Marketing the Liberal Arts
Or, if I were communications czar for American liberal arts education
The essay below is the first installment of a regular column, “Marketing the Liberal Arts,” that I’m officially debuting in the next issue of our college magazine. In each column I plan to take the reader under the hood of the (incredibly fascinating and exciting) life of a university communications guy. Hope you enjoy. -Daniel Oppenheimer
By almost any metric you can imagine, the liberal arts are in decline. Fewer undergraduates want to major in our programs. Universities are cutting funding and in some cases whole departments. When university administrations tell the “brand” story of their institutions, they emphasize advances in science, technology, and health.
Last year The New Yorker ran an incredibly depressing article on “The End of the English Major” that emphasized that even literature-loving Harvard students, earning the single most marketable university pedigree in the world, don’t feel free to follow their intellectual bliss. Instead, they major in something they perceive as more practical and take a few courses in the English department on the side. As a result, the trends are bleak: “From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters — in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand — and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses.”
For a variety of reasons, the picture isn’t particularly bleak at UT Austin. There have been declines in some of the historically popular humanities majors, like history and English, but they’ve been modest by comparison to what a lot of schools have seen. In general, we’re thriving, but the challenge for a salesman like me remains roughly the same. How do you sell the liberal arts in a world where the liberal arts are on the decline and on the defensive?
One way I sometimes think about it is that there are two narratives we typically have to offer. One is that the liberal arts are in fact modern and pragmatic. We’re good at teaching highly marketable skills like writing and good at cultivating important soft skills like leadership and collaboration. Our graduates go on to get good jobs. We have a great career services office. And so on. You don’t need to be worried about getting a job after graduation. We’ve got you covered.
The other approach is to emphasize the more old-school virtues of a liberal arts education. Students get to read the best and most beautiful things that have ever been written. They get to spend time delving into the big questions: Why are we here? How should we live? Why is society shaped the way it is? Where does power lie, and why? If you want college to be a transformative intellectual experience, there’s no better place to study than a college of liberal arts.
In practice we put forth both of these narratives, often at the same time. We tailor our message to different contexts and audiences. That’s the job, and I am not beset by deep angst every time I draft an email to one of our constituencies, or make an assignment for the magazine, that emphasizes one of these narratives at the expense of the other. I’m responsible for communications for this specific place with its specific needs, not “the liberal arts” as a broader institution in our culture. I don’t need to make a big philosophical decision about Who We Are, and it would be irresponsible of me to subordinate the needs of the college to some grand unified vision of how the liberal arts should be marketed.
If I were emperor of communications for the liberal arts in America, however, and had both the responsibility to tell the larger story and the power to enforce a coherent message across all the individual entities that constitute “the liberal arts in America,” I would make us settle on one big narrative. The alternative is a muddiness and defensiveness in messaging that in the long run can’t help us reclaim territory from the scientific, technological, and moneymaking disciplines. To reclaim territory, we’d need to go on the offensive.
The big narrative I’d choose, however, wouldn’t be either of the two I mentioned above, though it would have elements of each. Instead, it would be a story that sells the liberal arts in the same way that most things in America are sold, by appealing to our desires. In particular, I’d want to craft a campaign that positioned a liberal arts education as an experience that can satiate three particular desires: our desire for status, our desire for distinctiveness, and our desire for meaning. You want a liberal arts education, it would convey, because you are elite, you are unique, and you have purpose. And you are these things, in particular, relative to the other kinds of degrees you can earn at a place like UT, the “practical” ones (with “practical” said with some condescension) which are all well and good for people who are interested only in following the herd, getting an office job, grinding it out, checking the boxes. For those people, it makes sense to get a job in the technical or money-making fields. For you, though, remarkable and purpose-driven creature that you are, the only possible degree is one that challenges you to delve into the mysteries of the world, understand yourself and society better, and cultivate the virtues that distinguish the best among us now as they did in ancient times. For a rare and precious gem like you, the only possible degree is a liberal arts degree.
For this hypothetical campaign, I imagine a visual aesthetic that’s in the vicinity of what the fashion designer Rachel Comey created for her collaboration with the New York Review of Books. High end, bookish yet glamorous, tactile.
I fear I sound cynical here. I’m not. I’m actually painfully earnest, and painfully aware of the decline in the fortunes of the kind of liberal arts education that I loved so much as an undergraduate and graduate student. Our faculty’s job is to teach, research, and write. Our students are here to learn. I’m here to sell, and I happen to be the best kind of salesman, which is someone who believes in the product. I am not, alas the emperor of liberal arts communications in America, nor is there a reasonable prospect that I will be. A salesman can dream, though, and write the occasional column.
