. There is no doubt that the United States is now producing an unprecedented number of B.A.s who know little or nothing about humanistic thought - and a growing number of humanities Ph.D.s who cannot find jobs.

As Alexander I. Jacobs noted last year in a Chronicle essay, defenses of the humanities have tended to take two paths. One, the more traditional, points out that life is not simply a matter of careers, and that the humanities address the higher concerns that make it worth living: A person who knows some Shakespeare and Plato, or who has some acquaintance with Bach and Canaletto, will live a happier and more interesting life than someone who does not.

The other response cites the growing evidence that the skills taught in humanities courses - clear and critical thinking, knowledge of different cultures, and so on - are in fact very useful for careers, especially at the higher levels of business and politics. Many people, of course, accept both these arguments, and rightly so. People with humanistic training do tend to succeed both at careers and life.

The arguments may indeed be persuasive, but as Jacobs pointed out, they aren't working. In a society that has largely dismantled its already feeble safety nets, most people - even many who were once considered well off - are scrambling just to make it through the month, or the next couple of months; they can't worry about interesting lives or high levels of future achievement. The defenses fail, in short, because it is society itself, not the individuals who live in it, that needs fixing.

So in order to survive, the humanities have to fix the world. Can they? Not on their own, of course. But a recent incident at the University of California at Los Angeles, where I teach, suggests that they can help - and in a crucially important way.

In February of 2015, members of the UCLA student government asked strange questions of a student interviewing for a job. They noted her work for Jewish groups and wondered whether she could be "objective" about Israel. When the faculty representative in attendance pointed out that these questions were anti-Semitic, the questioners immediately turned around and apologized; all of them then voted for her to get the job.

At breakfast shortly after, a friend remarked, "That was classic anti-Semitism." Something hit me in midbite: I realized that I wished it were so. This, however, was ominously different. Those apologies, confirmed by subsequent actions, were clearly sincere. I was forced to confront the possibility that the students who made them - prominent members of a student government, not new kids on campus - genuinely did not know what anti-Semitism is, and they did not know why it is evil.

A few weeks later, my suspicions were confirmed by an incident at the University of Oklahoma, where students were filmed singing a racist song during a bus ride. One of them, Levi Pettit, later said that while he had known that people did not like the racist language he had used on the bus, he had not known why. In other words, he had thought anti-racism was merely a personal preference - which means that racism, too, is a mere personal preference and so cannot be truly evil. Once again, a student at a major university had not been taught what something evil actually is, or why it is evil. Or - most important of all - how to avoid it.

Where will they learn this? Not in their marketing, economics, or STEM courses. Highly quantified disciplines like those cannot teach about things like racial or religious prejudice. To learn what anti-Semitism and racism are, students must turn to history and sociology courses. To learn why they are evil and how to avoid them, they must turn to the humanities.

In particular, it is the humanities that teach us how not to be racists, by showing us how to open ourselves up to what is different. Whether a given humanist is a modernist, postmodernist, New Critic, Marxist, or an adherent of any of dozens of other approaches, what she does in the classroom is always the same: She takes some cultural product that seems at first strange and off-putting - a poem by some ancient Greek or Persian poet, a novel by some African or Chinese author, a statue from an indigenous culture whose true name we don't even know - and, if she is a good teacher, makes it familiar enough to be interesting. Doing that inevitably expands the minds of the students, bringing their horizons just a little closer to the widest horizons of all - those of humanity itself.

Scientists, of course, do this too - when they explain the delicate structure of a trilobite or the chemical reactions driving a star. And when they do this, they are engaging in humanistic thought - not in the sense that it is about a separate group called "humans," but in the sense that it produces individuals to whom, to paraphrase the Roman playwright Terence, nothing human is truly alien. And so produces humanity itself.

For humanity doesn't just exist; it has to be created, over and over again. If our violent history shows anything, it is that we are not born with an innate sympathy for, or understanding of, all humankind; and without those, "humanity" is just a word. So humanity has to be built, and the only way to build it is to show young people, already rooted in their own birth culture, that they can move beyond that culture without abandoning it - that what is foreign to that culture can remain foreign and still be worthy of thought and respect.

Humanists thus build humanity, one work of art at a time. In this function, the humanities are useful to individuals, to be sure, but indirectly: Rather than helping an individual to a more interesting and prosperous life, they first build a shared and - let's call it "humane" - world in which such lives can subsequently find a place. It follows that cultures which do not teach the humanities to as many people as possible (or who adopt, for example, a narrowly nationalistic view of them) are inviting serious trouble; for continuation of the current dystopia is not the worst possibility before us.

Consider this: Is it possible to have a society full of young people who are creative, energetic, entrepreneurial, technologically informed - and wholly comfortable with mass slaughter?

I know the answer. I'm in a German department.

John McCumber is a professor of Germanic languages at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author, most recently, of The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As academe's hoped-for recovery from the 2008 financial crisis recedes before it like the shimmer of water on a hot roadway, the problems of its humanities component are up close and all too real.

# data[].attributes.headline
STEM Education Is Vital--but Not at the Expense of the Humanities

# data[].attributes.subject
STEM Education Is Vital--but Not at the Expense of the Humanities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kentucky governor Matt Bevin wants students majoring in electrical engineering to receive state subsidies for their education but doesn't want to support those who study subjects such as French literature. Bevin is not alone in trying to nudge higher education toward course work that promotes better future job prospects. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a former presidential candidate, put it bluntly last year by calling for more welders and fewer philosophers.

Promoting science and technology education to the exclusion of the humanities may seem like a good idea, but it is deeply misguided. Scientific American has always been an ardent supporter of teaching STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But studying the interaction of genes or engaging in a graduate-level project to develop software for self-driving cars should not edge out majoring in the classics or art history.

The need to teach both music theory and string theory is a necessity for the U.S. economy to continue as the preeminent leader in technological innovation. The unparalleled dynamism of Silicon Valley and Hollywood requires intimate ties that unite what scientist and novelist C. P. Snow called the "two cultures" of the arts and sciences.

Steve Jobs, who reigned for decades as a tech hero, was neither a coder nor a hardware engineer. He stood out among the tech elite because he brought an artistic sensibility to the redesign of clunky mobile phones and desktop computers. Jobs once declared: "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough-that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."

A seeming link between innovation and the liberal arts now intrigues countries where broad-based education is less prevalent. In most of the world, university curricula still emphasize learning skills oriented toward a specific profession or trade. The ebullience of the U.S. economy, which boasted in 2014 the highest percentage of high-tech outfits among all its public companies-has spurred countries such as Singapore to create schools fashioned after the U.S. liberal arts model.

If Bevin and other advocates of a STEM-only curriculum look more closely, they will find that the student who graduates after four years of pursuing physics plus poetry may, in fact, be just the kind of job candidate sought out by employers. In 2013 the Association of American Colleges & Universities issued the results of a survey of 318 employers with 25 or more employees showing that nearly all of them thought that the ability to "think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems"-the precise objectives of any liberal arts education-was more important than a job candidate's specific major.

Those same skills, moreover, are precisely the ones required for marrying artistic design with the engineering refinements needed to differentiate high-end cars, clothes or cell phones from legions of marketplace competitors-the type of expertise, in fact, that is least likely to be threatened by computers, robots and other job usurpers. "Consider America's vast entertainment industry, built around stories, songs, design and creativity," wrote commentator Fareed Zakaria, author of the book In Defense of a Liberal Education, in a Washington Post column. "All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum."

