why study the humanities essay

Insight – Charles Sturt University

Why we still need to study the humanities

The story of us – Homo sapiens – is intriguing and complex. We’re unique creatures living in a rapidly changing world and we continue to face new challenges and opportunities. The study of humans, and all we’ve done, has always been of value. But studying the humanities now is probably more important than ever before!

We chatted with Charles Sturt University’s Jared van Duinen, who’s been teaching humanities for more than 15 years, and asked: what exactly are the humanities and why is it so important to study them in the 21 st century?

So, what are the humanities ?

First things first. When you sign up to learn about humanities, what sorts of topics will you study?

“Well, traditionally, the humanities are those disciplines that deal with human interaction, society and how humans get along in society. So think history, sociology, philosophy, politics, English literature and Indigenous studies.”

Why is it so important to study humanities?

Learning about ourselves – through the various humanities – helps us to create a better world.

“It’s the human in humanities that is worth studying. Humanities can tell us about ourselves, how we interact and get along and why we sometimes don’t!”

“Studying the humanities helps us to better understand who we are, our identity as a people, a society and a culture, and how to organise our societies so we can achieve our goals.

“Importantly, the study of humanities is a wonderful way of exploring our Charles Sturt ethos of Yindyamarra Winhanganha.

“Obviously STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – has a role to play in creating a world worth living in. But the study of humanities can help create a better world, just as much, if not more so, than scientific and technological innovation.”

Tackling the world’s issues

Jared believes that understanding the humanities can help you deal with all sorts of issues and problems facing the world. Big, small and ‘wicked’ ones! How? By taking you behind the human scene, giving you an insight into some really valuable information, and equipping you with a unique set of skills.

History. Studying the past helps us understand where we’ve come from and learn lessons to help us deal with the future.
English literature helps us explore the great themes of human interaction and better understand each other.
Sociology helps us to understand human behaviour, culture and the workings of society.
Philosophy helps us to think well, clearly, ethically and logically.
Politics. Learning about political processes and their impacts will help us understand how social and political change occurs.
Indigenous studies is especially important because Australia has an Indigenous population. If we’re trying to create a world worth living in, a fuller understanding of the perspective of our Indigenous population is essential.

A practical reason to learn about the humanities – the ultimate skill set!

The other super valuable reason to study humanities is more practical. Studying humanities will give you knowledge and skills that you can use all throughout your working life! And grads who study in this field are catching the eye of more and more employers.

“People who study these disciplines are really important to employers. They gain these important, sought-after skill sets:

effective communication
critical thinking
creative thinking
emotional intelligence
working well in teams
cultural understanding
problem solving.

“Humanities grads have always had these skills in abundance, but for a long time these skills were disregarded or overlooked because they were generic. They didn’t speak to a particular vocation.

“But the world of work is changing, becoming more unpredictable. It’s suggested that a lot of graduates coming out of uni now will change careers five to seven times. So those more well-rounded, transferable or soft skills you gain from studying history, philosophy or English literature will really become important. Having them is now seen as a strength because you can carry them from one occupation to your next. And recent studies highlight that these types of soft skills – the ones humanities graduates gain – are what helps them land jobs.

“Employers say these skills matter. They can teach technical knowledge, but they don’t always have the time or know-how to teach employees these vital soft skills. They look for employees who have these skills well-honed and are ready to work.”

Studying humanities gives you a swag of soft or transferable skills. That means you’ll be the employee who is more flexible. You can pivot from one role to another and adapt faster to changing roles. You become an asset. Now – and definitely into the future!

What jobs are there in humanities?

So, guess you want to know what sort of career you could go into? Studying humanities with Charles Sturt can really take you places – even if you’re not sure where you want to go just yet.

What sort of jobs, you ask?

Public service – in local, state and federal government. (History grads often end up in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade!)
Non-governmental organisations, not-for-profit groups and advocacy groups
Corporate sector – management and marketing, publishing and media
Social work
Policy work

“Studying humanities through our revitalised Bachelor of Arts allows you to study a wide range of disciplines. And that’s especially ideal for those who aren’t quite sure what career path they’ll go down. Those who don’t necessarily know what job they do want, but know they want to study.”

But what about the rise of job automation. How will studying humanities protect you from losing a job to a robot? It all leads back to those very special skills that you’ll build!

“With the increasing automation of many industries, those skills that are resistant to automation, such as critical thinking, cultural understanding, and creative problem solving, are going to be in greater demand.”

Set yourself up for success – now and in the future!

Want to explore the humanities and build a degree that’s meaningful to you and sets you up for career success? Keen to develop the ultimate soft skill set that will help get your first job – and your second and third and fourth? Check out our Bachelor of Arts and let’s get to work!

Bachelor of Arts CRICOS code: 000649C

Collections: The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities

(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format here )

I have been holding off writing something like this, because it is often such a well-worn topic and I hardly wanted to preach to the converted. But at the same time, the humanities need all of the defenses they can get and I’ve found, looking at the genre, that my answers for why we need the humanities are rather different from the typical answer.

But first, the shameless plug that if you , yes you! want to support the humanities, you can support this humanist by sharing my writing, subscribing with the button below or by supporting me on Patreon . Your support enables me to continue telling you and other people to continue supporting me, a giant self-devouring ouroboros of support that will grow to become so large it will crush the world (I look forward to regretting this joke in the future).

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Edit: A friendly reminder to those in the comments: you will be civil . This thread has prompted some spirited discussion. That’s fine. But it will remain polite.

What Humanities?

First, just to define my terms, what are the humanities ? Broadly, they are the disciplines that study human society (that is, that are concerned with humanity): language study, literature, philosophy, history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and so on. It is necessarily a bit of a fuzzy set. But what I think defines the humanities more than subject matter is method ; the humanities study things which (we argue) cannot be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method or strictly mathematical approaches. You cannot perform a controlled trial in beauty, mathematical certainty in history is almost always impossible, and there is no way to know much stress a society can bear except to see it fail. Some things cannot be reduced to numbers, at least not by the powers of the technology-aided human mind.

By way of example, that methodological difference is why there’s a division between political science and history , despite the two disciplines historically being concerned with many of the same subjects and the same questions (to the point that Thucydides is sometimes produced as the founder of both): they use different methods . History is a humanities discipline through and through, whereas political science attempts to hybridize humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approaches; that’s not to say historians never use statistical approaches (I do, actually, quite a lot) but that there are very real differences in methodology. As you might imagine, that difference leads to some competition and conflict between the disciplines as to whose methodology best answers those key questions or equips students to think about them. Given that I have a doctorate in history and self-identify as a historian, you will have no trouble guessing which side of this I come down on, although that might be a bit self-interested on my part.

So if the STEM fields are, at some level, fundamentally about numbers, the humanities are fundamentally about language . The universe may be made of numbers, but the human mind and human societies are constructed out of language. Unlike computers, we do not think in numbers, but in words and consequently, the study of humans as thinking creatures is mostly about those words (yes, yes, I see you there, economics and psychology; there are edge cases, of course). Our laws are written in words because our thoughts form in our heads as words; we naturally reason with words and we even feel with words. Humans are linguistic creations in a mathematical universe; consequently, while the study of the universe is mediated through math, the study of humans and human minds is fundamentally linguistic in nature.

Thus, the humanities.

Oh, the Humanities!

Now I want to note here the standard defense of the humanities, which is that the study of human culture, literature and art enriches the soul and the experience of life. This is, to be clear, undoubtedly true . There is joy and richness in the incredible kaleidoscope of human expression and a deep wisdom in the realization of both how that expression joins us, and how radically different it can be. There is also the enjoyment of developing a ‘palette’ for art and literature which is enhanced by knowing more of it, in being able to see the innovations and cross-connections (the ‘intertext’ to use the unnecessarily fancy academic term). This is all very much the case. There is a reason that rich people with abundant free time have consistently gravitated to the study of the humanities, or supported it.

But this is a weak defense of the humanities as they are currently constructed . The fact is that the academic humanities exist because people who do not study the humanities fund them. The modern study of the humanities, in its infancy, was paid for by wealthy elites who wanted either that joyful richness or at least the status that came from funding it. I should note here also that the humanities were never for the teachers of the humanities, but for its students. The rich funders of the humanities were rarely the authors of the great treatises or studies; rather they wished to be the readers of them (and likewise, the modern academic humanities are not for professors, but the students we teach; more on this next time ). Down until really quite recently, education in the humanities was largely reserved for that elite and their academic clients. As public support for the humanities continues to decline, many humanities fields seem in real danger of reverting back to that status: a prestigious toy for the already-rich and already-elite.

Avoiding that retreat of the humanities back into the wealthy elite means defending the humanities on different grounds. Of course, the traditional humanities will always survive at Harvard or Cambridge or Yale. But for the humanities to actually be generally available, they need to survive, to thrive, outside of those spaces. And yet, no good that is tethered to colleges can be justified solely through the benefit it gives the holder. Colleges, after all, are publicly funded, but while everyone pays taxes, not everyone goes to college . The OECD average rate for tertiary-education-completion among adults is around 37% and not all of those are four-year university degrees. To break down the United States’ data, while 44% of Americans have completed some kind of tertiary education, putting the USA towards the top of the scale (and around two-thirds have at least some college, though they may not have completed it), only 35% of Americans have a four-year degree . And of course, only a subset of those degree-holders will have taken very much in the way of the humanities. Which means the taxes that pay to fund the public universities that make up the great bulk of the study of the humanities are going to mostly come from people who have not, or could not, avail themselves of a humanistic education .

Even if we made the humanities available to all – a goal I robustly support (it is one reason I am spending all this time working on this open, free web platform, after all) – that effort would likely have to be publicly funded through a great many tax-payers who did not care to consume much of the academic products of the humanities (even if they consume many of its pop-cultural byproducts without knowing it). We must be able to justify the expense to them . And alas, while I love crowd-funding (did I mention, you can support me on Patreon ?), it is simply not an alternative for the research and teaching environment of the university (though I think it is and ought to be an important parallel model, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment). The fact is that while ‘short’ essays, blog posts and public-facing books can be popularly funded, the slow, painstaking work that forms the foundation for those efforts has no ready popular market ; but without the latter, the former withers (as a note: my next Collections post will be on the process by which knowledge filters from the latter to the former).

We must be prepared to explain the value of the humanities to people for whom the humanities hold no interest, or appear out of reach (though I feel the need to again reiterate that I think it behooves society to put the humanities within reach for everyone).

The Pragmatic Case for the Humanities

So rather than asking – as many of these sorts of ‘defenses of the humanities’ do – “why study the humanities” the question we ought to ask is “ why would you put down money so that other people can study the humanities? ” The STEM fields have long understood that this is the basis on which they need to defend their funding; not that science is personally enriching, but that it produces things of value to people who are not scientists, engineers, mathematicians or doctors . And they have ready answers in the form of inventions, medicines, soundly constructed machines and so on.

I firmly believe that the humanities can be defended on these terms and will now endeavor to do so.

The great rush of STEM funding that has slowly marginalized the humanities within our education system (it was, for instance, not hard to notice growing up that my school district had a special high school for students gifted in “science and technology” but no such program for students gifted in writing, art, history, and so on) has long been justified on national defense grounds. We needed science to ‘beat the Russians’ and now we need it to ‘beat the Chinese.’ I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of if ‘beating the Chinese’ (which I think, would be better phrased as ‘deterring the leaders of the PRC from mutually destructive conflict’) is a worthwhile goal. But I want to assess the humanities on that strict, materialistic basis (even though I believe there is rather more to our lives and world than a strict materialist outlook), because if the disciplines of the humanities may be justified on these grounds, they may be justified to anyone.

The core of teaching in the humanities is the expression of the grand breadth of human experience. As I hope the images I’ve been using throughout this essay have conveyed, when I say the humanities, I do not just mean a study of the traditional Western canon (by which I mean Greece, Rome, the Renaissance (but rarely the Middle Ages), all in Europe), but of the humanities spread widely over time and space . A ‘humanities’ which covers only elite European men is a narrow field indeed, to its detriment (the same could be said of a field that excluded them, but there is little chance of that). On the one hand, this provides a data set of sorts – a wide range of information about places, cultures and people. But more importantly than that, it is meant to teach students how to go about learning about a place or a people not their own, to inspire a degree of ‘epistemic humility’ (that is the knowledge that you do not know everything ) and also what I call an ’empathy of diversity’ – the appreciation that the human experience and the things humans do and value varies quite a bit place to place and person to person and that what seems strange to us seems normal to others.

(That is, by the by, not an invitation to endless crass moral relativism – some strange foreign customs are bad , some comfortable domestic customs are bad too . Accepting that I, and my society, do not have a monopoly on virtue is not the same thing as declaring virtue itself an impossibility, or even that it is undiscoverable in an absolute sense.)

These experiences, bottled up in artwork, literature, languages, histories and laws, forms the evidence base of any given humanities discipline. But that breadth of evidence, properly delivered, teaches through experience to a depth that merely saying the maxim cannot, two core things: that in the human experience, the human component is constant , even while the experience is not . That is, on the one hand, “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” (and foreign countries are foreign countries too!) but at the same time – homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (I am human, and I think nothing human to be alien to me). Put another way: people are people, no matter where and no matter when, but the where and when still matter quite a lot!

(Now you might argue that there are certain trends within the humanities which present this or that maxim as a transcendent, nearly theological proof and thus fundamentally undermine this message by undermining both epistemic humility and the empathy of diversity with the promise of One True Revelation. And I agree! I am very troubled by this. But the problem is hardly solved by dumping the entire study altogether; if anything, the shrinking of the humanities has made this problem worse as smaller and more poorly funded departments are easier for political interests with ‘one true revelation’ to colonize and dominate.)

The other thing we ask students to do, beyond merely encountering these things is to use them to practice argumentation, to reason soundly , to write well , to argue persuasively about them. That may sound strange to some of you. I find that folks who have not studied in the humanities often assume that each discipline in the humanities consists of effectively memorizing a set of ‘data’ (historical events, laws, philosophies, great books, etc) and being able to effectively regurgitate that information on demand. Students often come into my class thus impatient to be ‘told the answer’ – what is the data I need to memorize? But the humanities are far more about developing a method – a method that can be applied to new evidence – than memorizing the evidence itself. Indeed, the raw data is often far less important – I am much more interested to know if my students can think deeply about Tiberius Gracchus’ aims and means than if they can recall the exact year of his tribunate (133, for the curious).

