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.
Good points all, but I think you may be underestimating the degree to which I approached this essay in the true spirit of marketing. i.e. without any concern for the social impact of success or the truth quotient of the way your product is being sold.
You're probably right about all the ways in which such an approach is gratuitously and unjustifiably condescending to others, and the ways in which people in other realms bring real virtues to the table, not just technical or fiscal skill, and the manifold flaws of the typical liberal arts grad, etc. I was really just saying that it might be a good way of *marketing* the liberal arts if your only interest is in the growth of liberal arts enrollment and the overall prestige of these fields.
The only thing you said that I might disagree with is your point 3. I mean, I agree that we shouldn't condescend toward others, just as a matter of principle. But in fact the prevailing strategy over the last few decades, in higher ed, has been precisely to try to frame the value of a liberal arts degree in the language and concepts of business and the STEM fields. We've been making the utilitarian argument, and I don't think it's helping at all. It concedes too much to these other realms of value. I think if you're going to make a big argument for liberal arts, it has to be an argument that stands on values that are distinct to, or at least central to, the liberal arts themselves. No need to be dismissive of other concerns at all, but if you're always going on about how valuable the liberal arts are in the marketplace, then sooner or later (and in fact right now) students are going to wonder why they shouldn't just skip the liberal arts altogether and go straight to the disciplines that are in fact even more valuable in the marketplace.
Then again, to be fair to all your points, this was an essay that was more interested in exploring certain ideas than in making truth claims about how we should actually do things. So there is maybe an implicit grain of salt that needs to be taken with reading.
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?
The problem with selling liberal arts via their competitiveness in the job market is that the data doesn't really support that an English major is more competitive than a STEM or business major in the business world. It supports that he's almost as competitive, that the difference is pretty negligible over the long run - i.e. that the fear that the English major will be underemployed isn't merited. You can pursue what you find most interesting (e.g. literature) and the long term cost in life time income is pretty negligible. That's not a great sales pitch, though.
I don't disagree with you on 2, but boy would that be a hard sell to humanities profs who may already be struggling with enrollment. It would be much easier if you were starting from scratch to begin with that kind of rigor. Maybe the way to do it from within an existing institution would be to start new programs from that stance, as pilots, and then try to make them grow over time, to the point where they're attracting high achieving students from other majors (both those in the liberal arts and from other academic realms).
On 3, I guess my fear about that is just many fewer people would end up getting that kind of education. There wouldn't be the broad social and financial support for people to get that continuing ed later in life. There's no reason in principle you couldn't separate those two functions of higher ed, but it's hard for me to see in practice.
Thanks for the response. My quick thoughts: on 2, I'm now recalling a few people I know who did undertake rigorous humanities classes like this, which were really driven by a particular professor wanting to do that type of teaching. Also, it was mostly about demanding people write quite a lot, more than harsh grading.
I do think you could get a lot of adults interested in a reading group led by a local English professor, and that people would pay for this. At least, if people had a good experience with the humanities before, I don't see why they wouldn't do it again. Perhaps the issue is that you couldn't charge the same rates, but at least in my view the high cost of tertiary education is a core problem here.
That New Yorker piece on the end of the English major actually touches on the continued enthusiasm for these things among adult learners. There really is probably room for a lot of expansion in that realm, and it would be worth it for universities to think more about how to get there. I think currently a lot of our extended education programs are focused on vocational stuff, not humanities, but that doesn't have to be the case.
There’s “how?” That’s engineering and business and the like. There’s “what?” That’s the hard sciences.
Then there’s “why?”
And that’s the liberal arts.
As a society, in a time where getting back to even is a decades-long proposition for most, we have to provide the opportunities for those who ask why. Currently we don’t — and it’s not an accident.
I can’t help but remember this scene from Dead Poets Society.
“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
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.
Good points all, but I think you may be underestimating the degree to which I approached this essay in the true spirit of marketing. i.e. without any concern for the social impact of success or the truth quotient of the way your product is being sold.