The undergraduate able to cobble together a course schedule integrating STEM and the humanities may be able to reap rich rewards. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg became an avid student of Greek and Latin when he was only in high school, in addition to setting about learning programming languages. And the same government officials who call for a shift in educational priorities should know better than to trash the liberal arts. Take Bevin's call to eschew French literature: Bevin is someone with his own debt to the humanities. He graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in East Asian studies.

The way to encourage high-tech industry to move to Kentucky-or any other state-is not to disparage Voltaire and Camus. Rather the goal should be to build a topflight state educational system and ease the way financially for students from even the most humble backgrounds to attend. The jobs will follow-whether they be in state government or in social media start-ups.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
STEM Education Is Vital--but Not at the Expense of the Humanities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kentucky governor Matt Bevin wants students majoring in electrical engineering to receive state subsidies for their education but doesn't want to support those who study subjects such as French literature. Bevin is not alone in trying to nudge higher education toward course work that promotes better future job prospects.

# data[].attributes.body
Alan Liu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities-in collaboration with 4Humanities-has created a new The Humanities Matter! infographic with statistics and arguments for the humanities in high-impact visual form. [Download PDF] Countering clichéd, factually ungrounded criticisms, The Humanities Matter! draws on published statistics and a crowdsourced poll to give a shout out to the humanities in sections on "What the Humanities Do," "But the Evidence Shows," and "Culture is Important."

The digital version of The Humanities Matter! is a large, vertical-format banner available as a PDF file. A limited number of printed posters made from the infographic is being mailed to newspapers and magazines, national councils and commissions, public and private funding agencies, humanities centres and programs, and digital-humanities associations and programs around the world.

As a follow-up to the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities' "Quantifying Digital Humanities" infographic from 2012 ( PDF), The Humanities Matter! starts a more expansive effort by the Center and 4Humanities to gather statistics and create infographics about the humanities. The Humanities Matter! is part of the 4Humanities Humanities Infographics initiative, including Infographics Friday online posts.

4Humanities invites additional statistics (including from more parts of the world) so that it can expand the infographics initiative and, funds allowing, produce future versions.

The Humanities Matter! was created by the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities under the supervision of its director Melissa Terras, who is also a co-leader of 4Humanities. Terras collected data for the infographic with assistance from Ernesto Priego (an international correspondent for 4Humanities), Lindsay Thomas (lead research assistant for 4Humanities), Victoria Smith (research assistant, Humanities Computing, U. Alberta), and the other co-leaders of 4Humanities: Christine Henseler, Alan Liu, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Stéfan Sinclair.

Please download The Humanities Matter! and help 4Humanities circulate it ; feel free to print in small or large format and distribute. The Humanities Matter! is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities--in collaboration with 4Humanities--has created a new The Humanities Matter! infographic with statistics and arguments for the humanities in high-impact visual form. [Download PDF] Countering clichéd, factually ungrounded criticisms, The Humanities Matter! draws on published statistics and a crowdsourced poll to give a shout out to the...

# data[].attributes.headline
Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

# data[].attributes.subject
Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

# data[].attributes.body
Steven Pearlstein

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Did you vote, education major? How about you, engineer?

# data[].attributes.headline
So Your Kid's A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.

# data[].attributes.subject
So Your Kid's A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.

# data[].attributes.body
Willard Dix

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Everyone's heard the parents' lament: "What are you going to do with a major in [philosophy/art history/classics/history/English]?" You may even have asked your own offspring the question. In these days of high tuitions, uncertain job prospects and laser-like focus on careers, a student's choice of major can sound like a first step on the Yellow Brick Road (think business, economics, any of the STEMs--Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or a plunge into garrett-dwelling obscurity. But the situation doesn't have to be either/or; students can have a rich educational experience while also preparing for the world after college.

It's a common misconception that a college major determines what students will do afterwards. Being a philosophy major means they will be (or have to be) philosophers; being classics majors means they'll be talking largely to themselves. Alternatively, being biology majors means they'll be biologists, and so on. In fact, though, a lot more flexibility exists in college and university majors than most people think.

When I speak to students, I tell them that the "major" in most cases (I'll discuss the exceptions below) is simply a way of organizing their educational experience in college, not the determinant of their future lives. Out of the total number of courses they must take to fulfill degree requirements, only a portion is devoted to the major, sometimes as little as a quarter. In a liberal arts college where 32 courses over eight semesters is the standard, that usually means eight to ten courses can constitute a major, leaving plenty of room to maneuver throughout the rest of the curriculum.

The major, in other words, constitutes the backbone of students' college experience, not the whole body. In colleges with few or no required or "gen ed" courses (more than you'd think), even double majoring can work well. English majors may want to teach or study English as a career, but they can also take the courses required to prepare them for medical or business school. Conversely, economics majors can spend time with Plato, Foucault, Cassatt or Ellison. Biology majors can go on to be marketing executives.

The situation differs in many universities if students enroll in specific schools outside the more generalized liberal arts and sciences school as undergraduates. If they decide to attend engineering or business schools, their courses are more strictly prescribed. There's less flexibility to to take courses outside each specific curriculum. But opportunities are always available for venturing outside any prescribed area of study. That includes summer programs, semesters abroad and service commitments. Students laser-focused on a career can structure their studies accordingly. (A cautionary tale, however: One of my students, passionate about meteorology, found the ideal program and couldn't wait to dedicate herself to it. Within three months of enrollment, she was in my office desperate to transfer.)

For many students, strict focus on career-based study is perfectly fine. But for the vast majority of freshmen who list themselves as "undecided" (somewhere around 75%), a more wide-ranging course selection list may be helpful. Students even change their minds about majors frequently and usually don't have to declare one until their sophomore year. That gives them time to explore different fields and ways of thinking along the way. They can try out different outlooks, which can influence their final decision about a major. And plenty enter college with one idea in mind only to be inspired to take up a new direction by something totally different. That's one of the reasons to go to college: To discover things you didn't already know.

It's important to remember that how majors are designated is somewhat arbitrary: At one time, for example, what we now call "science" was considered "natural philosophy," a systematic way of looking at the world. Every major in some way expresses ideas of how to look at the world. So whether it's classics or geology, students learn to read and interpret what's in front of them carefully, construct theories about it, and draw conclusions based on evidence. These elements are useful whether the classicist ends up a geologist or vice versa. (My final exam for Geology 11 in college: The professor set a selection of rock types on the floor of an empty classroom serving as an imaginary landscape. From that evidence we had to describe the history of that area. I'm not a geologist, but I did learn about the importance of seeing and careful interpretation.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
So Your Kid's A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everyone's heard the parents' lament: "What are you going to do with a major in [philosophy/art history/classics/history/English]?" You may even have asked your own offspring the question.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Decline and Fall of the English Major

# data[].attributes.subject
The Decline and Fall of the English Major

# data[].attributes.body
Verlyn Klinkenborg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this year, they were economics and mathematics.

Parents have always worried when their children become English majors. What is an English major good for? In a way, the best answer has always been, wait and see - an answer that satisfies no one. And yet it is a real answer, one that reflects the versatility of thought and language that comes from studying literature. Former English majors turn up almost anywhere, in almost any career, and they nearly always bring with them a rich sense of the possibilities of language, literary and otherwise.