What a student in these classes is – or at least, ought to be – doing is practicing a form of considered decision-making : assessing the evidence in a way that banishes emotion and relies on reason (which is why we encourage students to write plainly and clearly, without too much rhetorical flourish), and then explaining that reasoning and evidence to a third partly clearly and convincingly . Assertions are followed by evidence and capped off by conclusions in a three-beat-waltz with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of clarity. Different disciplines in the humanities have different kinds of evidence and methods of argument they use – legal argument isn’t quite the same as historical or philosophical argument – but they share the core component of argumentation. I tell my students that even if they never use any fact or idea they encounter in a history course ever again in life – unlikely, I think, but still – they will still use these skills, practiced in formal writing but applicable in all sorts of circumstances, for the rest of their lives in almost anything they end up doing.

What is being taught here is thus a detached, careful form of analysis and decision-making and then a set of communication skills to present that information . Phrased another way: a student is being trained – whatever branch of specialist knowledge they may develop in the future – on how to serve as an advisor (who analyzes information and presents recommendations) or as a leader (who makes and then explains decisions to others).

And it should come thus as little surprise that these skills – a sense of empathy, of epistemic humility, sound reasoning and effective communication – are the skills we generally look for in effective leaders . Because, fundamentally, the purpose of formal education in the humanities, since the classical period, was as training in leadership .

As I’ve already noted, in much of the past, this sort of education was quite clearly limited to a hereditary (or effectively hereditary wealth-defined) class of leaders. Elite Roman education began with basic grammar, but extended to the analysis of poetry, the reading of literature and from there into the study of rhetoric, history and philosophy. Particularly for history, the ancient Greeks, with whom the discipline of history began, left little mystery as to its purpose: history as a field existed to inform decision-making and leadership. As Thucydides puts it, “but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content” (Thuc. 1.22.4). Plutarch ( Alexander 1.1-3) and Polybius (1.1.1-4) are similarly direct. Polybius goes so far as to say “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Plb. 1.1.1). But the same was true for the reading of literature, the development of knowledge in law, oratory and philosophy. These were leadership skills , taught to aristocrats who were assumed to be future leaders. This was true not merely in Greece and Rome (where I just happen to have the easy textual references) but in every sophisticated agrarian society I am aware of, from the universities of medieval Europe to Chinese aristocrats training for Imperial examinations .

(As an aside – note that the use of history in particular in this way is not merely because ‘history repeats.’ In the first case, history does not repeat; if it did, we should surely be around to the second (or third) Akkadian Empire by now. Rather, as Thucydides says, human affairs resemble themselves , because they contain in them the same one dominant ingredient, the one thing the humanities study: humans. The best guide to future human behavior is past human behavior, and history is the best way to sample a lot of that behavior, especially in circumstances that are relatively uncommon.)

Does anyone look at the present moment and conclude that we have an over-abundance of humble, empathetic, well-trained and effectively communicating leaders?

Soft Skills in Soft Power

That is, of course, not the only thing the humanities offer to a society. As I noted above, the steady marginalization – as a matter of education and funding – of the humanities in favor of STEM in the United States has been motivated by the need to ‘win’ geopolitical contests. And perhaps the most obvious benefit of the humanities, particularly in the geopolitical sphere, is the soft-power aspect of a robust culture ‘industry.’ No rocket, no weapon-system of any kind was as instrumental in the collapse of Soviet Communism as Hollywood and Rock’n’Roll – or more correctly the vast culture edifice that those two ideas are used to represent. The Soviet Union wasn’t defeated with missiles, after all, it collapsed from a failure of ideological legitimacy ; a crisis of words not numbers. What we’ve seen again and again over the last century (and even longer, if one cares to look) is that the vast soft power of cultural cachet is often far more cost-effective than new weapons (in part because new weapons are just so expensive). Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, but remained an important place for centuries, while Sparta – which won – sank into irrelevance. It is hard not to conclude that Athens lost the war but decisively won the peace and that it was the latter victory that actually mattered.

The response to this is typically the glib assumption that this cultural ‘effectiveness’ is simply the product of chance, or individual genius or just a product of markets. But the fact is no one is born a great producer of culture; all of the skills are trained. And they are refined against a backdrop of deep complexity, of interleaved references and homages to older and older works. Those rich traditions are kept alive in the humanities to provide so much of the raw material for new artists and writers to hammer into new ideas, new mixtures of old themes and motifs. And while academic cultural criticism can often be self-indulgent and jargonistic, it serves an important role of examining the motifs we would otherwise use unthinkingly, which in turn can lead to the production of yet better (or just new) art. It also trains us to be critical of our art, in a way that makes the public harder to beguile and the art itself better.

At the same time, the study of the humanities, properly done, broadens the range of reference points beyond a single culture. As I hope the images that go with this essay show, when I say the humanities, I do not simply mean the study of the same few dozen European ‘great books.’ By no means am I throwing the western ‘canon’ out, but it is not the whole of the humanities. That in turn can provide a means of training the ability, however dimly, to ‘see’ through the eyes of other cultures (and in other languages, of course); the geopolitical benefits of having people trained this way, prepared with a wide range of cultural reference points from many times and places, should be obvious.

I think the impact that the academic humanities have on that process is often obscured by the intermediate layers that this knowledge passes through. Of course a great many cultural creators do not immerse themselves in four-year humanities degrees (although quite a number do, and it certainly seems to me that most writers, artists and musicians are quite open that the quality of their own art is dependent on sampling the art of other great creators, past and present, which would not exist in accessible form without the academic humanities or their public siblings). Rather, the study of the humanities creates a certain level of diffused knowledge in the society that is available to everyone. It is sufficiently diffused that it is often supposed that we might do as well without its source, but that is a mistake of understanding. I do not stand next to my A/C to get cool (because it cools my whole apartment, albeit less evenly than I might like), but if I turn it off, things will surely get warmer! Likewise, if you disassemble the academic and public humanities, you will quickly find that their beneficial influence on even the art produced beyond their borders wanes, to the detriment of the final product and the culture at large. And yet that diffusion makes the case for the humanities more difficult because it takes training in the humanities, sometimes, to see the influence of the humanities in the broader culture.

In the meantime, it seems to me no accident that as the funding for the humanities, and the social importance placed on a broad humanistic education, has dwindled, it has produced a matching decline in the richness of our cultural products that at this point has been broadly noticed: more and more sequels or remakes of things that aren’t even very old yet; the same handful of properties and themes flogged to death with precious little in the way of innovation. The reference pool has grown small and stagnant, even as every library in the country has an unplumbably deep well of rich ideas, just waiting to be discovered, if we only got back to teaching ourselves how to fathom those depths.

The frustration I most often encounter – particularly from students coming from high schools that too often ‘teach to the test’ instead of teaching skills – is in the apparently round-about way that the humanities teaches these things. Why not shovel money directly into Hollywood and a handful of ‘leadership institutes’? But – and I apologize, because I am going to adapt a phrasing I saw from someone else but can no longer find – that is the equivalent of the student arriving to class asking to “just be told the answers.” The point was never the answers, but the skills you gained finding them .

Leadership courses can reduce some of these ideas to basic maxims – good for what it is; maxims can be very helpful – but they cannot teach you how to discover new maxims . They cannot prepare you for a situation where you find that all of your old maxims are useless because the culture you are in or the people you are now leading do not value a ‘firm handshake’ or ‘strong eye-contact,’ to use one example. Maxims are rigid; the world demands flexibility . And there is no short-cut but to practice reasoning and argumentation, over and over again, in one unfamiliar discipline, one unfamiliar cultural sphere after another (which, of course, in turn necessitates teaching by individuals who are hyper-specialized in those disciplines and cultural spheres, not because humanist academics are the best leaders – note how the skills to teach are not the same skills as to practice . One of these days, we will discuss the art of teaching a bit; suffice to say the old canard ‘those that cannot do, teach’ is rubbish. Few who do can teach , but most who teach can do; they are different skills, only infrequently found together).

And at the moment, particularly, it seems to me that those sort of leadership skills – calm, sound reasoning, careful explanations, epistemic humility and compassion – are in short supply. As I write this – future readers, note the date – we are still in the grip of a global pandemic. What we see is not a failure of our science – by no means! We have clearly gotten our money’s worth from our doctors and scientists who continue to do heroic work. Researchers are breaking one vaccine speed record after another. The speed with which new medical methods and data are brought to bear on the viral enemy is astoundingly fast. But so far, that work hasn’t had the impact it could have had because of leadership failures – failures to buy the scientists the time they need to do their work, to get the public to follow best practices.

Our knowledge of science hasn’t failed – our knowledge of humanity has. And can it be any surprise? Since the 1950s, the humanities – particularly the academic humanities that teach the skills I have been talking about – have faced cuts not only in the United States but around the globe, over and over again. What is happening as a result is that the humanities are collapsing back into what they were in the ancient world: a marker or elite status and privilege, available to those born to wealth .

Which is a real problem, because it isn’t enough for this to be a skill-set held only by a tiny class of designated, hereditary ‘leaders.’ Rather, it behooves us for the humanistic skills to be broadly distributed in society, so that they are widely available. In the same way that I discussed above, where an artist might benefit from the broad array of influences in the humanities without having done a four-year-degree themselves – through their proximity to others who have – society benefits broadly by having skills in the humanities widely diffused. After all, you need someone in the lab to ask if we should, not merely if we can (it is striking, in that scene, that this observation is given to Ian Malcolm, a mathematician, rather than an ethicist or a historian or someone else whose knowledge actually bears on the question of should ; this is Hollywood’s fetishism of scientific knowledge at work. For exhibit B, notice how even the officers in Star Trek: The Next Generation have their training in science rather than in leadership , like real officers do (the Kirk era knew better!) – the only actual knowledge treated as such in TNG is generally scientific knowledge). You need people at every level of business and government who can ask larger questions and seek greater answers in places where science is unable to shed light. It does no good to silo those skills away to a select, elite few.

The most pressing problems that we face are not scientific problems . That is not because science has failed, but rather because it has succeeded – it has given us the answers . It has told us about the climate, given us the power of the atom, the ability to create vaccines and vast , vast productive potential. It has taken us beyond the bounds of our tiny, vast planet. What is left is the human component, which we continue to neglect, underfund, and undervalue. We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.

We would do well to go back to the humanities.

Published by Bret Devereaux

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Specifically in regards to Star Trek, I will note that yes, in the original series, officers are trained in ‘leadership,’ while the training seems to emphasize science more in later series from the 1980s and on.

With that said… It is true that Picard, as a character, may not have had to pass humanities classes to get the Starfleet Academy degree that launched his officer career in-setting. But he is plainly a cultured *man.* He displays deep moral reasoning, he is passionate about and respectful of the arts, he has a strong sense of where his own species stands in the universe and his vision of where it is going- that is to say, a sense of history. So even if he is only formally trained in the sciences, he cannot be imagined as the product of *only* an education in the sciences. Somewhere along the way, he soaked up a lot of the humanities, even if only indirectly.

But then look at later Star Trek captains- Janeway and Archer. Here we see a considerable amount of decay in their depiction. More superficial moral reasoning, respect for the arts that seems more performative and pro forma at least in my opinion. And, at least aboard Janeway’s USS Voyager, there is no real sense that the activities of the ship fit into a broader historical narrative of which the officers are aware. The ship’s mission is purely about survival and travel, not about “why are we out here.”

So we can view this as a sort of progressive shift, the de-humanitization, if you will, of the Starfleet officer. The captain evolving from a rounded figure who may not know as much science as the science officer or engineering as the chief engineer, but whose grasp of an alien culture or ability to make strategic decisions is enhanced by a sense of history and philosophy… Down to an ascended version of (again) the engineer or science officer. Indeed, Janeway IS the science officer of her own ship; the command-track officers are killed in the first episode and Janeway takes command by stepping into the shoes of the dead.

I’m afraid you betray your lack of ST lore. Janeway was the captain of Voyager from the get go. You’ve relied on false memory for your argument. However, regardless of the nitty-gritty problem of getting the details wrong, I think that your passion for humanities has occluded your perspective, which has failed to take into account evidence that contradicts your argument.

Take C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures as a jumping off point.

Snow discusses humanities versus STEM problem, and in particular the way each perceives the world and the growing divide where one side is unable to comprehend what the other side says. His argument being that the political and social elites are no longer taught science and technology, which effectively makes them modern day Luddites opposed to industrialization. Therefore they’re at a loss to cope with the changes technology is bringing.

This leads to neither side being able to comprehend the other, or finding the points of view expressed nonsensical to their ears; each seeing the other as deluded. ~Snow argues that this leads to the rich failing to comprehend science and technology, while the poor treat science and technology as things equivalent to magic: beyond their comprehension and understanding.

However, the poor experience the benefits that science and technology bring, and are affected by the social changes arising in a visceral way that the rich are insulated from by their wealth.

In short, the rich live their lives with values derived from an arts and literary education where social change is slow. Whereas the poor have to contend with both the benefits and costs from a rapidly changing cultural milieu. Snow argues these social changes will divide populations, and the only thing that can address the problem is better education with a greater emphasis on science.

Therefore, it could be argued the future is not about machines or the advancement science, but rather information about the most valuable of resources, ourselves and what makes us tick.

However, if we are to do this, then we have to embrace the scientific method, put facts before feelings and develop theories that account for our natures, rather than mythologizing the human condition based on beliefs held onto through faith. I’ve said elsewhere on your lovely blog, that unfortunately facts don’t change peoples opinions.

Caveat: T&CA, E&OE; because most people are concrete operational thinkers, and those who develop abstract formal thinking are only able to do so within specific parameters of their specialist training (Piaget).

Arguably, no matter where you go in this world, ultimately people are just people trying to get along..

Coming back to this much later, I freely admit I misremembered details about Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager and its pilot episode. I was, quite simply, wrong . There are reasons I misremembered such an important set of details in that particular context, and I can find them in hindsight, but the reasons are ultimately irrelevant. I goofed.