You're probably right about all the ways in which such an approach is gratuitously and unjustifiably condescending to others, and the ways in which people in other realms bring real virtues to the table, not just technical or fiscal skill, and the manifold flaws of the typical liberal arts grad, etc. I was really just saying that it might be a good way of *marketing* the liberal arts if your only interest is in the growth of liberal arts enrollment and the overall prestige of these fields.
The only thing you said that I might disagree with is your point 3. I mean, I agree that we shouldn't condescend toward others, just as a matter of principle. But in fact the prevailing strategy over the last few decades, in higher ed, has been precisely to try to frame the value of a liberal arts degree in the language and concepts of business and the STEM fields. We've been making the utilitarian argument, and I don't think it's helping at all. It concedes too much to these other realms of value. I think if you're going to make a big argument for liberal arts, it has to be an argument that stands on values that are distinct to, or at least central to, the liberal arts themselves. No need to be dismissive of other concerns at all, but if you're always going on about how valuable the liberal arts are in the marketplace, then sooner or later (and in fact right now) students are going to wonder why they shouldn't just skip the liberal arts altogether and go straight to the disciplines that are in fact even more valuable in the marketplace.
Then again, to be fair to all your points, this was an essay that was more interested in exploring certain ideas than in making truth claims about how we should actually do things. So there is maybe an implicit grain of salt that needs to be taken with reading.
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?
A few thoughts:
The problem with selling liberal arts via their competitiveness in the job market is that the data doesn't really support that an English major is more competitive than a STEM or business major in the business world. It supports that he's almost as competitive, that the difference is pretty negligible over the long run - i.e. that the fear that the English major will be underemployed isn't merited. You can pursue what you find most interesting (e.g. literature) and the long term cost in life time income is pretty negligible. That's not a great sales pitch, though.
I don't disagree with you on 2, but boy would that be a hard sell to humanities profs who may already be struggling with enrollment. It would be much easier if you were starting from scratch to begin with that kind of rigor. Maybe the way to do it from within an existing institution would be to start new programs from that stance, as pilots, and then try to make them grow over time, to the point where they're attracting high achieving students from other majors (both those in the liberal arts and from other academic realms).
On 3, I guess my fear about that is just many fewer people would end up getting that kind of education. There wouldn't be the broad social and financial support for people to get that continuing ed later in life. There's no reason in principle you couldn't separate those two functions of higher ed, but it's hard for me to see in practice.
Thanks for the response. My quick thoughts: on 2, I'm now recalling a few people I know who did undertake rigorous humanities classes like this, which were really driven by a particular professor wanting to do that type of teaching. Also, it was mostly about demanding people write quite a lot, more than harsh grading.
I do think you could get a lot of adults interested in a reading group led by a local English professor, and that people would pay for this. At least, if people had a good experience with the humanities before, I don't see why they wouldn't do it again. Perhaps the issue is that you couldn't charge the same rates, but at least in my view the high cost of tertiary education is a core problem here.
That New Yorker piece on the end of the English major actually touches on the continued enthusiasm for these things among adult learners. There really is probably room for a lot of expansion in that realm, and it would be worth it for universities to think more about how to get there. I think currently a lot of our extended education programs are focused on vocational stuff, not humanities, but that doesn't have to be the case.
I think part of what you're saying here, which I agree with 100%, is that the liberal arts are f****** cool, man.
I'm not going to disagree, but I have to keep my language, um, more restrained in my day job.
There’s “how?” That’s engineering and business and the like. There’s “what?” That’s the hard sciences.
Then there’s “why?”
And that’s the liberal arts.
As a society, in a time where getting back to even is a decades-long proposition for most, we have to provide the opportunities for those who ask why. Currently we don’t — and it’s not an accident.
*Everybody* can be an elitist! Such is the promise of democracy. Bravo.
Indeed!
Great read.
I can’t help but remember this scene from Dead Poets Society.
“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
https://youtu.be/omveFR-2hmg?si=iVUBC7q_aXUWEBv4
We may need to reboot Dead Poets Society to stave off the decline of the liberal arts. Not sure who would replace Robin Williams, maybe Ethan Hawke?