The canon - the books and writers we agree are worth studying - used to seem like a given, an unspoken consensus of sorts. But the canon has always been shifting, and it is now vastly more inclusive than it was 40 years ago. That's a good thing. What's less clear now is what we study the canon for and why we choose the tools we employ in doing so.

A technical narrowness, the kind of specialization and theoretical emphasis you might find in a graduate course, has crept into the undergraduate curriculum. That narrowness sometimes reflects the tight focus of a professor's research, but it can also reflect a persistent doubt about the humanistic enterprise. It often leaves undergraduates wondering, as I know from my conversations with them, just what they've been studying and why.

STUDYING the humanities should be like standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience. Instead, now it feels as though people have retreated to tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, from which they peep out on a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank or the back of a spouting whale.

There is a certain literal-mindedness in the recent shift away from the humanities. It suggests a number of things. One, the rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring (though that doesn't explain the current popularity of political science). Two, the humanities often do a bad job of explaining why the humanities matter. And three, the humanities often do a bad job of teaching the humanities. You don't have to choose only one of these explanations. All three apply.

What many undergraduates do not know - and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them - is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.

Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth. Whenever I teach older students, whether they're undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn't acquire earlier in life. They don't call that skill the humanities. They don't call it literature. They call it writing - the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.

Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn't merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.

No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it - no matter how or when it was acquired - knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Decline and Fall of the English Major

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this year, they were economics and mathematics.

# data[].attributes.body
Robert Matz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The old joke about studying English went, "Would you like fries with that major?" I haven't heard that joke in years. Barista has replaced fast food worker as the career of choice for warning against the perils of majoring in English.

What are we to make of this new old joke about the English major? Why did barista replace fast food worker? The fact is that English majors are not particularly likely to end up as baristas or as workers in the food service industry in general. Plenty of data is available to disprove this idea, so what does its persistence mean? The English major barista is a myth in the sense of being untrue. It is also a myth in the deeper sense of that word: a story that a culture tells itself to explain wishes or fears. In this case, fears.
The Data
First things first. Data show that English majors do not tend to end up as baristas. Over each year, the U.S. Census Bureau conducts a detailed survey of about 1 percent of the national population. Called the American Community Survey, this census includes questions about age, educational attainment, field of degree and employment. Respondents to the survey cannot actually choose "barista" when reporting occupation, but they can choose the category "counter attendant, cafeteria, food concession and coffeehouse." However, the number of people in this category is small when further segmented by field of degree.

A more reliable analysis groups this category along with several related ones, including bartenders, waiters, dishwashers and the like. That larger grouping does not literally count English majors who work as baristas, but it gets at the spirit of the claim, with greater statistical validity. If the destiny of the English major is service behind the coffee bar, then bartending, waiting tables or washing dishes cannot be far behind.

However, none of those food service jobs are the English major's particular fate. According to the Census Bureau, graduates with an English degree have about a 4.9 percent chance of working in one of these food service occupations for some time between the ages of 22 and 26. By comparison, the average among all degree holders in this age group is about 3.5 percent. So English majors are only about 1.4 percentage points more likely to work in food service than the average for all degree holders.

When we look at mature workers, the data bear out a broader observation: majors in the humanities and social sciences take a little more time to find their career footing, but then they catch up with and sometimes exceed in salary earnings the graduates with more professional degrees. For degree holders ages 27 to 66, the percentage of graduates in English working in food service professions for some time during this 40-year period is 0.72 percent, or about one in 139 majors. Among all majors ages 27 to 66, the average is 0.48 percent. English remains higher than average, but not by much. The 0.24 point difference translates to an additional one in 417 chance of ending up at working in food service at some point between the ages of 27 and 66.

So where, in fact, do English majors end up working? The top occupations for English-degree holders ages 27 to 66 are elementary and middle school teachers, postsecondary teachers, and lawyers, judges, magistrates and other judicial workers. Indeed, English majors, who go on to a range of careers, are less likely to work in food service than in many highly skilled positions, including as chief executives and legislators (1.4 percent), physicians and surgeons (1.2 percent), or accountants and auditors (1.2 percent). Parents worried that their children will study English and end up as baristas should know that their sons and daughters are statistically more likely to end up as CEOs, doctors or accountants than behind the counter of a Starbucks.

Level of education and age, rather than choice of major, most predict work in food service. Between the ages of 22 and 26, people who do not report a baccalaureate degree have a somewhat higher percentage of food service work than English-degree holders: 5.68 percent vs. 4.88 percent. For mature workers, ages 27 to 66, the corollary numbers are 1.45 percent and 0.72 percent. For full-time mature workers, the difference a baccalaureate degree makes is particularly striking. English-degree holders ages 27 to 66 work full time in food service at a rate of 0.53 percent, those without a baccalaureate degree at 1.92 percent. Starbucks has made help with college degree completion a perk for its workers. If all those baristas had B.A.s in English, or in any degree, there would be no need for this program.

Of course, the English major as barista is also shorthand for a general belief that a degree in English leads to underemployment -- that is, to jobs that really do not require a college degree. A recent study shows that around 12 percent of recent college graduates ages 22 to 27 with a degree in English work in low-skilled service jobs. That is the same percent as for baccalaureate holders in this age group who majored in psychology and earth science, and 3.4 percentage points higher than the average for degree holders in general, which is 8.6 percent. Those percentages may be higher than we would like, but there's nothing distinctive about English majors in them.

Fortunately, too, these percentages are for recent graduates; the same study shows that college graduates tend to mature out of these jobs. As we have seen, the English majors who do work in food service generally do so when they are young and as a first job -- a start, not an end. The coffeehouse is not their career.

To establish themselves in their careers, English majors need to show a bit more resourcefulness than do majors in narrowly preprofessional degrees. And year after year, that is exactly what real English majors do. They do not possess this resourcefulness in spite of their English degree or as a mere coincidence with it. Creative and independent thinkers are attracted to the English degree, and that course of study helps to develop their creativity and their initiative -- the same personal qualities that serve them so well in the working world after graduation.
The Joke
So why the barista joke? It reflects negative attitudes about the English major itself rather than the realities of an English major's likely employment. Since coffeehouses are places for reading, writing and talking, spending time in a coffeehouse is a lot like spending time in the study of English. Naturally enough, English majors like to hang out in them. STEM majors have their labs; English majors have their Starbucks. The joke about the English major barista implies, however, that unlike the science done in a lab, the study of English, whether pursued in coffeehouse or classroom, is without value. What better punishment for wasting this time than being sentenced to work at a coffeehouse rather than enjoying its pleasures, serving those who presumably chose some more valuable and lucrative major?

In this vengeful fantasy, moreover, the barista with an English B.A. contributes to the coffeehouse's cultural sophistication, the human equivalent of its background jazz or pictures of Seattle circa 1971. The English major's transformation into cultural wallpaper is part of the joke.