More broadly, though, I don’t think I’m wrong in the broader observation about Star Trek , which is that Picard represents something of a high water mark for the franchise in terms of the idea that a Starfleet officer’s aspiration should be towards culture, philosophy, and history of the Federation and those it encounters, as much as to technology and the physicality of space.

To be fully fair to Star Trek , it’s tricky to come up with a convincing three-dimensional character who’s more cultured than Picard without being entirely focused on culture to the exclusion of other activities. One would face similar troubles creating a successor character noticeably braver than Worf or more compassionate than Counselor Troi from the same series. Picard is a tough act to follow in some ways. Note that confronted with a similar problem in TNG itself (“how do we follow Kirk’s act”), the creators quite sensibly didn’t try. They created Picard, who’s a respectable captain but so different from Kirk that neither can be seen as a lesser version of the other, and Riker, who’s a bit more like a lesser Kirk, but who also has the less “spotlight” role of first officer and so can afford to be a little less impressive than another series’ captain.

And to be further fair, I don’t feel qualified at all to comment on the most recent Star Trek series that have come out ( Discovery, Lower Decks while we’re at it, and most notably for what I’m saying, Picard ).

As regards the general thesis of the post I’m replying to, about broader historical trends, I would note that Snow was presenting The Two Cultures in 1959. Of necessity, he was referencing back to social trends observed in the 1950s and earlier, and within the context of specifically the British class system he’d grown up with and lived his adult life in. After all, Charles Percy Snow, recently created Baron Snow as of the time of his speech, was born in 1905, in a world very different from the one we now occupy.

To him, the problem of the Victorian-era focus on a very specific and stilted type of humanities education (poetry memorization, Greek and Latin for everyone, and the sort of inapplicable cramming-focused education memorably mocked in I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General ) carrying over into the education of the then-dominant elites of Great Britain (most of whom would have been born during or before the First World War at the time) and leading them to ignore the advances created by “rude mechanicals” must have seemed very real.

We don’t live in his world anymore.

I would argue that whatever may have been the case in Britain c. 1930-1960, in America c. 1990-2020, and in many other parts of the developed world, the problem has changed. The trouble is not that the “classical” elites with their humanities education have walled out the scientists, and merely educating the public in science more fully is not enough to address the matter. I would argue that on the contrary, the problem is that elites whose education focuses almost entirely around law and business management have pushed aside both the humanities and the sciences, except insofar as the sciences can be used to make money.

“Aside from my profound uncertainty as to the accuracy of this claim”

Not to mention many of the riots were sparked by police misbehavior on the spot. When police behaved themselves, so did protesters.

> Within the context of American history, it is fairly close to true to say “only blacks were enslaved.”

Or if you want to get complicated, there’s Indian slavery. Charles Mann says early South Carolina exported lots of Indians as slaves to work in Caribbean islands. Not to mention forced labor through the Spanish Americas, from Columbus to California missions. Supply didn’t keep up though, thus the turn to Africans. (Who brought malaria and yellow fever to the Americas, inadvertently increasing their own relative advantage as laborers, since they had more immunity than anyone else.)

>What a student in these classes is – or at least, ought to be – doing is practicing a form of considered decision-making: assessing the evidence in a way that banishes emotion and relies on reason (which is why we encourage students to write plainly and clearly, without too much rhetorical flourish), and then explaining that reasoning and evidence to a third partly clearly and convincingly.

>What is being taught here is thus a detached, careful form of analysis and decision-making and then a set of communication skills to present that information.

Just to clarify here, are you saying this is something that is the product of studying the humanities, but not a product of non-humanities courses?

If not, then this point boils down to ‘humanities courses also offer SOME of the benefits of stem courses’, which seems like a pretty thin argument in defense of their continued funding.

If, on the other hand, you’re saying that STEMs do not involve careful, impartial and detached analysis based on data, and then communicating the information to others in a precise understandable way, then you’ve defined STEM topics so narrowly as to exclude research publications. All scientific research is a conversation.

>In the meantime, it seems to me no accident that as the funding for the humanities, and the social importance placed on a broad humanistic education, has dwindled, it has produced a matching decline in the richness of our cultural products that at this point has been broadly noticed: more and more sequels or remakes of things that aren’t even very old yet; the same handful of properties and themes flogged to death with precious little in the way of innovation.

This is a pretty weak argument as well; look at 1920’s cinema and you’ll see tons of sequels and adaptations, to the point where even contemporary newspaper comics have numerous complaints about the plague of poor adaptations. So cinema, at least, has always done it. Go back a century further, and stories that were popular with the general public, like “Varney the Vampire” don’t reflect any sort of lost cultural era of literary innovation.

You say the sequel/remake problems started happening in the 1950’s, though. Over the course of 1935-1948, Universal put out SEVEN sequels to Frankenstein (which was, of course, an adaptation of the play from four years earlier, which was itself an adaptation).

But, as you’re the one touting that reasoning based on evidence is the benefit of the humanties education you received, I’d love to see your work. I assume you’ve put your money where your mouth is and have done an actual analysis rather than going off your ‘gut feeling’?

Overall, however, the biggest issue I have is that your post – as such – is structured with the implicit assumption that people with scientific training should be ruled over by those without. You either state, or heavily imply, that mathematicians are incapable of making ethical decisions, that scientists are incapable of asking bigger questions, and that the problem with our covid response is not that the people organizing this scientific project are scientifically illiterate, but that the *wrong* scientifically illiterate people are in charge.

The critical distinction here isn’t between people educated in STEM fields and people educated in the humanities. It’s between people educated in the humanities and people not.

The average physicist has more training in the humanities than the average non-physicist, after all. And the average sociologist has more training in STEM fields than the average non-sociologist. Most people are not any kind of academic.

People, including scientists, are going to be ruled over by some group of people. And it’ll be better for everyone if that group is well-versed in history, sociology, law, economics, philosophy, and language. So the humanities are necessary.

Though it is worth noting that some of the stuff a leader should know is generally considered STEM. Statistics and environmental science, notably.

I notice that you said “data” whereas Bret said “evidence”. Data is a kind of evidence, of course, but it’s not the only kind, nor does a facility with handling data equate to facility with handling other kinds of evidence.

I’ve wondered how much history might have changed if someone had the idea of representative democracy back in ‘ancient’ times. Seems to me that they didn’t have an idea of something that could scale the way the early US did — spanning 800×1000 miles with no communication better than the printing press and maybe the occasional pigeon. (I.e. well before the railroad or electric telegraph or even the US pony express.)

“political decisions have to be made by a smaller group of people.”

With a large population, the deliberation and detailed decisions have to be made by a small group; the people at large can still approve or strike down proposed decisions once spelled out. Modern Switzerland uses this: a conventional legislature writes laws, but it can be put to popular referendum within a few months if enough people object. I’ve often imagined a system where changes to the criminal or tax laws automatically have to go to referendum.

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Faith in Humanities restored! Very compelling post, which shows what it says by doing it.

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>the study of the humanities creates a certain level of diffused knowledge in the society that is available to everyone.

You go on to and talk about Rock&Roll and Hollywood. How they made the Soviet Union collapse. These are greatly limited by copyright law, itself an extension of patent law. The idea behind patent law was that it would grant an inventor a period of exclusive use, and later it would expire and it would enrich public domain.

It is now common for copyright to last 70 years after the death of the writer or artist. And that can be extended on a case by case basis. It is often enough to make a work irrelevant. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954, 67 years ago! LOTR is copyrighted. Peter Jackson’s movies are copyrighted.

The bulk of popular culture, the de facto culture, is not Homer, Machiavelli, Chopin, or even Tom Sawyer. It’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Kanye West, Home Alone, Die Hard, The Witcher, Spiderman, Dr House or Call of Duty. They’re overwhelmingly patented. There’s no common culture. There are cultures and bubbles.

STEM inventors have it easy as they can literally show an invention used by everyone or by a few important people and explain their working principles. They’re tangible. Humanities ‘inventions’ each require an essay to defend. Besides, we live in a post-truth, post-expert era. Anyone can claim anything on the internet, especially if you have a charismatic personality. On youtube, to a regular joe, anti-vaccer looks just as good as a person highly educated in humanities. We can spend hours arguing how much merit there is in Jordan Peterson’s lectures or how much he uses word salad tactic, using language to distance, intimidate and confuse instead of bridging gaps and illuminating. There’s no straightforward (like a mechanical device) way to test which parts of Peterson’s lectures are valuable. Mechanical contraptions can be taken apart into their base mechanisms. You can’t trivially take Rashomon apart and get Citizen Kane. Wise leaders might benefit from illuminating classic works, but that’s hard and time-consuming to prove to a simple citizen.

People aren’t even interested in facts (knowledge) much anymore. They’re happy with opinions. The more radical and emotional, the better.

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I agree that the typical justification for the humanities is not solid. I wonder if there is value in tracing the genealogy of that justification, because it answers the question “Why should you study the humanities?” not “Why should society value the humanities?” The common justification has a little moralizing in it – you should study humanities because it is a morally good thing to do so. But I wonder if that is because it is the Western Tradition [of the elite], and at the time it was created, it was an essential part of being a good elite. Hence the idea that it is a moral necessity. I think Bret correctly identified that it is not a sufficient justification for society valuing (and government funding of) the humanities.

Corollary: Many historical rulers were smart. Most historical rulers studied humanities. Many smart historical rulers emphasized the study of humanities (as part of my hypothesis above regarding it being a moral good for elites). Thus, there is some good reason to think that humanities have value for rulers. If so, we should educate the rulers of America in humanities. Who are the rulers in a democracy?

I think it’s absolutely critical to address your responses to the actual question asked, and I appreciate Bret making a solid case for actually funding humanities.

Let me make another case, possibly in a similar vein. My background: I went to a liberal arts college, but got degrees in mathematics and biochemistry. However, a couple years out from college, I now work for a major consulting firm.

What does America value? What defines our culture? No moral judgement here, but America is about money. Everything is America is about money. (I had another comment about the driving factor behind movie construction in Hollywood being money, but it was too long so I cut it). I guess I can justify this statement if somebody wants me to, but I honestly feel like it doesn’t need justification. If I’m wrong, let me have it.

Money in America flows to the most valued members of society. I know what you’re thinking: “Programmers! Engineers! Essentially STEM people.” No, it’s their managers. It’s always the managers who get paid. Programmers and Engineers get paid more than most other workers, but managers are the largest people group who makes serious amounts of money. Obviously tech company founders tend to amass enormous assets, but (1) They are a very select group of people, and (2) They usually stop programming and start managing pretty fast. I don’t even think companies are very good at identifying good managers (Although I’m pretty sure most research has indicated that managers with good people skills pretty generally enhances team performance). But they do recognize that managing people is a more valuable skill than technical ability. On the same note, it always amazes me the ridiculous amount money that consulting companies bring in for having so much less technical ability than the big tech companies. My guess is that much of it is based on strong communication and people skills that make clients comfortable with our technology, more so than it is based on superiority of our technology.

The point here is that people are convinced to spend money, not by technology, but rather by techniques designed to appeal to people. No matter how fancy the technological edifices we construct are, they’re still pretty generally all about people. (Facebook and Google run ad networks based on monetizing people’s preferences!)

I feel like I am missing a logical step here, but I think the implication is that if we want any individual person to succeed in attracting money in America, we need that person to understand people. At least in theory, if we want the whole community of Americans to succeed, we need the whole community of Americans to understand people. I think what Bret has pointed out, again and again, is just how radically different, and how constantly the same people are, and how much we need to directly study these samenesses and differences in order to actually understand people.

(I have further thoughts on how STEM will fail to do this – I think businesses in America are a great place to look for the inability of academic STEM to grasp the world with the totality that it typically desires, but this comment is way too long already)

Patricia Crone in Pre-Industrial Societies talked about education in elite culture being a way to keep the elite as a coherent elite, despite being thinly spread over a diversity of peasants. Then you can have mass education as part of a nationalist program, to make a ‘nation’ out of the masses. But if your core value is pluralism then it’s hard to tell everyone to read the same books, unless you can do that as part of inculcating the value of pluralism… Or things like democracy; I’ve headcanoned that Bujold’s Beta Colony has a strong education in “why democracy is good” (pointing to things like accountability and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, not just moralizing) and “how democracies have failed”, along with education in marketing techniques (to inoculate people against them), cognitive biases, etc.

First of all, great post and great blog.

I think 21st century American politics cries out for better humanities education. We see a lot of disadvantaged (by technology, globalization, capitalist system etc.) people unaible to channel their political interests through existing structures and politicians and “thought leaders” unable to find a reasonable approach to meet those needs. 2020 elections and especially what followed is just a symptom, but the one that should have been taken seriously and yet everything is primitivized to bad Trump and treasonous rioters.

It doesn’t mean that the current academic structure is fit for the purpose. The non-humanities solution is to make some semi-random clear break and solve one problem by creating a hundred more. More humanities-informed approach (I am a stem person myself, mind) is to understand that institutions grow and the best way is to give them more resources and to set a clear purpose than to try to micromanage who to hire and how to teach classes.

Two more comments.

Have we absorbed the lessons of WWI? It seems that the world powers are just as capable to walk into a major war through militarism and bricksmanship as 100 years ago and just as unable to and conflicts by negotiation. If anything there is some ability to freeze conflicts (better than keep fighting!) like in the West Bank, Cyprus, Eastern Ukraine. Some smart humanitarians have to help here!

Soviet system didn’t collapse because of Hollywood and rock-n-roll. I never studied the details, but lived through it. Mainly, the majority was disappointed with low living standards as compared to Western consumerism and inability of the sklerotic system to move forward. Just like in Western Europe “socialism didn’t work”, but there was no mechanism to change it (relatively) gently.

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I’m reminded of times, online, when people — college educated people– have said things like, “College education is valuable because it teaches critical thinking.” Usually, just that statement, nothing else supporting it. Which makes the statement ironic, because by failing to provide any evidence for their claim that college improves faculties for critical thought, they are demonstrating the exact opposite of their claim: by making explanations without reason, without evidence, they are showing that they themselves have some significant deficits in critical reasoning.