Daniel,
I struggled with this more than anything you've written.
1. I'm not in academia. Like you, I was a humanities major who went from the nonprofit sector into business, and have been humbled. I made the transition with all of the elitism you described. I was certain I had the pedigree, the curiosity, and the transferrable skills to thrive in any market. I was totally humbled by the intelligence of more technical people around me. And not just in their ability to write code, but in their ability to see the forest for the trees. I needed to check my liberal arts entitlement at the door. It's great that liberal arts graduates are proud of what they studied, and the big questions they ask, but I think I'd prefer they approach their transition out of college with more humility.
2. Maybe this gets at the heart of my discomfort with your essay. When I hear elite, I think of the smugness of any young person, just steeped in some ideology they learned in college, and certain that they are right, and rather closed minded. If this elitism is accompanied by a true curiosity, to continuously challenge their own deeply held beliefs, and to learn from others that aren't as well spoken as they are, then super. But I'm seeing too many liberal arts college graduates enter the work force more interested in professing their moral position than being open to learning. This doesn't serve them well, and it doesn't serve society well. This is probably an ungenerous interpretation of your word elitism. I may be loading it with lots of personal baggage, but I think it'd be important for you to clarify the relationship between elitism and intellectual humility.
3. I don't think the liberal arts will recover until it finds a place for the condescention towards the more vocational majors, and this utilitarian role of universities. This is where I see hope. Yes, I know technical people who are buried in the weeds and can't ask bigger questions, but those that blend the two are the most impressive I've seen. There's an intellectual rigor that the hard sciences demand that I haven't seen in the liberal arts. This kind of thinking alone can be formulaic and limiting. But the combination of this disiciplined thinking and the spirit of liberal arts eduction that you describe is where I see the greatest benefit.
4. This is more of a tactical comment, but I don't think we can dismiss the arguments around the cost of a liberal arts education, and whether this prepares graduates for the world. How many english majors from elite schools ended up unable to pay off their student debt? I agree that schools shouldn't be purely vocational, but dismissing that as a role that college plays, while also allowing college costs to increase faster than inflation, and not looking at the crisis of student debt and student preparation for the world today sounds out of touch. As I sit on the side of industry right now, this very much plays into their perception of academia as not serving students well for life after college I suspect you are making a more abstract aspirational argument and not really addressing more concrete questions of student debt and college affordability, but these are the elephants in the room when we talk about a liberal arts education in the abstract.
Apologies for commenting on a two month old post, but this is one of the few persuasive pieces I've read on this topic, and I wanted to ask about one or two alternative framings here.
1. One thing that bothers me about a lot of defenses of liberal arts is that they don't and won't say, "yes, an English degree is worth paying $70k/year for four years for." University tuition is so much higher than ever, so it's not at all surprising that people will look for higher ROI in degrees.
Your point about liberal arts majors getting good jobs is something, but if anything I'd want to hear an even more aggressive pitch at this point. Have an alumni who majored in English and went to McKinsey come back and give a talk on how English majors are way more competitive in the corporate world than non business peers. So long as there's evidence, the pitch needs to be that liberal arts degrees are arguably better ROI than business or stem degrees.
I'm still not sure this functions at every point on the prestige scale, though. My view having done some research is that in order to get our academic job market back to a healthy equilibrium, you need to e.g. convince Indiana Republicans to bankroll more humanities faculty at the University of Indiana, which still sounds like a hard sell.
2. One big difference between stem and humanities professors, in my experience, is that stem professors want their students to drop their classes and humanities professors want their students to have a good time. I see this as an effect of supply and demand, and a bid by humanities profs to not dig a bigger hole in terms of having few majors, but it also betrays a lack of rigor and confidence.
I've always done reasonably well in humanities subjects, but it's frustrating when you have class discussions with people who are totally unaware of aby of the reading and you're supposed to act like this is productive. Liberal arts classes would be better if they were about as harsh as other classes in terms of hitting underperformed students with bad grades to force them to shape up or drop. This would also eliminate the problem of people dropping from difficult majors into liberal arts majors because the latter is less work, which tarnishes the prestige of the liberal arts.
3. A lot of American academia seems to be stuck in a particular rut carved in, if not earlier, 19th century Germany, and maybe liberal arts undergraduate majors are a part of that. Many of the arguments I see in favor of liberal arts are arguments that would favor continuing education for adults. You could keep the college degree focused on gaining work skills, and meanwhile allow everyone to get a taste of universal human truths and beauties to enrich their lives with. Would that model not make more sense under the best arguments for more liberal arts education?