The English major makes an academic career out of studying literary culture or (still worse in the eyes of the major's detractors) ordinary culture inflated into an academic subject. Having to work in a coffeehouse is punishment for that study, since students who are ambitious to become cultural elites instead find themselves in a lowly service industry, working in their local strip-mall Starbucks rather than sitting at a coffee bar in Florence. The particular name that Starbucks made famous for its workers -- "barista" -- along with all its pseudo-Italian terms, like "grande" for medium, is the foam on the Frappuccino. The joke implies that the job and its pretentious, pseudo-high culture name perfectly fit the empty pretensions of the major itself.
The Thin Bar
But this joke about frustrated aspiration is on us all. Consider the coffeehouse's storied place in the history of European and Anglo-American modernity. Jürgen Habermas made famous the idea that the activities with which coffeehouses are still associated -- reading, writing, conversation -- made them nothing less than cradles of modern literature and democracy. The coffeehouse was a republic of letters, where literacy and the purchase of a cup of coffee were the only entry requirements to participation in literary and political worlds that had once been the exclusive province of courtly and hereditary elites. Coffeehouses were sometimes referred to in the 18th century as "penny universities." (One still also had to be a man, although Habermas believes the ideals of the coffeehouse militated even against this restriction).

Your local coffee spot may seem a far cry from a cradle of western democracy or a "penny university." Particularly with regard to Starbucks, the criticism of the coffeehouse today is that it's a place of faux culture and shallow consumption, where the other side of high-priced coffee drinks is the exploitation of coffee farmers in the third world and of the company's own workers behind the counter. From that point of view, Starbucks is just about making money. "Everything else," as one Starbucks critic puts it, is "window dressing." As part of that window dressing, the Starbucks barista both serves and reflects a world narrowed to maximized profit and empty consumption.

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," the poet Wordsworth wrote. Still: Starbucks promises something more than getting and spending. However much our local Starbucks is a place to grab coffee as we rush to work, or an embarrassment of ersatz culture, the success of the Starbucks brand demonstrates a yearning for more fulfilling cultural and communal spaces of the sort described by Habermas. Starbucks doesn't just sell coffee; it sells the coffeehouse ideal. It offers reading and music suggestions, has printed literary quotes on coffee cups, and has asked its baristas to start discussions about race in America. The criticism that greeted the last initiative is telling. Starbucks was seen as too corporate to serve as a place for genuine cultural or political exchange, however much it seems to promise it.

The fast-food joke consigned the English major to a low-paying and unfulfilling job. The barista joke consigns the English major to a low-paying and unfulfilling job that remains tantalizing close to a more fulfilling coffeehouse ideal. To the extent that we also want that ideal, we're that close, too. We, too, are attracted to the coffeehouse image of a richer cultural and communal life, even if that image promises more than harried working lives and corporate marketing can deliver. A thin bar separates the cultural aspirations, and disappointments, of Starbucks workers and consumers.

A similarly thin bar separates worker and consumer in terms of a feared economic decline. There was a time when we might have celebrated the English major's drive to explore self and world in college, or as part of a career trajectory that involved some time for similar self-development and exploration of opportunities, before rushing headlong into a career. There was a time when we laughed at hearing the just-graduated Dustin Hoffman advised in The Graduate to stake his future on plastics. And there was a time when we understood that English majors, like other majors in the liberal arts, end up with far more than a salary -- they develop the sense of ethics, history and culture, and the habits of open and reasoned deliberation, that the coffeehouse ideal represents and that are essential to functioning democracies, not to mention to lives well lived.

Today, however, many people laugh at someone who seems unwilling to turn a college education into job training for the industry du jour in order to secure the highest-paying job straight out of college. English majors achieve successful careers, as the data show. That we consign them, in the myth of the English major barista, to a permanent life in food service says less about them and more about us -- about how afraid we have become of defying the market imperative to maximize profit, the single force, apparently, by which we are now supposed to guide our lives.

This fear is reasonable -- stagnant wages, the erosion of unions, the growing use of contract and part-time labor to replace full-time jobs, the increasing gap between rich and poor, and insufficiently regulated financial markets all contribute to the insecurity of middle-class life. For college students in particular, the withdrawal of states from the public funding of higher education, combined with rising tuition, makes any decisions seem risky if they don't, as the saying goes now, make college an effective return on investment. But the fear is more than that. It is as if any defiance of profit maximization must be met with punishment: the condemnation to a life serving coffee.

We will only really dispel the myth of the English major barista when we confront head-on the structural economic problems and the narrow market ideology that drive the fear behind it. Meanwhile, in their own refusal to succumb to this fear, English majors can be confident they'll do fine spending some time in coffeehouses -- whichever side of the bar they're on.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The cultural implications of the myth that English majors end up working permanently at Starbucks (essay)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The old joke about studying English went, "Would you like fries with that major?" I haven't heard that joke in years. Barista has replaced fast food worker as the career of choice for warning against the perils of majoring in English. What are we to make of this new old joke about the English major?

# data[].attributes.headline
Why America's Business Majors Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts Education

# data[].attributes.subject
Why America's Business Majors Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts Education

# data[].attributes.body
Yoni Appelbaum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'm looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.

That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they'll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens-and to build successful careers. And it's why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need-a rigorous liberal-arts education.

They're trying to solve a rapidly growing problem. Almost one in five bachelor's degrees earned in the United States is a business degree, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Education. And that may actually understate the growth of business education-it doesn't account for undergraduate minors, nor for the students who major in economics at schools where business degrees aren't on offer. But a panel of educators moderated by Samuelson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, emphasized the need to ensure that these degrees provide a robust education. (The panel was drawn from participants in the Aspen Undergraduate Business Education Consortium, an initiative that's promoting the tighter integration of the liberal arts into business curricula.)

There's good reason for their concern. Put simply, business majors seem to be graduating with some of the technical skills they'll need to secure jobs, but without having made the gains in writing or critical-thinking skills they'll require to succeed over the course of their careers, or to adapt as their technical skills become outdated and the nature of the opportunities they have shifts over time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why America's Business Majors Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'm looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.

# data[].attributes.body
Nathan Yau

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With some occupations, people make more annual income than others. Obvious. But we typically see figures in terms of means and medians when in reality, the difference between the person who makes the most and the one who makes the least can be significant.

The chart below shows the spread for major occupation groups, for several decades. Imagine you randomly select 50 people from each group, and this is what their annual income probably looks like.

The data for 2000 and earlier comes from the decennial census, and the data for 2010 and 2014 come from the American Community Survey.

As you progress through time, you'll notice the distributions of income spread out more. This is especially obvious when you switch between 1960 and 2014. With the exception of lower paying jobs in areas such as food preparation and cleaning, it looks like there's more opportunity to earn a higher salary (among those who have jobs at least).

That said, even if a job typically pays well, there are still people at the lower end of the bracket.

Make a Moving Bubbles Chart to Show Clustering and Distributions

Here's how to make a chart similar to this one.

Nerd Notes

This is total personal income for individuals, as opposed to salary from an employer. I didn't want to minus out the self-employed, but consequently the dollar values include things like welfare and retirement income.

The occupation groups are broad. See here for detailed listings.

I adjusted for inflation and binned by $5,000 increments, but it's probably worth noting that some of the binning you see is from rounding.

I downloaded the data from IPUMS, which makes Census microdata much easier to grab.

I'm not fully sold on using a force-directed graph instead of histograms to show distributions, but I do like that it gets you closer to the individuals that the data represents.

I analyzed and prepared the data in R and made the final visualization with d3.js.

Chart Type Used

Become a member. Support an independent site. Make great charts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With some occupations, people make more annual income than others. Obvious. But we typically see figures in terms of means and medians when in reality, the difference between the person who makes the most and the one who makes the least can be significant.

# data[].attributes.body
Buffalo News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As a college professor for the last 13 years, I have witnessed the simultaneous tumult that has characterized both higher education and the economy for which we as educators are readying our graduates.