We see assertions like that throughout this argument. That education in the humanities improves leadership ability over education in other domains or no formal education at all. Where is the evidence?

I don’t agree that humanities and science are inherently different domains, that they use different kinds of evidence, etc. Science has regularly had to use qualitative evidence, as for the identification of Saturn’s rings. As in history, science uses the best kind of evidence it can muster. Where that evidence is not as great as we’d like, which comes often from limitations due to timeframe, ethics, budget, we still do what we can, understanding that we’re not saying definitively– we’re *never* saying definitively. Philosophical descriptions of the “scientific method” have been criticized for ignoring absolutely tons of science. Anthropology is an example that does not typically involve any experiments. I find it humorous that in these comments, sociology is provided as an example of the humanities, when some professors, of science *or* humanities, might take offense at that; nevertheless, I think there’s more than a grain of truth to it. There is no hard border between the sciences and the humanities.

And while our art is definitely inspired by domains studied by the humanities, that is a very different thing than claiming that art is dependent on the humanities. Absent written history, absent literacy itself, people still made art. You’ve demonstrated very well that 300 has nearly no historical basis– yet, it was still made, and it’s still good, in the sense that it’s fun, that it’s enjoyable, and that it’s inspiring, at least, to some people.

There is another defense of the humanities: they are *fun*! Do we study to live, or do we live to study? This may not be convincing to some of the rich people providing funding, but it *should* be. Knowledge, inquiry, is not just an instrument to other values. For many of us, it is a primary value, a good in and of itself. Should it come before lives? Probably not, not in my opinion (but I don’t believe that’s an objectively answerable question), but I think you’d agree with that anyways, that if we are ever making an explicit choice between people surviving and people studying history, that we should probably pick the surviving thing, regardless of the practical benefits of the study of the humanities. Yet, not all choices are between those two, at least, not explicitly.

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Thanks for this post! Certainly changed my perspective on the humanities, especially as a mathematician who often hasn’t been able to appreciate the humanities in the past.

I can’t help but think that merely funding the humanities is not enough. What most people want out of college is a better job (e.g. https://news.gallup.com/reports/226457/why-higher-ed.aspx ). And humanities are famous for not really giving good job prospects (law degrees being the exception). For the benefits you’re arguing for to come to fruition, people actually have to choose humanities. What practical jobs could the humanities train people for?

I can’t help but think the answer is already contained in this blog: content creator. Why couldn’t humanities majors train people to be YouTubers, and bloggers, and podcasters, and influencers? Heck, the humanities already trains people to be authors and essayists. But pamphlets and books are no longer the dominant medium of communication. So perhaps the humanities also need to adapt.

History majors actually already do fine in the broader economy – the idea that humanities degrees don’t have good job prospects is a myth. See: https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/why-study-history/careers-for-history-majors/what-can-you-do-with-that-history-degree and https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/april-2017/history-is-not-a-useless-major-fighting-myths-with-data

With respect, my graduating class (2009) fared very poorly and humanities majors took the brunt of the unemployment and underemployment, with engineers and economics majors weathering the storm. Those who doubled down and went on to pursue a PhD in a humanities discipline, reasoning that the job market would improve by the time they graduated, instead faced a collapsing academic job market by the time they completed their doctorates. Those who braved years of underemployment to carve out some sort of niche generally did better than those who had chosen the PhD route.

I studied history and found it immensely fulfilling. My fiancée studied philosophy. We are now both software engineers, her by way of a masters degree and myself by way of self study. It is undoubtedly true that our humanities backgrounds aid our careers in small ways, yet this is insufficient to justify them, because our careers would not be possible with a humanities degree alone. An undergraduate degree is an immense investment and it is reasonable to expect a return on that investment. Given the staggering costs of higher education, assessing a field of study on the basis of whether its graduates are able to achieve any gainful employment at all is wholly inadequate.

Several of my friends who have backgrounds in the humanities, including graduate degrees, subsequently transitioned to software engineering and found the first stable, well paid work with good benefits in their careers through doing so. The foreign language and research skills they acquired through their academic training have little bearing on their present employment.

I continue to read academic history today; I even audited Timothy Snyder’s survey course on the history of Ukraine last fall, doing all of the reading (several books!) and watching all of the lectures. I also continue to pursue several of my other undergraduate interests, such as rock climbing and hiking. I find all of these activities enriching and worthwhile. None of these things pay the bills, however. Knowledge of Python, Rust, and Linux do so.

I support funding the humanities as a matter of policy, because I think exposure to the humanities (history in particular) is critical to fostering the sort of informed critical thinking that is imperative in a democracy and because the production of valuable scholarship requires academic infrastructure and support. That said, if someone asked me whether they should major in a humanities discipline as an undergraduate, I would simply say: don’t do it. It pains me to say this, but I think it needs to be said.

Humanities at Illinois

Why studying the humanities matters, why study the humanities, the world needs humanists.

In a world that’s increasingly automated, people who can use words effectively are vital to building relationships and perceiving new possibilities. Countless leaders agree—for example, Steve Jobs has mentioned that "it's in Apple's DNA that technology married with liberal arts married with the humanities yields the result that makes our heart sing."

When you graduate with a humanities degree , you'll have a skill set that employers are actively looking for—humanities students gain expertise in creative thinking, communication, problem solving, relationship building, and more. No matter what you want to do, choosing a humanities major from the University of Illinois will prepare you for a bright future.

Hear from English and Latina/Latino studies alumna Issy why humanities education is important for all students, read on to learn more, and then apply to a humanities major at the University of Illinois.

What are the humanities?

What is the study of humanities ? Humanities involve exploring human life's individual, cultural, societal, and experiential aspects. Studying humanities helps us understand ourselves, others, and the world. If you're interested in humanities, you'll find a variety of subjects to choose from.

The objects of the humanities are the values we embrace, the stories we tell to celebrate those values, and the languages we use to tell those stories. The humanities cover the whole spectrum of human cultures across the entire span of human history.

The College of LAS offers dozens of humanities majors , so as a student at UIUC you're sure to find a path that's right for you. Many of your classes will be small enough to allow intense, in-depth discussion of important topics, guided by teachers who are leading experts in their fields. You will learn from people who know you and take a personal interest in your success. This experiential, interactive learning is deeply satisfying, a source of enjoyment that is one good reason to major in the humanities.

What you learn also will be useful in any career you pursue. Specialized training for a specific profession has a very short shelf life, but the knowledge and skills that come with studying the humanities never go out of date.

To study the humanities is to cultivate the essential qualities you will need in order to achieve your personal and professional goals as you help to create a better society for all human beings.

Why are the humanities important?

Studying the humanities allows you to understand yourself and others better, offering better contexts to analyze the human experience.

So, why is humanities important, and why is it critical to study them? Human values are influenced by religion, socioeconomic background, culture, and even geographical location. The humanities help us understand the core aspects of human life in context to the world around us.

The study of humanities also helps us better prepare for a better future. They teach you skills in the areas of critical thinking, creativity, reasoning, and compassion. Whatever your focus, you'll learn the stories that shape our world, helping you see what connects all of us!

W hat is humanities in college ? What will your courses look like? Just a few popular humanities majors include English, philosophy, gender studies, and history. And while these studies might center around different topics, settings, and even periods in human history, they all share a common goal of examining how we are connected.

Humanities studies may seem less concrete than STEM studies, and some might consider them a luxury we can't afford in a culture that values capital over society. This raises some common questions: Why is humanities important right now? Is it even relevant to our lives today? The answer to those questions lie in how the humanities help us in understanding human culture , emotions, and history—which is vital now more than ever!

As technology advances—such as with artificial intelligence and machine learning becoming more common—it might seem like human beings are becoming less central to the world's workings. That may lead to asking, "why is humanities important if humans are required less in day-to-day operations?" The reality, though, is that rapid changes and development in our world only make the constant aspects of human nature more crucial to explore and celebrate. A deep understanding of humanity gained by studying the humanities helps us not only navigate but also thrive through these changes. The humanities are vital to preserving the core of what makes us human.

So, why study humanities?

What is the study of humanities going to do for my career? Why is humanities important for my work ?

These are two questions commonly asked when students consider an academic journey in the humanities. The journey from classroom to career may not seem as direct for humanities students as those following more defined career paths. However, it’s that nebulous nature that make them such excellent choices. The skills you learn from your studies, like creative thinking, emotional intelligence, and communication, are essential to any career and industry.

And if you are asked, "What is humanities studies ' advantage compared to more 'concrete' subjects like math or science?," you can simply answer that the humanities make you stand out. Employers highly value the nuanced skills gained from humanities studies . In today's rapidly evolving job market, the ability to think critically, communicate effectively, and understand complex social and cultural contexts can set candidates apart.

Ready to take the next step?

You’ll be ready for any future you can imagine by earning a degree in the humanities from the University of Illinois. Apply to a humanities major today!

April 14, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication, why we need the humanities.

The word itself contains the answer

Nagasaki on September 24, 1945, six weeks after the city was destroyed by American atom bomb (Lynn P. Walker, Jr./Wikimedia Commons)

A little over five years ago, a pair of huge, exquisitely crafted L-shaped antennas in Louisiana and Washington State picked up the chirping echo of two black holes colliding in space a billion years ago—and a billion light years away. In that echo, astrophysicists found proof of Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves—at a cost of more than $1 billion. If you ask why we needed this information, what was the use of it, you might as well ask—as Ben Franklin once did—“what is the use of a newborn baby?” Like a newborn’s potential, the value of a scientific discovery is limitless. It cannot be calculated, and it needs no justification.

But the humanities do. Once upon a time, no one asked why we needed to study the humanities because their value was considered self-evident, just like the value of scientific discovery. Now these two values have sharply diverged. Given the staggering cost of a four-year college education, which now exceeds $300,000 at institutions like Dartmouth College (where I taught for nearly 40 years), how can we justify the study of subjects such as literature? The Summer 2021 newsletter of the Modern Language Association reports a troubling statistic about American colleges and universities: from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded in modern languages and literature has plunged by 29 percent. “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” asks the article. But here’s a more pragmatic question: what sort of dividends does the study of literature pay, out there in the real world?

Right now, the readiest answer to this question is that it stretches the mind by exposing it to many different perspectives and thus prepares the student for what is widely thought to be the most exciting job of our time: entrepreneurship. In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the story of how a rural Mississippi family comes to bury its matriarch is told from 15 points of view. To study such a novel is to be forced to reckon with perspectives that are not just different but radically contradictory, and thus to develop the kind of adaptability that it takes to succeed in business, where the budding entrepreneur must learn how to satisfy customers with various needs and where he or she must also be ever ready to adapt to changing needs and changing times.

But there’s a big problem with this way of justifying the study of literature. If all you want is entrepreneurial adaptability, you can probably gain it much more efficiently by going to business school. You don’t need a novel by Faulkner—or anyone else.

Nevertheless, you could argue that literature exemplifies writing at its best, and thus trains students how to communicate in something other than tweets and text messages. To study literature is not just to see the rules of grammar at work but to discover such things as the symmetry of parallel structure and the concentrated burst of metaphor: two prime instruments of organization. Henry Adams once wrote that “nothing in education is more astonishing than the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Literature shows us how to animate facts, and still more how to make them cooperate, to work and dance together toward revelation.

Yet literature can be highly complex. Given its complexity, given all the ways in which poems, plays, and novels resist as well as provoke our desire to know what they mean, the study of literature once again invites the charge of inefficiency. If you just want to know how to make the written word get you a job, make you a sale, or charm a venture capitalist, you don’t need to study the gnomic verses of Emily Dickinson or the intricate ironies of Jonathan Swift. All you need is a good textbook on writing and plenty of practice.

Why then do we really need literature? Traditionally, it is said to teach us moral lessons, prompting us to seek “the moral of the story.” But moral lessons can be hard to extract from any work of literature that aims to tell the truth about human experience—as, for instance, Shakespeare does in King Lear . In one scene of that play, a foolish but kindly old man has his eyes gouged out. And at the end of the play, what happens to the loving, devoted, long-suffering Cordelia—the daughter whom Lear banishes in the first act? She dies, along with the old king himself. So even though all the villains in the play are finally punished by death, it is not easy to say why Cordelia too must die, or what the moral of her death might be.

Joseph Conrad once declared that his chief aim as a novelist was to make us see. Like Shakespeare, he aimed to make us recognize and reckon with one of the great contradictions of humanity: that only human beings can be inhumane. Only human beings take children from their parents and lock them in cages, as American Border Patrol agents did to Central American children two years ago; only human beings burn people alive, as ISIS has done in our own time; only human beings use young girls as suicide bombers, as Boko Haram did 44 times in one recent year alone.

As a refuge from such horrors, literature can offer us visions or at least glimpses of beauty, harmony, and love. They are part of what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry”—compensation for the misery, cruelty, and brutality that human beings ceaselessly inflict on one another. But literature at its most powerful is never just a balloon ride to fantasy, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Rather than taking flight from our inhumanity, great literature confronts it even while somehow keeping alive its faith in our humanity. What is the moral of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved , the story of a formerly enslaved Black woman who killed her own infant daughter to spare her from a life of slavery and sexual exploitation? In a world of merciless inhumanity, can infanticide become an expression of love?

This is the kind of question literature insists on asking. At the heart of the humanities lies humanity, which stubbornly insists on measuring everything in terms of its impact on human life. Seventy-six years ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer midwifed the birth of the most destructive weapon the world had ever seen—a weapon that made America invincible, ended World War II, and saved countless American lives. But the atomic bombs that America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki incinerated more than 200,000 men, women, and children. That is why Oppenheimer said afterward: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

In saying this, Oppenheimer was not just radically unscientific. He was potentially treasonous, disloyal to a government bent on military supremacy above all else. Refusing to join the next heat in the arms race, the development of the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance and spent the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion.

But his response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrates the kind of humanity that the humanities aim to nurture. We need this humanity now more than ever, when the diabolical cruelty of terrorism is compounded by the destructiveness of our very own drone strikes, which too often hit not only the guilty but also the innocent—the victims of “collateral damage,” the human life we sacrifice to our military ends.

We need literature to bear witness to such sacrifices—the lives we take and also the minds we deform in the process of making war. One of those minds is portrayed in a book called Redeployment , a collection of stories about American soldiers in Iraq written by Phil Klay, a veteran U.S. Marine officer. In one of his stories, a lance corporal says to a chaplain, “The only thing I want to do is kill Iraqis. That’s it. Everything else is just, numb it until you can do something. Killing hajjis is the only thing that feels like doing something. Not just wasting time.”

Where is the humanity here? This soldier has just enough left to realize that he has been weaponized, turned into a killing machine. Literature thus strives to speak both for and to whatever shred of humanity may survive the worst of our ordeals. In The Plague , a novel he wrote during the Second World War, Albert Camus symbolically portrays the war as a bubonic plague striking an Algerian city. The story is told by a doctor who struggles—often in vain—to save all the lives he can, though hundreds of men, women, and children will die before the plague has run its course. In the end, he says, this tale records what had to be done and what must be “done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts.”

If these words seem uncannily resonant for our time, consider what the doctor says about how the fight against terror must be waged. “Despite their personal afflictions,” he says, it must be waged “by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”

Having spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism with bullets and bombs, we need literature and the humanities now more than ever, because they strive to heal, to nurture the most priceless of all our possessions: our humanity.

James A. W. Heffernan , an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the author of Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (2014) and other books. His Flashpoint: Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II will appear next year.

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Why study Humanities?

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates.

As a Humanities student, you’ll bring artistic, historical, critical and philosophical reflection to bear while you explore and examine our past and present, our thought, our cultures, and societies, as well as our existence. You’ll learn about the world and learn about yourself.

Gain knowledge and learn to question.
Grapple with how to make sense of experiences, how to achieve understanding, and how to live well.
Learn how to think, inquire, weigh evidence, read critically, make arguments, write and speak thoughtfully.
Practice the skills you learn in the classroom, lab, theatre and studio through community engagement, international experience, field study and internships

Why Humanities at McMaster?

Dean Swett reflects on the top ten things that students say when we ask them “Why did you choose Humanities at Mac?”

Humanities at McMaster

Join our close-knit community in the Faculty of Humanities -- where you aren't just a number. There are lots of supports to help you succeed, both while you're in university, and beyond.

That is the power of the arts — to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common; to help us understand our history and imagine our future; to give us hope in the moments of struggle; and to bring us together when nothing else will.

— MICHELLE OBAMA FORMER FIRST LADY, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Humanities grads are needed now more than ever. The world needs people who have these essential skills.

Think critically

Lead change

Exercise social and emotional intelligence

Communicate effectively

Think ethically and make a difference

The question isn’t "What can I do with a Humanities education?" It's "What can't I do?"

While the skills you’ll learn while you’re at McMaster are essential for the 21st century workplace, a university education is far more than vocational training: it’s designed to foster personal growth and intellectual development.

Remember – in Humanities, there isn’t always a direct link between the subject you study and the career path you follow after graduating.

The academic fields that study the human condition – prepare young adults for the most essential aspects of work: getting along with other people, understanding multiple points of view and coming to terms with one’s place in the world. As such, students of all majors need exposure to the humanities to be adequately — and practically — prepared for the working world. The skills learned in the humanities are practical, and, even better they are timeless.

— Elizabeth H. Bradley President of Vassar College

Learn about us

Humanities during a time of global change, investing in humanities is key to post-pandemic recovery.

In our rapidly changing world, government policymakers will need to recognize the important insights gained through humanities and social sciences research to drive COVID-19 recovery and secure a better future for Canadians.

Why Science Needs The Humanities To Solve Climate Change

Going beyond science, humanists can define cultural forces driving climate change and uncover the root of complex problems. Society needs humanists and their “soft” technologies – intangible tools for solving problems based on non-scientific knowledge.

Humanities provides career benefits

Oxford study: Humanities benefits young people's future careers and wider society. New research shows how studying the humanities benefits young people’s future careers and wider society – despite challenges of COVID-19 and employment changes.

Literature is unbelievably helpful because no matter what business you are in, you are dealing with interpersonal relationships. It gives you an appreciation of what makes people tick.

— Michael Eisner Former Chairman and CEO, the Walt Disney Company

Many humanities graduates become professional chameleons of sorts. We leave university with these highly developed critical thinking and communication skills and can apply them to any number of industries.

Alex Zavarise '17

BA History and Classics

To think critically about the world is a skill far more valued in the workplace than you can imagine.

Nichole Fanara '14

Combined Honours in English and History

My program at McMaster provided me with the opportunity to commune with students and professors who encouraged interdisciplinary approaches to creating knowledge.

Casey Mecija '13

Combined Honours Communication and Multimedia Studies

Employers across Canada and around the world choose Humanities graduates because of their adaptability, flexibility, empathy and critical thinking skills -- essential knowledge in the 21st-century workplace.

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How Studying the Humanities Helps Humanity

More from our inbox:, tuberville’s blockade, and a problem in the senate, living with grief, ethical issues raised by a gilgo beach murders documentary.

To the Editor:

“ Stop Corporatizing My Students ,” by Beth Ann Fennelly (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 15), is a heartfelt reminder that humanistic studies are critical to developing thoughtful, compassionate and functional citizens. Yes, developing skills to make a living is essential, but, as Ms. Fennelly writes, learning to “fail better” and dream must come first, “for a while anyway.”

During a time of immense technological change, war and political division, nothing is more important than having the intellectual confidence to challenge what you see, hear and read with thoughtful questions. Humanistic study provides young students with an opportunity to develop their intellectual confidence.

We should want our students to graduate intellectually and emotionally confident. That confidence is the foundation for success in the workplace. Too often, we think that skills solve problems, but, in fact, problem-solving starts by asking the right question first.

I taught undergraduates and graduate students for over 25 years, and nothing lights up a classroom more than a student who, for the first time, steps forward to address a problem with their newfound intellectual confidence.

Nao Matsukata Bethesda, Md.

As I apply for college, a constant question in my mind is whether I should major in a lucrative STEM field or in a “useless” humanities field. I want to expand my worldview, “dream, try, fail, try harder, fail better” in a humanities field, but college costs are prohibitively high.

My education should make me a better person, an educated citizen, not just a better part of some machine. We recognize that high schools should be offering a full education, yet we deny the same for expensive universities.

It cannot become the privilege of the wealthy to study the humanities and become fuller people in college.

Toby Shu Englewood, Colo.

In 1978 I graduated from college with a degree in philosophy. One might consider this a useless degree. Yes, it took me three years after graduation to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life, but I then got a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. I have had a successful career in private practice as a psychotherapist for 40 years and have founded and run an online school for professional continuing education as well as a nonprofit organization.

I use the thinking and listening skills that I learned in my philosophy classes every single day in both my private practice and my other businesses. I learned discipline and time management by going to class every day and completing assignments in a timely manner. The writing skills that I had to develop as well have been invaluable to me and my career.

I also believe that the critical thinking skills learned in liberal arts programs protect democracy and freedom.

Christina Veselak Wayne, W.Va.

As an astrophysicist, I study distant denizens of the dark universe. Similar to Beth Ann Fennelly’s experience as a creative writing teacher, people often point out that my work is useless. I usually smile and say, “I completely agree, but some of the most useless endeavors are among the most important.”

Rebecca Oppenheimer New York The writer is a curator and a professor of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.

Re “ Military Promotions Approved After Tuberville Lifts His Blockade ” (front page, Dec. 6):

There must be a collective sigh of relief within the Beltway, and most certainly at the Pentagon, now that Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, has dropped his blockade of most military promotions over the policy of abortion access for military personnel.

While this senator’s action was certainly reprehensible, the Senate did not even attempt to address the real issue. It’s the Senate’s archaic rules that give an individual senator the power to put a hold on any nomination.

The real issue is why an individual senator has such dictatorial power. Interestingly, neither party is willing to open that Pandora’s box because all senators relish it. That is the real problem.

Subir Mukerjee Olympia, Wash.

Re “ It’s OK to Never ‘Get Over’ Your Grief ,” by Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 3):

For those of us who lost a parent or sibling in childhood, the idea that we should one day be over our grief is not just hurtful, but harmful as well.

I applaud this guest essay and would point out that encouraging people to move past their grief is particularly bad for kids who may blame themselves when they can’t. People who don’t understand this are usually those who have yet to live through the loss of someone they depended on for self-definition.

Dr. Slawkowski-Rode correctly blames Freud for our continued psychological approach to loss, but after Freud lost his daughter Sophie, even he changed his thinking on grief. Unfortunately, his earlier writings were already widely read and would go on to influence generations of clinicians.

For people who have grown up grieving, loss is part of who we are. We can no more “get past it” than erase ourselves.

Ann Faison Pasadena, Calif. The writer is the host of the podcast “Are We There Yet? Understanding Adolescent Grief” and is the author of “Dancing With the Midwives: A Memoir of Art and Grief.”

Re “ Outcry Follows True-Crime Deal for Wife of Gilgo Beach Suspect ” (front page, Nov. 29):

That Peacock, the streaming service owned by NBCUniversal, is paying the family of an alleged serial killer for participation in a documentary series about the murders, and had to outbid other avaricious media companies equally eager to capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for true-crime programming, the more salacious the better, is as disturbing as it is unsurprising.

Until very recently, true-crime stories were relegated to scripted movies and television productions, not because studios and networks had taken the moral high ground, but because documentaries historically did not garner high enough TV ratings or pull in large enough audiences to theaters to make it profitable to produce them.

Streaming has changed all that. It’s a bottomless pit, in constant need of content, the cheaper and the more likely to attract audiences the better. Unscripted programming, in particular documentaries, fits the bill perfectly.

Lost in all of this are the victims’ families, who not only stand to be retraumatized by the documentary series but will also see the family of the alleged killer, as well as their attorneys, reportedly being paid large sums of money. They also worry, with justification, that the documentary series might affect the trial.

NBCUniversal and its fellow media services should stop doing such programming out of a sense of decency, but obviously won’t. It’s up to viewers to give them a reason they’ll immediately understand: Stop tuning in.

Greg Joseph Sun City, Ariz. The writer is a retired television critic.

Why study humanities?

Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Arts and the Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

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Raimond Gaita does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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This is a revised excerpt of a talk given to students at the Inaugural Australian Youth Humanities Forum, hosted at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus.

After two days at this fine conference, you will know more than I could tell you about the humanities - about which disciplines usually go under that heading, and all you can and can’t do with a degree in the humanities. So I won’t talk about such things, or about how a degree in the humanities might help or hinder your career opportunities. I have little to offer on that last, important, concern. My experience has been very different from what yours is likely to be, in large part because I didn’t have to work for money as a student, except during the holidays.

Also I have been extraordinarily lucky at every stage of my life, from primary school, through my years at King’s College University of London until now in my present appointment at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne. I’m glad to be able to call this university my alma mater, drawing on the affectionate resonances of that expression, because I received a wonderful education here as an undergraduate in the mid to late ‘60s. A sense of the public responsibilities of academics was strong at the university at the time.

In the letter of invitation to speak today I was asked to tell you what role an education in the humanities has played in my engagement in public life. In keeping with that request, I’ll speak personally. I’m a philosopher, so I will tell you a little about what philosophy means to me and the role it has played in my life – in my life as an academic, my life as a “public intellectual” (I hate that expression) and, differently from both, my experience as the author of Romulus My Father , an elegy to my father that was made into a film starring Eric Bana and the miraculous Kodi Smit-McPhee. Some of you will have studied the book at school.

In 1989 Robert Manne asked me to write a column for Quadrant, a magazine of politics and culture that he was then editing. I wrote more than 50 columns, each approximately 2,200 words long. In them, I reflected, in the context of political life and public life more generally, on ideas developed in Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception , which was directed primarily to an academic audience. Most of my book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice , first published in 1999, draws on material from those columns.

In them – and in much else I have written - I was not just applying ideas developed in a theoretical, academic context to a more practical, public one. Rather, I was rethinking those ideas in the context of public life, always mindful that though most of my readers would not be philosophers, they were, I assumed, educated people who knew how hard it is to think seriously about most things that matter in life. Indeed, the most important lesson I try to teach my students is just how hard it is to think seriously, which means, really, to think at all in the sense we try to convey when we say with exasperation, “For God’s sake, think!”. One needs more than brainpower. Among other things, one also needs humility, courage and a deep spirit of truthfulness.

To explain some of what I attempted to do in those columns and in later writings, I will restrict myself to one example. In two columns written at greater length than usual, I wrote a qualified defence of the allegation in Bringing Them Home , the report on the stolen generations, that the crime against the children who bear that name is rightly called genocide. My argument was directed primarily to (please note “to” rather than “against”) those who believed such an allegation is absurd and offensive because the Holocaust is our paradigm of genocide. Those two columns proved highly controversial. They ended my time at Quadrant and contributed to the end of Robert Manne’s editorship.

It is a remarkable fact that 63 years after genocide was established as a crime in international law, people still argue about what it is. Disagreement about this is radical and sometimes bitter. Contributions to that debate won’t be worth much unless they are thoughtful about what it means to be rooted in a particular community.

To think about that is to think about the importance to peoples of their natural language, their history, their poetry and their song. Such thought is deepest, I believe, when it is steeped in the humanities, even when it goes beyond them, as anthropology does, for example. A sensibility nourished by the humanities enabled the great Australian anthropologist W H Stanner to see in the culture of Australia’s indigenous peoples “all the beauty of song, mime, dance and art of which human beings are capable”.

The discovery by many of the Western intelligentsia of moral or spiritual depth in practices and beliefs that had previously seemed to express only the superstitions of scientifically backward savages is an achievement of the latter half of the 20th century for which we must thankful. It amounted to a new capacity to see (as Stanner saw) in black cultures an ever-deepening responsiveness to the defining facts of the human condition – our mortality, our sexuality, our vulnerability to misfortune – and therefore to see them as cultures from which the West could learn.

I shall now change tack a little because I want to talk about Socrates. Or, more accurately, I’ll talk about the character Socrates in the dialogues of the great philosopher-poet Plato. Plato was a disciple of the historical Socrates, the philosopher who lived in Athens over 2500 years ago. He was troubled by what he called “the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy”.