When I began teaching in the early 2000s, higher education still served as a bastion of hope for incoming students and their parents, promising prestige, stability and upward mobility. For decades to that point, attending college represented the meritocratic foundation of the American dream.

However, as shifts in the national and global economy drove more students to pursue a college degree, higher education and principally liberal arts institutions slowly began to shift their degree portfolios from career preparation to job preparation.

This, no doubt, was in response to the general skepticism, if not anger, that overcame much of the middle class as a result of the economic crash that began in 2008. Parents and potential students saw not just their home values and retirement plans eroded, but also the faith they once had in the promise of higher education to help the future generation surpass past generations in terms of material success.

Colleges and universities, challenged by headlines asking "Is College Worth It?" and having turned to the business world for guidance in governance and curriculum development over the previous decade, began to craft degree programs responsive to feedback from employers and advertise their institutional superiority based on how many graduates found jobs directly related to their degrees immediately upon graduation.

While this is nothing new and is certainly a necessary message in establishing the value of higher education, particularly given the increasing costs of a college degree, the shift was remarkable because job-specific degrees were once the hallmark of two-year and technical institutions.

Now, however, as colleges and universities that offered baccalaureate degrees began to compete with two-year institutions, degree programs became more specialized. Owing to the necessity to learn job-specific skills and information, exposure to traditional liberal arts courses, such as English, history, philosophy and political science, was relegated to a smattering of introductory level courses for the purposes of meeting state education requirements rather than as part of an integrated and intentional effort to educate, not simply train, the student.

The trajectory that higher education has followed is similar to many other areas of our culture, where there has been an attempt to reverse engineer success by identifying the key features of those we admire and then mimicking them in hopes of similar results.

For example, studies have consistently found that children raised in homes with lots of books, or in which the family eats dinner together every evening, earn better grades and show more long-term intellectual growth and achievement than their peers who do not. As you can imagine, simply buying lots of books and eating dinner together will not improve a child's SAT score. But parents, mindful of the challenges their children face in achieving the type of stability and success that once seemed automatic in its path and predictability, put their faith in the pursuit of such efforts in hopes that they can somehow will their children to a better future.

This inductive path to success has now corrupted attitudes toward the value and purpose of higher education, and, I would argue, is undermining its role in our society. Given the costs involved, colleges and universities must be responsive to the desires of their students, and parents are certainly justified in questioning the return on such a significant investment. However, turning the college experience into an array of expensive utilitarian training programs not only does not assure any greater hope for long-term career and financial stability for students, but in fact has the exact opposite result.

Job-specific degrees help students develop a unique set of skills. Due to their uniqueness, these hard-earned skills are at the mercy of economic and technological changes that may render them obsolete well before the student loans have been paid off.

It is for this reason that I want my kids to major in English. Your first thought might be, "What kind of job can you get with an English degree?" Consider that long before the creation of job-specific baccalaureate degrees, the leaders of the most successful and profitable companies in the United States completed their undergraduate studies in the types of degree programs that are now thought to be worthless in terms of job-seeking. Current and/or past CEOs of companies such as Starbucks, FedEx, YouTube, Apple, Disney, Facebook, HBO, American Express and IBM learned to be leaders, critical thinkers and innovators not by learning the skills to do a job, but instead, the skills required to create or reimagine entire industries. Many of these successful leaders earned their undergraduate degrees in liberal arts programs such as English, in which they became well-read, well-spoken, well-written, highly analytical and understood the complexities and interrelatedness of knowledge and how best to capitalize on the potential not simply of knowing the answers, but rather knowing what questions need to be asked.

While I cannot easily answer the question of what specific jobs an English major can get, perhaps the better question is: What jobs can't an English major get? Perhaps that is the greatest promise and purpose of a college degree anyway - career readiness rather than simple job readiness.

James Golden, Ph.D., is chairman of the Social Sciences Division at Hilbert College.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a college professor for the last 13 years, I have witnessed the simultaneous tumult that has characterized both higher education and the economy for which we as educators are readying our graduates. When I began teaching in the early 2000s, higher education still served as a bastion of hope for incoming students and their parents, promising prestige, stability and upward mobility.

# data[].attributes.headline
What's Really Happening to the Humanities Under Neoliberalism?

# data[].attributes.subject
What's Really Happening to the Humanities Under Neoliberalism?

# data[].attributes.body
Dan Falcone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The number of college students majoring in English, according to some contested reports, has plummeted. In general, the humanities are taking a back seat to more "pragmatic" majors in college. Students, apparently, are thinking more about jobs than about general learning. Given this trend, should schools be scaling back on the humanities?

I understand these sentiments and concerns completely. I've worked at schools where math and science were esteemed, and for good reason. When parents attend school assemblies, the college counselors and deans present course selection mappings. The flow charts for math and science look very impressive, intricate and complex, with many boxes, lines, twists, turns and explanations that require qualifications. Meanwhile, history and English get a few boxes and they appear straightforward. What is this illustrative of? The fact that more time and energy are dedicated to upholding math and science as gospel? It's possible.

Moreover, after witnessing "regime change" in a school where I taught, the Advanced Placement offerings in the history department alone swelled from two to seven. Within this breakdown, there is another alarming sign: Students overwhelmingly prefer AP government or economics over courses dealing with, say, civil rights. This is likely due to their perception that these AP courses are valued more by people in power since they are the result of an effort to quantify the humanities and make them achievement-oriented instead of collaborative and intellectual.

Some might say that since top universities like MIT have decided to focus on management, business analytics, finance and mathematical economics (or trading), secondary schools should follow suit. It would be a mistake, however, for secondary schools to cave to this argument and scale back on the humanities.

Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, says the idea that the number of students majoring in the humanities has plummeted is untrue, although it is a universal presupposition.

Bérubé contends that while it is true that English enrollments are down in some places since 2008, they are not as bad as they were in the really lean years. Nevertheless, students and families keep hearing the myth that English is a dying subject. This humanities-ending attitude was just recently reflected in April 2016, when Pennsylvania State Rep. Brad Roae (R) proposed ending higher education grants for students studying "poetry or some other pre-Walmart major."

Bérubé says that the idea that humanities majors won't be able to find jobs is turning out to be a "zombie belief every bit as hard to kill" as the idea that enrollment in the humanities is plummeting, and Bérubé is positive that the two beliefs are symbiotic.

According to Inside Higher Ed's Allie Grasgreen, "liberal arts majors may start off slower than others when it comes to the postgraduate career path, but they close much of the salary and unemployment gap over time, a new report shows."

Grasgreen goes on to report that "by their mid-50s, liberal arts majors with an advanced or undergraduate degree are on average making more money than those who studied in professional and pre-professional fields, and are employed at similar rates." But that's just one component of Grasgreen observations. The concerns about the value of a liberal arts degree are essentially unfounded and should be put to rest, she writes.

Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, states that "[there is] a myth out there -- that somehow if you major in humanities, you're doomed to be unemployed for the rest of your life. [The research] suggests otherwise." Grasgreen cited Humphreys' indication that "we do need more engineers, but we also need more social workers" and that education need not be an "an either-or proposition."

Grasgreen highlights the report that Humphreys cowrote, entitled, "How Liberal Arts and Sciences Majors Fare in Employment," which includes US Census data from 2010 and 2011. It is a joint project of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Humphreys, along with researcher Patrick Kelly, looked at long-term career path and salary data as an answer to the myth that liberal arts graduates are disproportionately unemployed or underemployed.

Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said it's a mistake to assume a plummet in the humanities because "there is economic value in liberal arts and humanities degrees at the four-year level." Carnevale goes on to emphasize, however, the need to pursue graduate studies when pursuing a liberal arts degree.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted the reason for this prevailing wisdom about the myth regarding the humanities plummet: It's largely due to mainstream publications. For instance, in 2013, The New York Times featured an essay titled "The Decline and Fall of the English Major." In 2009, The American Scholar featured an essay, titled "The Decline of the English Department." Authors cited spirals in the humanities. Even The Chronicle's Mark Bauerlein wrote, "English has gone from a major unit in the university to a minor one."

The piece goes on to explain how, back in 2010, MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall said, "Students wanting to take up majors like art history and literature are now making the jump to more-specialized fields like business and economics, and it's getting worse." This comment was juxtaposed with a chart that indicated a spiral. Prominent New York Times journalist David Brooks also jumped on the bandwagon when he remarked, "The humanities [have] turned from an inward to an outward focus." The "sky is falling" myth then led to serious underfunding, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bérubé argues that mainstream accounts of the decline of the humanities in undergraduate education are "factually, stubbornly, determinedly wrong." He says there was a plummet, but it was between 1970 and 1980.

In reality, English isn't dying; it's just that at one time, it was unprecedentedly popular. English majors rose from 17,000 to 64,000 over a span of 30 years, from 1940 to 1970, and then declined to 34,000 by the 1990s. This does not mark a death to the humanities.

Are fields like art history and literature really "elite, niche-market affairs that will render students unemployable," as Bérubé argues? Are students abandoning the humanities because they are "callow, market-driven careerists?" No, this is not true. Bérubé states that "undergraduate enrollment in the humanities have held steady since 1980 (in relation to all degree holders, and in relation to the larger age cohort), and undergraduate enrollments in the arts and humanities combined are almost precisely where they were in 1970."

Despite the steady enrollment in the humanities, however, the humanities are increasingly being underfunded at all levels. Graduate education in the humanities is underfunded, mainly because of greed and the desire to promote athletics. Even in some secondary schools, the coaching staff's combined salaries are disproportionately higher than salaries within the humanities.
Making a Case for the Importance of the Humanities
To win back funding for the humanities, perhaps we must make a new argument for the role of philosophy, religion, literature, language, history, social studies, music and the arts in a world bending toward STEM. Professionals like Bérubé would say that the study of the humanities should constantly remind students that liberal arts are important in order to discuss human values and human relations with the nonhuman world. Schools must oppose what Bérubé would call the "narrow technocratic and instrumental modes of thought."

Chipping away at the humanities in schools jeopardizes the issues of social justice in education. Arguably, it is safe to say that the humanities and any liberal arts program are undervalued specifically because they involve knowledges, practices and traditions that usually cannot adhere to immediate short-term use by preservation seeking administrations and teachers

It is true that some of the liberal arts and humanities is indeed well-intentioned fluff, especially when there are serious crises in the world regarding climate change, nuclear proliferation and poverty. But right-wing critics of the humanities do not value these larger issues any more than certain elitists on the left.

Students need creativity, intellectual development and the humanities to think about things, but conservatives and liberals alike often instead demand performance in the name of compliance and aptitude. Too often, we put the curriculum above the students for our own preservation in an effort to satisfy management.

To win back financial support for the humanities, we need to fight arguments against their irrelevance, and part of this must involve taking seriously the public backlash against certain esoteric forms of postmodernism. Prof. Noam Chomsky states the problem well. He told me that postmodernists "have tried to create one crazy thing after another to try to be exciting ... It kind of gives the impression of being serious. Like you use big words and you have complicated sentences and there's things nobody can understand, so we must be like physicists because I can't understand them and they can't understand me."

His thoughtful words are a good reminder that even as we resist business- and testing-oriented forms of education, we must also keep the humanities grounded and conducive to helping people.

You need not be a writer, public intellectual or professor to make these criticisms and claims about education. The teachers that value the power of education in their classrooms need to resist the notion that schools are merely training centers for future managers and not institutions of learning and creative thought.
Psst! Want to see more stories like this one? Reader contributions are the driving force behind Truthout and your donation is critical to our future! Donate today by clicking here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What's Really Happening to the Humanities Under Neoliberalism?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The number of college students majoring in English, according to some contested reports, has plummeted. In general, the humanities are taking a back seat to more "pragmatic" majors in college. Students, apparently, are thinking more about jobs than about general learning. Given this trend, should schools be scaling back on the humanities?

# data[].attributes.headline
Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.subject
Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.body
David Kalt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
David Kalt is the founder of Reverb.com, a marketplace for musical instruments and gear, and the owner of the Chicago Music Exchange, a vintage guitar store in Chicago. He also co-founded and was the former CEO of online broker optionsXpress. As the demand for quality computer programmers and engineers increases, conventional wisdom assumes we need [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
David Kalt is the founder of Reverb.com, a marketplace for musical instruments and gear, and the owner of the Chicago Music Exchange, a vintage guitar store in Chicago. He also co-founded and was the former CEO of online broker optionsXpress. As the demand for quality computer programmers and engineers increases, conventional wisdom assumes we need [...]

# data[].attributes.body
Robert Matz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The story of the unemployable English major is both powerful and damaging, since students are more than ever concerned that their choice of degree will lead to successful employment-reasonably so considering the lingering effects of the recession and the high cost of postsecondary education in the US. Hence it behooves us to counter the belief that English majors can't get a job. Indeed, both institutions and individuals have begun to push back on that story. For example The Atlantic' s boldly titled article from June 2013, "The Best Argument for Studying English? The Employment Numbers," points out that employment statistics for English majors aren't really that different than from other fields-especially when compared to other fields in the liberal arts such as in social science as opposed to "truly pre-professional fields-including health, business, and education." The author of this piece concludes, "Bottom line: If humanities departments really want to win students back from the clutches of political science and econ, they'd be smart to start by showing them the employment stats."

I mostly agree with this author. We do need to show the employment stats. However, I'm uncomfortable trying to "win students back from the clutches of political science and econ." Those are important majors too! In addition, having worked for some time with "the employment stats," I do not think it as obvious as the author of this article to know exactly how to go about doing so. For the remainder of this post I'd like to outline some of the resources we have to make our case, as well as some of the limitations of these resources.

There are two main research groups that produce these numbers, the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Group, and the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce. (For Georgetown, see especially the report The Economic Value of College Majors.) Both groups use a detailed census survey called the American Community Survey, often abbreviated ACS. Unlike the decennial census survey with which we're most familiar, this survey is conducted and reported on annually. (A third source, at Payscale.com, uses data volunteered by people who go to the site, rather than data collected randomly, so I am leery of using it.) Of these two sources, I find the Hamilton Project particularly useful-though it hasn't been updated as recently as Georgetown's information has. The first visualization in the interactive feature accompanying the report allow users to compare average earnings over time across different majors. One can see, for example, that Communication and English majors have practically the same average earnings over time, and that Business majors have higher earnings-but, at between 10 to 15 thousand more per year, the difference is not one of orders of magnitude from what English or Communication majors make, as some myths about English major underemployment or unemployment might suggest. We need to remind prospective students and their parents that earning a college degree typically makes a much bigger difference in earnings than does the difference among degrees earned, as a comparison of any of the degree holders' earnings with high school diploma only earners will show.