Many people think Plato believed that he had resolved that quarrel in favour of philosophy. In Republic, he banned poets from the ideal state. But if that expressed his final, untroubled opinion, he could not have produced the great works of art that are his dialogues and given us Socrates, fully realised as a character rather than a mouthpiece for philosophical arguments. It is the character who has haunted the Western moral and political imagination, reflection about what it means to live the life of the mind and, more generally, on why we must strive for lucidity about the meanings of what we do, think and feel.

I belong to a relatively small group of philosophers who believe that moral and political philosophy become sterile when they do not engage creatively with art, especially with literature. The form of my work as much as – indeed inseparably from - its content has expressed that belief. The English philosopher Roger Scruton described The Philosopher’s Dog as an experiment in narrative philosophy. The same could be said of After Romulus . But though I have emphasised in my academic and other work, and many times in more public fora, that philosophy is impoverished when its conception of what it is to think rigorously does not include a sensibility nourished by art, I have also stressed that art speaks to us only because it draws upon the background of a common understanding.

Obviously the discursive disciplines of the humanities contribute to that common understanding. Just as importantly, they play an indispensable role in clarifying its conceptual character. And it is the humanities, reflecting critically about the Holocaust and the brutalities of colonialism, that have probed, with sobering scepticism, the assumption that the humanities would humanise those who study them, or even make them relatively decent.

Perhaps you are already asking why I would talk to you about a philosopher who died 2500 years ago. You might think that the fact that I would even think of doing it is an example of the sterility of the humanities, evidence, indeed, that a graffitist had a point when he wrote above the paper rolls in the men’s toilets of the union of this university: “Humanities degrees. Feel free to take one.”

But to understand most of the disciplines of the humanities one needs to know that their history is not “just history”. Humanities scholars – certainly philosophers - engage critically with, and are nourished by, thinkers of the past as distant from us in time as the ancient Greeks. This has two great benefits. One is a treasure.

Firstly, reflective engagement with great thinkers and artists of the past enables one to live joyously - because one is given so much to love – in an extended continuous present. This, much more than the trappings of a reasonably successful academic career, makes me feel different from many friends who have not had the benefit of much education. Plato is my companion. So are Descartes and Kant, to name only a few great philosophers. Ditto for Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Bach. And, of course, there are others. I could not imagine my life without them.

Secondly, critical engagement with the past helps us to establish the kind of distance from the present that is necessary if we are even seriously to try, without self-deception, to resist becoming merely children of our times, in the pejorative sense of that expression. We exist in the present and hopefully we can love the world we are born into, but the present can be tyrannical unless our consciousness of it extends a long way into the past. We can dream of the future, and those dreams can sustain our struggles for a better world, but the future does not exist and no one knows how it will be. It cannot nourish us as only something real can do.

Dictators know this, which is why they rewrite history to suit their political ends and deny their subjects independent access to their past. They do it because they know that resistance to their rule will wither unless hope is nourished by trustworthy access to the past. People who fight against oppression need to know that their ideals are not mere dreams, that they have been inspired, at least in part, by something real to which sobriety requires them to be answerable.

Rather than alienating us from the times into which we are born, the past can yield to us a timeless love of the world that will protect us from cynicism if we are unfortunate to live in circumstances to which disillusionment appears to be the only truthful response. Sometimes people live in dark times.

In Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias, Socrates says that there is “nothing more important in youth or old age, than to discuss how one should live”. Note that he says that it is important to this discuss rather than just think about it. Some people think that is just silly and self-indulgent. The important thing is to get on with one’s life: one must be practical to survive in this world, they might say. But often, when misfortune strikes - when for example they are told that they have only a short time to live, or when someone dear to them suffers or dies – the very same people reassess what is most important to them.

Everyone knows this. But, of course, often we know it only in our heads, and even then only at the top of our heads, rather than in our bones. And if we come to understand it in our heads and our bones when misfortune strikes, we are prone to forget it when we recover. That is one reason why Plato says that the philosophers – by which he means lovers of wisdom, or to put it less portentously, those who want to be lucid about what really matters as distinct from what only appears to matter – cling in recollection to what they had once known.

It is therefore hardly practical, Socrates would say, to spend a large part of our lives devoting ourselves to things that, were we not blinded or intoxicated by relative good fortune, would appear not worth the sacrifices we make for them. In Romulus, My Father , I say that for my father nothing mattered more than to live his life decently, and I add that when I say “nothing” I mean nothing. He would never contrast the demands of morality, as he understood them, with what is practical. For him, nothing could be more practical than to try to rise to those demands.

He would not accept that sober realism requires one to accept that morality is well and good in its place, but that sometimes, if one is practical, one will subdue its voice and perhaps silence it altogether. The philosophical significance of his point, as I have understood it, though he would not put it as I have done – he had only four years of schooling - is that we should resist the ubiquitous attempts to hijack the very concept of the practical to relatively narrow material ambitions and the pursuit of status or prestige.

I have, therefore, been deeply touched by the fact that many students have responded well to the book when they studied it at VCE and HSE. I had not expected it. In an age that seems to admire nothing quite so much as cool urbanity, I expected that most students would respond uneasily, perhaps with distaste, to my father’s unnerving moral intensity. I am grateful that I have been mistaken.

I hope you don’t think that what I have said about the abuse of the concept of the practical is merely a “semantic matter”, in the pejorative sense of the phrase. It has been central to most of my work about morality and its relation to law and to politics. I have resisted attempts to commandeer the concept of the practical into the service of a narrow conception of realism in national and international politics and of the public role of a university. It is important that you think about this when you ask yourself, or when you are asked, perhaps by your parents: Is it practical to study the humanities?

Socrates was tried and sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens by his persistent questioning of their assumptions about morality and the place it might have in their lives. At his trial, he explained to the judges who sentenced him to death, but offered him a reprieve were he to stop philosophising, that he could not do so because, as he put it, “an unexamined life is not worthy of a human being”. That is sometimes translated as “an unexamined life is not worth living”, but I think the way I have put it is truer to his thought. Our humanity, he would say, is not given to us by virtue of belonging to a biological species; it is something we must rise to.

Often it is only in times of crisis that we realise that our humanity is a gift. We honour that gift and express our gratitude for it, by trying to be lucid about the meanings of what we do and suffer. Or, as a friend once said to me: “I try to live with my eyes open.”

I hope that I have now taken you to the point where you can see why Socrates would think that the humanities honour that gift. To enable them to do it is one of the most important of the public responsibilities of a university.

Had I time, I would explain why I would be dismayed if what I have said were taken as an attempt to revive the old war about “two cultures” – a war between the humanities and the sciences. The fundamental impact of science on our understanding of what it means to be human is undeniable. It has deepened immeasurably understanding of ourselves as creatures of the earth and as material beings in the universe.

Neuroscience has altered our understanding of the mind, and evolutionary psychology has had considerable influence on moral psychology and, through it, moral and political philosophy. Recent developments in technology have affected our lives directly in dramatic ways and altered our ways of thinking about and imagining ourselves. And just as importantly, when the natural sciences express a love of the beauty of the world – when, as Simone Weil put it, they manifest the spirit of truth in love - then as much as the humanities they offer to those engaged with them the kind of treasure of which I spoke earlier. Yet only when they are engaged with the humanities are the natural sciences able to contribute to an understanding of the human meaning of their discoveries – indeed of their meaning, period.

Romulus, My Father is a short book and it its prose is simple. I have been moved by how many people who are not at all educated have been touched by it. Yet it is a book that could only have been written by a philosopher. Indeed, I say of my father, that like Socrates, he believed that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. Perhaps not so evidently, it is written by someone whose sense of life has been shaped by Greek tragedy.

The novelist John Coetzee has written: “Gaita also clearly owes a great deal to Greece – to Greek literature even more than to Greek systematic philosophy.” He is right. In fact I say in After Romulus, published a couple of years ago, that tragedy shows a calm pity for the suffering it depicts. I say that I when I wrote Romulus, My Father I hoped that I could show the same pity towards the suffering of the people I wrote about.

The tone of Romulus, My Father is inseparable from that hope. The same is true, I think, of many of the responses to it and to the film. The suffering to which I referred was that of my mother, who killed herself at the age of 29 having suffered terribly from a mental illness, of her lover, Mitru, who killed himself two years before at the age of 27, driven to desperation by her infidelities, wild spending and incapacity to look after the child that had been born to them (all symptoms of her illness) and of my father who went mad three years later. I ask you to keep in mind those facts and the fact that the book was written by someone steeped in the humanities when I tell you a story that I first told in After Romulus.

When Romulus, My Father, was first published I read from it at a refuge for homeless people, reluctantly for I was aware that they came there for lunch, not for literature. At one stage a man, obviously mentally ill, called for me to stop. He raised his head, which he had held in his hands, and exclaimed: “God is in this book!” I remembered the times when, as a student, I worked in mental hospitals and was anxious about what he would do next. “I mean,” he explained, “that it’s filled with love.”

On that same day, five or six girls, prostitutes in the area, not one of them yet 20, asked me to read, again and again, about my mother. I read to them, passages I had not read before or have since in public because it pains me to do so. In my mother’s troubled life they saw something of their own and, I think, they saw her suffering, and what she shared with them, in the light of the love that the man who spoke before them said filled the book.

I am certain they would not repeatedly have asked me to read about my mother if they had detected in my portrayal of her what one critic called “a morally bankrupt woman”. The spiritual hunger that showed in their recognition that my mother was, like them, a deeply troubled soul, and the tribute by a man destitute of all worldly goods and achievements, bereft of all status and quite mad, moved and gratified me more than all the accolades the book and the film have received.

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Why Study the Humanities?

Main navigation, the value of a humanities degree: six students' views.

"Three years ago, we were all frosh in Stanford University's Structured Liberal Education program, a yearlong residential course that surveys the world's most important works of literature, art, theology, philosophy, and history. From there, each of us went on to major in some humanistic discipline. Now we are seniors, and with our eyes finally up from all the books, we face the specter of life after graduation.

What have we gained? What will we take with us when we leave? What is a major in the humanities worth? Should we measure worth by career utility or by some other value—cognitive, aesthetic, moral? By our skills or by our knowledge?

No doubt many students can attack those questions and reach the same breadth of benefits outside the humanities. At Stanford, many of our classmates are scientists, social scientists, and engineers, and we have great respect for and interest in their studies—not only for their work's clear practical applications but also for the ways in which those students grapple with the world. We argue that our education is just as significant, and just as irreplaceable, as theirs."

Read the full Chronicle of Higher Ed article

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The Value of the Humanities

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This book is a critical study of the justifications for the humanities that have been most influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and still exert persuasive power now. The main claims considered are: —that the humanities study the meaning-making practices of the culture, focusing on interpretation and evaluation, with an indispensable element of subjectivity; (relatedly) that there are grounds for discrimination here from the sciences and social sciences on the basis of the kind of work done, the culture of knowledge, and the character of the disciplines; —that the humanities are (laudably) at odds with, or at a remove from, instrumental use value; this has been a common line of resistance to political economists from Adam Smith onwards, and still tends to underwrite more recent descriptions of the humanities that demonstrate their contribution to the economy and to the social good; — that they contribute to the happiness of individuals and/or the general happiness of society; —that they are a force for democracy; —that they are good in themselves, or have value ‘for their own sake’. The Value of the Humanities has a dual purpose: it is a critical taxonomy, detailing the most commonly articulated arguments for the higher study of the humanities with the aim of clarifying their historical sources and lines of reasoning; it also seeks to test their validity for the present day, assessing their strengths and weaknesses and the part they can play in debate about the nature of public goods.

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Introduction: Why Study the Humanities?

The Humanities: Exploring What It Means to Be Human

The humanities can be described as the study of human experience and the way in which people define and document their experience through philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, politics, and language. Viewing the human experience through a humanities lens provides insights that extend beyond statistical data and field reports. Humanities facilitate our understanding of things we may never experience directly, by viewing people and events in the context of their surrounding circumstances. Incorporating context allows us to appreciate the extensive breadth and depth of human experiences from different cultures, locations, and time periods.

This reader explores the humanities by documenting and processing people’s interpretations of what it means to be human. These human experiences are divided into four themes: Diversity & Difference , Human Rights & Genocide , Reform & Revolution , and Happiness & Spirituality . For each theme, selected humanities artifacts are presented in the context of their historical, social, political, personal, cultural, economic, and other settings.

Reverse Teaching

This humanities reader utilizes a teaching and learning method called reverse teaching . It means we will approach the humanities a little-back-to-front in comparison to traditional textbooks. Instead of presenting humanities artifacts as a collection of conceptual or theoretical categories, we will actively explore each humanities artifact in the context(s) that helped create it. This in-context analysis facilitates a fuller, more meaningful understanding of how humanities artifacts represent human experience.

Cogito, Ergo Sum —Proof of Human Existence

Cogito, ergo sum is a Latin phrase by the French philosopher and mathematician Ren é Descartes that translates into, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes proposed that human self-awareness was evidence of human existence. Other facts or ideas can be disproved, but our ability to question whether we exist proves that we do. In other words, “[W]e cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt.”

The following excerpt from A D iscourse on Method (1637) further refines Descartes’ argument:

[English] “Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us. And because some men err in reasoning and fall into Paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of Geometry, I am convinced that I was as open to error as any other; rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for Demonstrations. And finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations), which we experience when awake, may also be experienced when we are asleep. While there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this, I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be something. And as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the Sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.” [French] “Ainsi, à cause que nos sens nous trompent quelquefois, je voulus supposer qu’il n’y avait aucune chose qui fût telle qu’ils nous la font imaginer; Et parce qu’il y a des hommes qui se méprennent en raisonnant, même touchant les plus simples matières de Géométrie, et y font des Paralogismes, jugeant que j’étais sujet à faillir autant qu’aucun autre, je rejetai comme fausses toutes les raisons que j’avais prises auparavant pour Démonstrations; Et enfin, considérant que toutes les mêmes pensées que nous avons étant éveillés nous peuvent aussi venir quand nous dormons, sans qu’il y en ait aucune raison pour lors qui soit vraie, je me résolus de feindre que toutes les choses qui m’étaient jamais entrées en l’esprit n’étaient non plus vraies que les illusions de mes songes. Mais aussitôt après je pris garde que, pendant que je voulais ainsi penser que tout était faux, il fallait nécessairement que moi qui le pensais fusse quelque chose; Et remarquant que cette vérité, je pense, donc je suis, était si ferme et si assurée, que toutes les plus extravagantes suppositions des Sceptiques n’étaient pas capables de l’ébranler, je jugeai que je pouvais la recevoir sans scrupule pour le premier principe de la Philosophie que je cherchais.”