Even more important are the earnings data shown in the second visualization on the site. This graph looks at earnings not as averages, but as they are distributed over a lifetime from the lowest to highest earners among each set of majors. Averages can be misleading. Suppose you decide to major in business because on average business majors make around 10 to 15 thousand more each year than English majors do. But what if you hate business, and have no head for it, while you're a very good reader and writer, and love the study of English? It would probably be better to end up a successful English major than an unsuccessful business major. For example, at the 50 th percentile, business majors make about 300 thousand dollars more than do English majors over their lifetimes. But an English major in the 70 th percentile of English-major-earners will make around 500 thousand more than a business major in the 30 th percentile for that major. Business and English majors at the 45 th and 59 th percentiles respectively have about the same lifetime earnings. That is, one only must do somewhat better in English than one would do in business to earn the same amount. The lesson here is that following your heart may not only make you more happy, but also be a good career investment.

These are wage statistics. Neither the Georgetown Center nor the Hamilton project present the data on the relationship between major and occupation. What do students with a degree in a particular major go on to do? This data is available from the ACS too, but I think both groups don't report on it because it's too granular. It's relatively easy to rank 138 majors by median annual salary, as Georgetown does. But showing the distribution of occupations from a particular major would be more like creating an ideas book-something to leaf through major by major, but hard to compare or rank majors. If you're only interested in one major, however, this data is not too granular.

And, best of all, it's positive. One particular danger of salary rates as metrics is that English will never come out ahead in them. The data isn't as bad as the popular myth has it. But we'll never beat accountants or petroleum engineers. Providing wage statistics buys into that whole new way of thinking about the college major as "return on investment." On the other hand, presenting typical occupational outcomes for the major doesn't ignore our students' concerns about employment, but it also allows them to imagine a life, with career conceived of as an interest and a vocation, rather than as the generator of a 7 vs. 8.4% return on investment.

Since Hamilton and Georgetown don't provide information on careers by major, I've produced this kind of report, using the same ACS census data that these organizations do. Here are the results.
Note: Clicking on the picture will take you to a live version of this chart, where you can click on slices of the pie to drill down on occupational categories to see percentages of particular jobs within those categories (you can also see the percentages that aren't visible on this picture).
Not surprisingly, the biggest portion of students with a BA in English go into the teaching professions, at 22.6%. Another 17.2% go on to work as managers of some sort. It's worth noting that 3.2% end up in computers and mathematics, while only 1% end up working in food service. To the myth of the English major barista we can say, you're three times as likely to being working with computers or math than in any kind of food service profession!

One more chart might be of use. This one, using the same ACS data, compares majors by broad occupation category in a heat map.
Note: Clicking on the picture will take you to a live version of this chart, where you can scroll over the heat map to see numerical percentages. The individual majors listed are the degrees offered by the college to which I belong, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University. "Non-CHSS degrees" are all the degrees our college does not offer. "All degrees" are all the degrees categorized by the US Census' American Community Survey.
The takeaway? Again, there is much more similarity in the occupational futures of BA holders than there are differences. Students should study what they love, work hard, learn a lot, and they will find employment success. We have become so vocationalized in our thinking about higher education that we have come to believe that a major is a career. It is not.

Robert Matz
George Mason University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The story of the unemployable English major is both powerful and damaging, since students are more than ever concerned that their choice of degree will lead to successful employment-reasonably so considering the lingering effects of the recession and the high cost of postsecondary education in the US.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Humanities Aren’t As Dead As You Think

# data[].attributes.subject
The Humanities Aren’t As Dead As You Think

# data[].attributes.body
Jennifer Summit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What's happened to the humanities-once the center, and now the wallflower, of American higher education? The subject of their decline and fall has become a familiar lament. As New York Times columnist David Brooks recently recounted, 50 years ago, "14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors." Brooks blames this flight from the humanities-history, literature, arts, and languages-on faculty, who have supposedly abandoned "the old notions of truth, beauty, and goodness" for "political and social categories like race, class, and gender." If they could only return to the old questions, the humanities might regain their former glory.

But are students really fleeing the humanities? Brooks cites a fall-off in humanities majors at Harvard. But Harvard and other elite schools do not represent the larger national picture. Seen in absolute numbers, humanities majors have actually risen slightly over the last 50 years. What's changed is the proportion of undergraduate students majoring in humanities. Students haven't simply switched from English to, say, physics. Instead, the number of students, and of majors offered, have greatly increased. The humanities have gone from being a main course within a relatively narrow menu of options to just one plate among many at a bounteous buffet.

This frames the real challenge for the humanists: to demonstrate the relevance of the humanities within this broader landscape.

"The Heart of the Matter," a recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, stands apart from the elegies of the humanities now being issued with dreary regularity. Rather than defending the humanities by setting them against the other disciplines-as nearly every other defense of them tends to do-"The Heart of the Matter" insists that the humanities are integral to the larger whole of education for democracy, if only they can recognize and claim their part.

Commentaries tend to frame the curriculum as a zero-sum game: the more math and science, the fewer humanities. When numbers win, arts and letters lose. But "The Heart of the Matter" imagines the university curriculum not as an arms race but as a balancing act. This perspective may depart from the way that we faculty perceive the situation (we see ourselves as in competition with one another for resources), but it comes much closer to the experiences of our students, who must negotiate a mash-up of general education requirements, courses in their major, electives, and, increasingly, credits transferred from other institutions.

What students need from us, the report insists, is coherence. In place of "an ever-more fragmented curriculum," it calls on the disciplines to cooperate in identifying and fostering the "qualities of mind" needed by all students "for leadership in an interconnected world." In place of a battle for institutional turf, it imagines the disciplines joining together in "a mutually energizing balance."

The primary site of this integration is general education, which the report calls "our distinctly American form of education: broad, comprehensive, and balanced, recognizing the interdependence of all areas of knowledge." Unlike the canons and cores "of some idealized past," this general education is dynamic and interconnected. Rather than viewing the disciplines as disconnected silos (or "pillars of excellence," as a colleague wryly calls them), it asks them to come together to pursue "grand challenges" of shared concern.

The integrative ideal in "The Heart of the Matter" describes a vision of education that is connected not only within but also across institutions. The report recommends "a nationwide effort to reconnect our K-12 schools and teachers to the broader scholarly community" and urges "college and university faculty" to "reach out to their teaching colleagues at K-12 schools" to create "a true teaching network-from kindergarten through higher education [that] will collect and share new methodologies, new discoveries, and new student needs." In this network, higher education is one piece of a long continuum spanning educational sectors that have long been held apart.

To this, New York Times commentator Stanley Fish, a master of snark, retorts, "Sure, let's have a joint bake sale or a dance." The very improbability that faculty would "reach out" to high school teachers, or vice versa, leads Fish to conclude that the report is "laden with bland commonplaces and recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia."

The charge is unfair, but it also points to an all-too-common shortcoming in the report itself. Despite insisting that "the humanities and social sciences are not merely elective, nor are they elite or elitist," the commission's members are themselves overwhelmingly from elite institutions. So are the educational initiatives they cite as exemplary. Had the report broadened its focus to the comprehensive and state institutions that produce most of the nation's humanities majors, it could have found inspiring examples of integrated institutions and student-focused curricula already in action.

The Long Beach Promise," for example, joins Long Beach Unified School District, Long Beach City College, and Cal State Long Beach in an exemplary cross-institutional collaboration meant to ease students' passage from kindergarten to college graduation. Cal State Northridge and neighboring Pierce College have aligned their curricula to ease transfers between them, in the process creating integrative general education designed around "grand challenges" like community health, social justice, and sustainability. Alverno College, a tiny school serving working-class women in Milwaukee, has designed its entire curriculum around eight "core abilities" that exemplify education for the "qualities of mind" that "The Heart of the Matter" suggests are needed by all graduates. Examples like these might convince doubtful readers like Fish that the report's integrative vision is already making progress in forward-looking institutions that can serve as examples to others.

Elite institutions stand to gain much by broadening their focus, not least because of their role in preparing the future academic workforce. Where "The Heart of the Matter" calls for "a vision of education that meets students' needs ..., not one that simply mirrors the map of current faculty specialization," it will fall on Ph.D.-granting institutions to develop new ways to train graduate students to be the future professoriate. Tomorrow's professors must do more than excel in specialized research; they must be able to perceive their role within a broader educational world that is undergoing fast and unpredictable change. That world demands that their training as future educators be no less rigorous than their research preparation. It also demands that future academic employers encourage and reward innovation in the classroom-including the general education classroom-if our institutions are to repair the fragmentation of the curriculum and deliver an education of balance and relevance.

This challenge can only be met through a true integration of institutions, faculties, and administrators. If "The Heart of the Matter" brings us closer to meeting it, the report will have made a powerful contribution indeed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Humanities Aren't As Dead As You Think | Essay | Zócalo Public Square

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What's happened to the humanities-once the center, and now the wallflower, of American higher education? The subject of their decline and fall has become a familiar lament. As New York Times columnist David Brooks recently recounted, 50 years ago, "14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities.

# data[].attributes.headline
“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania

# data[].attributes.subject
“Frivolous” Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania

# data[].attributes.body
Irina Dumitrescu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a recent New York Times article on the movement to promote university majors promising higher employment and income, Anthony Carnevale, a professor at Georgetown University, sums up the utilitarian view of education in one snappy phrase: "You can't be a lifelong learner if you're not a lifelong earner."

Things often sound true when they rhyme. Growing up in Canada, I would have agreed with Carnevale. I would have even agreed with politicians like the governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, who sees university primarily as job training. I had a Romanian immigrant's relentless pragmatism, having been raised to think that medicine and law were the only acceptable career options in life. Although I was a bookish teenager, I never thought I could study literature or history or philosophy. At some level I felt these topics were pleasant but useless fluff, nice as hobbies but not worth thousands of dollars in tuition and four years of my life.

At the University of Toronto I fell in love, against my better judgment, with English literature, and switched majors. I felt like a rebel reading Paradise Lost and learning Old English grammar instead of doing something that would earn me a job after graduation. But although I made the switch to the liberal arts, I couldn't help but feel that the humanities were still somewhat superfluous. This opinion began to change the summer when I was 20 years old. In search of my roots, I went to Bucharest and worked at the Canadian embassy there. That job was the beginning of a practical education in the importance of the humanities.

I learned, for example, how much depends on a word. One of my tasks was to translate interviews with Romanians who wanted to marry Canadians. The immigration agent needed to know if the couple was in love or if the relationship was faked. It was essential that I be scrupulous, adding nothing and taking nothing away. Liars, I learned, often make up romantic stories about their betrothed but cannot bring themselves to say "love." One woman was allowed to emigrate because, pressed to explain why she wanted to marry her middle-aged, average-looking fiancé, she said merely that he was a good man and she loved him.

During another interview with a prospective fiancée, the Canadian agent pushed a pile of letters and cards towards me and said, "Look over these and see if they seem romantic to you." My critiques of Romantic poetry in university had made no difference to those long-gone poets, but now the woman whose future I would help to decide watched me as I read over her correspondence with her boyfriend. "It isn't particularly romantic," I declared, with all my 20 years of life experience behind me, "but they seem to know each other well." Her visa was approved.

The more important lesson, though, I learned secondhand. One day, as I was running background checks and doing paperwork, my co-worker told me the story of her in-laws' marriage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the communist government of Romania carried out a massive program of re-education and extermination of the country's cultural elites. Artists, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and priests were put in political prisons and work camps. In a notorious experiment at the Pitești prison, prisoners-many of them university students in the humanities-were "re-educated" using physical as well as psychological torture. Guards beat and subjected them to extreme cold and hunger. They were made to eat their own excrement, and, worst of all, to torture each other. My colleague's father-in-law, then a student of literature, was one such prisoner.

If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail.

In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education. He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one another their foreign languages. After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result. Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their "files" with the government, so they married each other. Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always coming and going. This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator of English poetry.

When I heard this story, I understood that the stereotype of the fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie. If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities students and professors in jail. For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby. It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity, their shredded sense of humanity. Nothing could be more practical.

Years later, when a new wave of cutbacks in higher education led to reports of another humanities " crisis," I decided to find out how much of the oral history I heard at the embassy had been written down. I read a dozen Romanian prison memoirs, all of them published after the 1989 revolution. Each one testified to the power of the liberal arts-especially literature and foreign languages-to help individuals maintain sanity and a sense of self in conditions designed to destroy them.

The memoirs taught me how common it was for prisoners to teach each other languages. Constantin Giurescu, a historian, learned Hungarian from one prisoner and taught it to another; meanwhile, he practiced his English, German, and French. The mathematician and Holocaust survivor Egon Balas held language sessions during captivity to practice English, Russian, French, and German. In prison, Arnold Schwefelberg recalled the Hebrew he had previously learned to the point where he could think in it fluently. Dan Brătianu and his fellow prisoners were tormented by lice, for which they received DDT in glass bottles, so they covered the bottles in spit, rubbed them with soap, and sprinkled the DDT on top. They could scratch up to four hundred words on this makeshift writing surface, which they used to teach each other foreign vocabulary. Later, some of the prisoners who had learned English from Brătianu became professional translators.

Many prisoners survived by recalling poetry they had learned in school or by writing their own. The artist Lena Constante learned French prosody by remembering lines of poetry, scanning and analyzing them, and then composing her own verse in French. Schwefelberg "wrote" 50 to 60 poems and a play, some of which he committed to paper after release. Inmates used Morse or other tapping codes to compose poems, often finishing each other's lines. They also communicated essential information by quoting poetry, guessing that the guards would miss the point. Prisoners formed study groups, recalling the plots of novels and teaching each other history from memory. Forced into a program of "re-education," they created their own university instead.

Being an immigrant once made it difficult for me to imagine studying the humanities. Going home to Romania-both physically and through books-helped me understand the value of the liberal arts, one that goes far beyond job prospects and starting salaries after graduation. We have been taught to think of the liberal arts as unnecessary and wasteful, or in Ronald Reagan's words, "intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without." Memoirs of the Romanian gulag showed me what a dangerous lie this is. Educated political prisoners drew on rich inner resources to preserve their sanity and their spirits. They used their knowledge to help their fellow inmates survive as well. Their experiences reveal what the attack on the humanities really is. It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays how vital the liberal arts are. The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education, even as it attempts to destroy it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Frivolous" Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist Romania | Essay | Zócalo Public Square

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a recent New York Times article on the movement to promote university majors promising higher employment and income, Anthony Carnevale, a professor at Georgetown University, sums up the utilitarian view of education in one snappy phrase: "You can't be a lifelong learner if you're not a lifelong earner."