Meta-Cognition: Thinking About Thinking

Given this fantastic capacity to think and to question, we could argue that thinking is what sets us apart from other living things. This process of thinking about thinking is called metacognition . Metacognition is invaluable for humanities studies, or any critical analysis, because it forces us to challenge our preset values and principles.

We humans look at the world through a lens, one shaped by personal interests, family and peers, religion (or lack thereof), and other factors. We gravitate towards people and opinions that align with our own. We resist data that could change our minds. Being aware of our tendency to stick with what is familiar and affirming will help us recognize that what we perceive as truth is highly dependent on our personal knowledge and experiences.

How Do We Humans See the World?

An o ptical illusion takes advantage of how the human brain organizes and prioritizes visual information. These images trick the human brain into perceiving something that is not present or choosing one image over another.

The following illustration merges two images into the same picture. The brain interprets the visual information and chooses which image it wants to see. Because of the way the illustration is drawn, most people readily see a young woman. It takes a bit more concentration to discern an old crone. Notice it is difficult to perceive both women simultaneously because the brain chooses to see one image or the other but not both.

Rubin’s Vase is a famous optical illusion created by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin to show how the brain prioritizes visual information. His theory explains that when two images share a common border, the brain automatically assigns one image to the foreground (positive space) and the second to the background (negative space). The yellow color draws the brain’s attention, making the vase the primary image.

British puzzle master Henry Dudeney created a puzzle that exploits the human brain’s inability to envision negative spaces. The illustration shows playing cards laid out into a square. The goal is to create a swastika inside the square using only four cards. Try to figure out the solution using playing cards, or c lick on the image to reveal the solution .

These examples highlight how easily our brains automatically lead us into seeing what we want to see. In the next chapter, Creative & Critical Thinking , we will look at methods to overcome these mental obstacles.

The Human Experience: From Human Being to Human Doing Copyright © 2020, Edition 1 by Claire Peterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Why are the humanities important, written by: hilbert college • feb 9, 2023.

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Why Are the Humanities Important? ¶

Do you love art, literature, poetry and philosophy? Do you crave deep discussions about societal issues, the media we create and consume, and how humans make meaning?

The humanities are the academic disciplines of human culture, art, language and history. Unlike the sciences, which apply scientific methods to answer questions about the natural world and behavior, the humanities have no single method or tools of inquiry.

Students in the humanities study texts of all kinds—from ancient books and artworks to tweets and TV shows. They study the works of great thinkers throughout history, including the Buddha, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Descartes, Nietzsche, Austen, Thoreau, Darwin, Marx, Du Bois and King.

Humanities careers can be deeply rewarding. For students having trouble choosing between the disciplines that the humanities have to offer, a degree in liberal studies may be the perfect path. A liberal studies program prepares students for various exciting careers and teaches lifelong learning skills that can aid graduates in any career path they take.

Why We Need the Humanities ¶

The humanities play a central role in shaping daily life. People sometimes think that to understand our society they must study facts: budget allocations, environmental patterns, available resources and so on. However, facts alone don’t motivate people. We care about facts only when they mean something to us. No one cares how many blades of grass grow on the White House lawn, for example.

Facts gain meaning in a larger context of human values. The humanities are important because they offer students opportunities to discover, understand and evaluate society’s values at various points in history and across every culture.

The fields of study in the humanities include the following:

Literature —the study of the written word, including fiction, poetry and drama
History —the study of documented human activity
Philosophy —(literally translated from Greek as “the love of wisdom”) the study of ideas; comprising many subfields, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics
Visual arts —the study of artworks, such as painting, drawing, ceramics and sculpture
Performing arts —the study of art created with the human body as the medium, such as theater, dance and music

Benefits of Studying the Humanities ¶

There are many reasons why the humanities are important, from personal development and intellectual curiosity to preparation for successful humanities careers—as well as careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and the social sciences.

1. Learn How to Think and Communicate Well ¶

A liberal arts degree prepares students to think critically. Because the study of the humanities involves analyzing and understanding diverse and sometimes dense texts—such as ancient Greek plays, 16th century Dutch paintings, American jazz music and contemporary LGBTQ+ poetry—students become skilled at noticing and appreciating details that students educated in other fields might miss.

Humanities courses often ask students to engage with complex texts, ideas and artistic expressions; this can help them develop the critical thinking skills they need to understand and appreciate art, language and culture.

Humanities courses also give students the tools they need to communicate complex ideas in writing and speaking to a wide range of academic and nonacademic audiences. Students learn how to organize their ideas in a clear, organized way and write compelling arguments that can persuade their audiences.

2. Ask the Big Questions ¶

Students who earn a liberal arts degree gain a deeper understanding of human culture and history. Their classes present opportunities to learn about humans who lived long ago yet faced similar questions to us today:

How can I live a meaningful life?
What does it mean to be a good person?
What’s it like to be myself?
How can we live well with others, especially those who are different from us?
What’s really important or worth doing?

3. Gain a Deeper Appreciation for Art, Language and Culture ¶

Humanities courses often explore art, language and culture from different parts of the world and in different languages. Through the study of art, music, literature and other forms of expression, students are exposed to a wide range of perspectives. In this way, the humanities help students understand and appreciate the diversity of human expression and, in turn, can deepen their enjoyment of the richness and complexity of human culture.

Additionally, the study of the humanities encourages students to put themselves in other people’s shoes, to grapple with their different experiences. Through liberal arts studies, students in the humanities can develop empathy that makes them better friends, citizens and members of diverse communities.

4. Understand Historical Context ¶

Humanities courses place artistic and cultural expressions within their historical context. This can help students understand how and why certain works were created and how they reflect the values and concerns of the time when they were produced.

5. Explore What Interests You ¶

Ultimately, the humanities attract students who have an interest in ideas, art, language and culture. Studying the humanities has the benefit of enabling students with these interests to explore their passions.

The bottom line? Studying the humanities can have several benefits. Students in the humanities develop:

Critical thinking skills, such as the ability to analyze dense texts and understand arguments
A richer understanding of human culture and history
Keen communication and writing skills
Enhanced capacity for creative expression
Deeper empathy for people from different cultures

6. Prepare for Diverse Careers ¶

Humanities graduates are able to pursue various career paths. A broad liberal arts education prepares students for careers in fields such as education, journalism, law and business. A humanities degree can prepare graduates for:

Research and analysis , such as market research, policy analysis and political consulting
Nonprofit work , social work and advocacy
Arts and media industries , such as museum and gallery support and media production
Law, lobbying or government relations
Business and management , such as in marketing, advertising or public relations
Library and information science , or information technology
Education , including teachers, curriculum designers and school administrators
Content creation , including writing, editing and publishing

Employers value the strong critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills that humanities degree holders possess.

5 Humanities Careers ¶

Humanities graduates gain the skills and experience to thrive in many different fields. Consider these five humanities careers and related fields for graduates with a liberal studies degree.

1. Public Relations Specialist ¶

Public relations (PR) specialists are professionals who help individuals, organizations and companies communicate with public audiences. First and foremost, their job is to manage their organizations’ or clients’ reputation. PR specialists use various tactics, such as social media, events like fundraisers and other media relations activities to shape and maintain their clients’ public image.

PR specialists have many different roles and responsibilities as part of their daily activities:

Creating and distributing press releases
Monitoring and analyzing media coverage (such as tracking their clients’ names in the news)
Organizing events
Responding to media inquiries
Evaluating the effectiveness of PR campaigns

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for PR ¶

Liberal studies majors are required to participate in class discussions and presentations, which can help them develop strong speaking skills. PR specialists often give presentations and speak to the media, so strong speaking skills are a must.

PR specialists must also be experts in their audience. The empathy and critical thinking skills that graduates develop while they earn their degree enables them to craft tailored, effective messages to diverse audiences as PR specialists.

Public Relations Specialist Salary ¶

The median annual salary for PR specialists was $62,800 in May 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS expects the demand for PR specialists to grow by 8% between 2021 and 2031, faster than the average for all occupations.

The earning potential for PR specialists can vary. The size of the employer can affect the salary, as can the PR specialist’s level of experience and education and the specific duties and responsibilities of the job.

In general, PR specialists working for big companies in dense urban areas tend to earn more than those working for smaller businesses or in rural areas. Also, PR specialists working in science, health care and technology tend to earn more than those working in other industries.

BLS data is a national average, and the salary can also vary by location; for example, since the cost of living is higher in California and New York, the average salaries in those states tend to be higher compared with those in other states.

2. Human Resources Specialist ¶

Human resources (HR) specialists are professionals who are responsible for recruiting, interviewing and hiring employees for an organization. They also handle employee relations, benefits and training. They play a critical role in maintaining a positive and productive work environment for all employees.

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for HR ¶

Liberal studies majors hone their communication skills through coursework that requires them to write essays, discussion posts, talks and research papers. These skills are critical for HR specialists, who must communicate effectively with company stakeholders, such as employees, managers and corporate leaders.

Additionally, because students who major in liberal studies get to understand the human experience, their classes can provide deeper insight into human behavior, motivation and communication. This understanding can be beneficial in handling employee relations, conflict resolution and other HR-related issues.

Human Resources Specialist Salary ¶

The median annual salary for HR in the U.S. was $122,510 in May 2021, according to the BLS. The demand for HR specialists is expected to grow by 8% between 2021 and 2031, per the BLS, faster than the average for all occupations.

3. Political Scientist ¶

A liberal studies degree not only helps prepare students for media and HR jobs—careers that may be more commonly associated with humanities—but also prepares graduates for successful careers as political scientists.

Political scientists are professionals who study the theory and practice of politics, government and political systems. They use various research methods, such as statistical analysis and historical analysis, to study political phenomena: elections, public opinions, the effects of policy changes. They also predict political trends.

How the Humanities Help With Political Science Jobs ¶

Political scientists need to have a deep understanding of political institutions. They have the skills to analyze complex policy initiatives, evaluate campaign strategies and understand political changes over time.

A liberal studies program provides a solid foundation of critical thinking skills that can sustain a career in political science. First, liberal studies degrees can teach students about the histories and theories of politics. Knowing the history and context of political ideas can be useful when understanding and evaluating current political trends.

Second, graduates with a liberal studies degree become accustomed to communicating with diverse audiences. This is a must to communicate with the public about complex policies and political processes.

Political Scientist Specialist Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for political scientists was $122,510 in May 2021. The BLS projects that employment prospects for political scientists will grow by 6% between 2021 and 2031, about as fast as the average for all occupations.

4. Community Service Manager ¶

Community service managers are professionals who are responsible for overseeing and coordinating programs and services that benefit the local community. They may work for a government agency, nonprofit organization or community-based organization in community health, mental health or community social services.

Community service management includes the following:

Training and overseeing community service staff and volunteers
Securing and allocating resources to provide services such as housing assistance, food programs, job training and other forms of social support
Developing and implementing efficient and effective community policies
Fundraising and applying for grants grant to secure funding for their programs

In these and many other ways, community service managers play an important role in addressing social issues and improving the quality of life for people in their community.

Community Service Management and Liberal Studies ¶

Liberal studies prepares graduates for careers in community service management by providing the tools for analyzing and evaluating complex issues. These include tools to work through common dilemmas that community service managers may face. Such challenges include the following:

What’s the best way to allocate scarce community mental health resources, such as limited numbers of counselors and social workers to support people experiencing housing instability?
What’s the best way to monitor and measure the success of a community service initiative, such as a Meals on Wheels program to support food security for older adults?
What’s the best way to recruit and train volunteers for community service programs, such as afterschool programs?

Because the humanities teach students how to think critically, graduates with a degree in liberal studies have the skills to think through these complex problems.

Community Service Manager Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for social and community managers was $74,000 in May 2021. The BLS projects that employment prospects for social and community managers will grow by 12% from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations.

5. High School Teacher ¶

High school teachers educate future generations, and graduates with a liberal studies degree have the foundation of critical thinking and communication skills to succeed in this important role.

We need great high school teachers more than ever. The U.S. had a shortage of 300,000 teachers in 2022, according to NPR and the National Education Association The teacher shortage particularly affected rural school districts, where the need for special education teachers is especially high.

How the Humanities Prepare Graduates to Teach ¶

Having a solid understanding of the humanities is important for individuals who want to become a great high school teacher. First, a degree that focuses on the humanities provides graduates with a deep understanding of the subjects that they’ll teach. Liberal studies degrees often include coursework in literature, history, visual arts and other subjects taught in high school, all of which can give graduates a strong foundation in the material.

Second, liberal studies courses often require students to read, analyze and interpret texts, helping future teachers develop the skills they need to effectively teach reading, writing and critical thinking to high school students.

Third, liberal studies courses often include coursework in research methods, which can help graduates develop the skills necessary to design and implement engaging and effective lesson plans.

Finally, liberal studies degrees often include classes on ethics, philosophy and cultural studies, which can give graduates the ability to understand and appreciate different perspectives, cultures and life experiences. This can help future teachers create inclusive and respectful learning environments and help students develop a sense of empathy and understanding toward others.

Overall, a humanities degree can provide graduates with the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to be effective high school teachers and make a positive impact on the lives of their students.

High School Teacher Salary ¶

According to the BLS, the median annual wage for high school teachers was $61,820 in May 2021. The BLS projects that the number of high school teacher jobs will grow by 5% between 2021 and 2031.

Take the Next Step in Your Humanities Career ¶

A bachelor’s degree in liberal studies is a key step toward a successful humanities career. Whether as a political scientist, a high school teacher or a public relations specialist, a range of careers awaits you. Hilbert College Global’s online Bachelor of Science in Liberal Studies offers students the unique opportunity to explore courses across the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences and craft a degree experience around the topics they’re most interested in. Through the liberal studies degree, you’ll gain a strong foundation of knowledge while developing critical thinking and communication skills to promote lifelong learning. Find out how Hilbert College Global can put you on the path to a rewarding career.

Indeed, “13 Jobs for Humanities Majors”

NPR, The Teacher Shortage Is Testing America’s Schools

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, High School Teachers

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Human Resources Specialists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Political Scientists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Public Relations Specialists

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Social and Community Service Managers

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Humanities Academic Services Center

Why Study the Humanities?

In the Humanities at UW, students will be trained to:

Develop a global perspective and an understanding of diverse cultures
Think critically and communicate expressively across media and genres
Engage with texts, languages, history, culture and civilization
Push boundaries, embrace scholarship, and investigate issues of power and difference

If you are looking to learn more about the value of Humanities Scholarship, or are considering if adding a Humanities program to your UW experience has value, read on for real world examples and benefits.

For even more, we invite you to visit the College of Arts and Sciences page on the Humanities Division .

“Curiosity, creativity, and empathy aren’t unruly traits that must be reined in to ensure success. Just the opposite. The human touch has never been more essential in the workplace than it is today. You don’t have to mask your true identity to get paid for your strengths...the job market is quietly creating thousands of openings a week for people who can bring a humanist’s grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future.” George Anders Author, “You Can Do Anything”

Real World Applications

The Humanities shape real world business, policy, and technology applications. Learn more about what our students go on to do with our career, alumni, and data insight resources. Learning outcomes, performance metrics, and employer data for Humanities Students are just a click away.

The Humanities as an "And", not an "Or"

A major as part of your degree is not a zero-sum equation; even if you weren't considering the Humanities as your sole major, you do have the bandwidth and the time for more than a single major at UW. Education is a cohesive collection of experiences, each providing its own unique contribution to a person’s future, and a competitive education that prepares someone for what's next should include "and" at every turn.

For Humanities majors or minors, our programs are structured in a way that allows a variety of double major, double degree, and major/minor combinations, each within the scope of a student's overall degree experience and graduation timeline. Adding a Humanities major or minor has real world benefits:

A medical practitioner speaks with a patient

Learning another language doesn’t just train students in sentence structure and vocabulary; it trains them to understand and interpret cultures and worldviews. Essential for political discourse and ethical policy.

If you want someone who can tell you if your business plan is going to work, your first stop might be a business school. If you want someone who can tell you whether or not it will work in Argentina or Japan, you'll need a student with Humanities training.
Physicians with language training learn faster which diagnostic questions translate into something their patients will understand and respond to.
Cognitive development and infant language acquisition blends linguistics and psychology. Labwork advances faster when skills are diversified.
Film and literature help develop a stronger understanding of how different cultures and societies view the impact of modern crises. A difference maker for the next generation of NGO and NPO leaders.

Real World Examples of the Humanities Edge

Asian Languages & Cultures + Computer Science
American Sign Language + Early Childhood Education
Cinema & Media Studies + Communications
Classical Studies + Architectural Design
Comparative History of Ideas + Business (Entrepreneurship)
English Creative Writing + Business (Marketing)
French + Art History
German + Mechanical Engineering
Global Literary Studies + Human Rights
Linguistics + Human-Computer Interaction
Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures + Political Science
Scandinavian Studies + Interior Design
Russian + Aeronautics/Astronautics
Spanish + Global Health

The World Needs Both Humanists & Technologists

The Humanities trains the next generation to reflect on questions of human existence that need answers: What language frameworks or messaging do people respond to, and why? How does a culture grow, change, and define reality? What constitutes a just action or society? How do humans understand and manage happiness or mitigate suffering?

Students examine human-computer interaction

In any industry and field, leaders, decision makers, and participants are all still at humans at their core. Proximity to (and engagement with) different ways of thinking through Humanities programs will make you a better lawyer, physician, or software engineer because it will train you to understand the human perspective and the human experience through creative communication, problem solving, and relationship building.

Adding the Humanities to your experience will train you in the spirit of inquiry to ask questions in a way that others might not; to ask the right questions, not just the obvious questions.

Better AI and Business through Humanistic Understanding

Truly understanding (not just discerning) blind spots in LLMs, data set biases, and neural networks used in AI needs Humanities training; training that can provide moral context, cultural clues, and ethical solutions for what people do and do not respond to. The next generation of program managers at tech companies will manage stronger teams and be promoted faster with these skill sets.

A business student presents on Argentina

Examination of relationships and feelings, and the feelings of others cannot be found in a computer science or business curriculum, but after graduation, those fields still demand those skillsets in new hires.

A World Economic Forum survey of top executives from nine leading industries listed the liberal arts skills of critical thinking, writing, emotional intelligence, and cognitive flexibility as the top skills they are looking for in employees. Forbes magazine writes that “today’s tech wave will inspire a new style of work in which tech takes care of routine tasks so that people can concentrate on what mortals do best: generating creative ideas and actions in a data-rich world.” See more here.

“What matters now is not the skills you have, but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place?” Harvard Business Review

clock This article was published more than 6 years ago

Why we still need to study the humanities in a STEM world

It is common to hear today, in the era of big data and STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — that liberal arts degrees are, well, relatively worthless. What is someone with a degree in English literature going to do with it, besides teach?

The question isn’t new. A decade ago, a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics magazine published an article titled “ What Can I Do With My Liberal Arts Degree? ” which starts with this: “What are you going to do with a degree in that ? Do you want to be a teacher?”

Since then, private and public pushes to increase STEM education have given rise to new concerns about the value of a liberal arts education — as well as arguments about why it is incredibly valuable, even to people going into STEM fields. A new book by George Anders titled “ You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education ,” says:

Curiosity, creativity, and empathy aren’t unruly traits that must be reined in to ensure success. Just the opposite. The human touch has never been more essential in the workplace than it is today. You don’t have to mask your true identity to get paid for your strengths. You don’t need to apologize for the supposedly impractical classes you took in college or the so-called soft skills you have acquired. The job market is quietly creating thousands of openings a week for people who can bring a humanist’s grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future.

And it makes this point:

The more we automate the routine stuff, the more we create a constant low-level hum of digital connectivity, the more we get tangled up in the vastness and blind spots of big data, the more essential it is to bring human judgment into the junctions of our digital lives.

Yet fewer students are studying the liberal arts than they did a few decades ago. A recent study by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, through its Humanities Indicators project , found that the number of bachelor’s degrees in the humanities that were earned in 2015, the last year for which there is data, was down nearly 10 percent from three years earlier.

Here’s a new piece on the humanities — what they are and why they are important — by Gerald Greenberg, senior associate dean of academic affairs; humanities; and curriculum, instruction and programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. Greenberg is a linguistics expert who teaches courses in Russian and whose interests include Russian and Slavic linguistics as well as syntactic theory. He has published many articles and essays on a variety of topics, including areas such as stress placement, the syntax of various non-finite constructions, case marking and language change.

By Gerald Greenberg

The value of a college education has long been debated. Some question an education that doesn’t explicitly provide training in a job skill — a criticism aimed at the humanities — while others push back, noting that employers increasingly are seeking the problem-solving and critical-thinking abilities that these majors bring to their jobs. Yet there are more important reasons for studying subjects within the humanities — such as philosophy, history, literature, religion, art, music, and language — and we ignore them at our own peril.

A liberal education is a cohesive collection of experiences, each providing its own unique contribution to the enlightenment of its practitioners . Typically, a liberal arts education involves the study of the natural sciences (including mathematics), the social sciences, and the humanities. (The natural sciences and math are frequently associated with STEM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — and not considered to be part of a liberal education, even though they are.)

A typical college curriculum requires students to sample fields in each subject . Within the sciences, one can learn about what happens when tiny particles collide, which can open the window into the universe. Within the social sciences, one can learn about how resources are used by people and companies, which can lead to an understanding of how the economy might develop. Within the humanities, one can learn another language, which can open the window into a new culture, a new worldview.

Many other examples exist, but the point is that it is only through engaging in the thinking processes practiced in these areas that one can be exposed to various ways of thinking, analyzing, and questioning. The experiences gained from studying in different fields may be qualitatively different, but they are all vital pieces of the Tao of the liberal arts , and are all equally important.

What is the Tao of the liberal arts? As I wrote in this piece , understanding the liberal arts is comparable to understanding the Tao , the source of everything in Taoism , an ancient Chinese philosophical system that explains why things are the way they are and why things happen the way they do. The liberal arts offer knowledge and the cultivation of habits of mind that allow graduates to mature into successful, productive members of society who can appreciate others, experience and embrace the notion of empathy, and seek lifelong learning.

Yet while popularity in areas such as economics or neuroscience continues to grow, interest in humanistic topics is moving just as quickly in the opposite direction. Many assert the primacy of the STEM fields, while for humanistic studies, politicians belittle them, parents urge their children to avoid them, and students choose them as majors less and less.

Many defenders of the humanities emphasize the pragmatic or practical value of studying the humanities disciplines, and their arguments are good ones. Articles and studies describe how employers seek graduates who can think critically and write clearly, both by-products of studying the humanities.

Nevertheless, while there seems to be little problem defining or identifying fields in the areas of science and technology, both supporters and detractors of the humanities have difficulty defining the humanities or agreeing on a definition that encompasses them all.

One approach to defining the humanities involves lists: literature, philosophy, foreign language, etc. However, this not only fails to provide a definition but sometimes sparks disagreements about which areas fall within the humanities. More general definitions provide further insight into what the humanities are, but they can be confusing and lead people to conclude they are irrelevant, overly simple, not valuable, and not worthy of serious study. Some definitions indicate the humanities are disciplines that study human culture or examine the human condition. Such terms, too, become open to broad and varied interpretations, which can easily lead to confusion.

Rather than defining the fields within humanities, we can try to explain what study in the humanities does. We might say fields within the humanities study and analyze artifacts that are created by human beings, such as literature, music, art, etc. We might say the humanities help us to analyze and grapple with complex moral issues, help us understand what goes on inside of us, that is, show us what it means to be a human being. In reaction to such definitions, however, the nonbelievers reject the need to study the humanities; after all, they are human beings, they grapple with complex issues pretty much on a daily basis.

Through studying the humanities, one has the opportunity to get to know oneself and others better, the opportunity to become better able to understand and grapple with complex moral issues, the complexities and intricacies of humanity.

When you take courses in any humanities discipline, you are using different methods to learn about individuals, including yourself, and groups of peoples. You examine relationships and feelings, the feelings of others, as well as your own feelings. You develop empathy and an appreciation for others that can help address difficult situations, personal and professional.

The ability to process information and to deal with difficult situations is important to everyone just to get through everyday life. It is also important for helping to deal with contemporary global issues at local, national, and international levels. Mathematics, the sciences, engineering, and technology are certainly useful, but the humanities provide another way of viewing issues, and better decisions are made when diverse opinions and ideas are considered.

Leaders and decision-makers who are able to employ a broader, more diverse range of ideas and knowledge will be better able to run businesses and governments and react to difficult situations as they develop and arise. We see time and time again, however, that a lack of appreciation of the humanity involved in any situation can lead to undesirable results.

The value of the humanities can only be fully appreciated by experiencing and knowing them. In response to the question: “What are the humanities?” University of Amsterdam Professor Rens Bod noted , “It is like the notion of ‘time’ in St. Augustine: if you don’t ask, we know, but if you ask, we are left empty-handed.”

Therefore, it isn’t so important to define the humanities, or what field is or isn’t part of the humanities; what’s important is what studying a humanities discipline does for the person experiencing it. Studying a humanities field involves moving beyond the search for the immediate and pragmatic; it opens one to the examination of the entirety of the human condition and encourages one to grapple with complex moral issues ever-present in life. It encourages reflection and provides one with an appreciation and empathy for humanity. This is why critical thinking done in the humanities goes beyond problem solving.

Even if we cannot agree on what they are, the humanities are an important part of the way. Given the state of the country and the world today, they are more important than ever.

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The Importance of Studying Humanities

Categories: Humanities

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Published: Sep 12, 2023

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Understanding the human experience, appreciating cultural diversity, engaging with complex social issues, developing a well-rounded education, promoting lifelong learning, challenges and opportunities.

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Humanities essays

What are the humanities.

The humanities refer to subjects that study people, their ideas, history, and literature. To put that another way, the humanities are those branches of learning regarding primarily as having a cultural character.

For example, one of the UK’s academic funding bodies, the Arts & Humanities Research Board or AHRB, tends to concentrate on the following sorts of subjects: Classics, Visual Arts and Media, Modern Languages, Music and Performing Arts, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Medieval and Modern History.

Key features – primary & secondary texts

In the majority of these subjects you begin with a primary text – e.g. a play or a film or a set of historical events. You are expected to show good knowledge of the primary text and to mount a discussion of it – or of aspects of it – that is located within current critical debate about it. You are expected to use your own judgement about other people’s judgements of the primary text.

Key features – logical argument

Readers of your essay will look for an argument that is clearly expressed in a logical order. They will not expect your essay to follow a specific set structure. For example, an English Literature essay might start with a plot summary of the work being discussed, a quote from the work or a quote from critical writing on the work. The important thing is to use your starting point to say clearly what you are going to write about and why; and to make the rest of your discussion flow naturally from it

Key features – balanced discussion

This is probably the one feature that distinguishes humanities essays from other sorts of writing. This does not mean that scientific papers or social science essays aren’t balanced discussions: it means that a humanities essay is more likely to have review various opinions and interpretations.

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Why we still need to study the humanities

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Stanford Humanities Today

Arcade: a digital salon.

I have been thinking of this essay as a road map to the ideas and practices of public humanities, a map that would help answer the title question, "why public humanities?" Because I am a historian, I do not usually think in terms of maps; my brain believes that all stories are chronological, and readers would be lost without a timeline to guide them. But public humanities practitioners find maps newly fascinating, and I have attended enough conferences and art exhibits, and reviewed enough digital projects, ranging from practical discussions of analog and virtual tours to abstract visions of maps as new forms of the archive, to know that there are many ways to chart ideas and practices. [1]

Approaching the topic from a number of vantages, this essay will look at some beginning points for public humanities; work through definitions; talk about the stakes for faculty and students–and the universities and communities in which they work–and consider whether public humanities could be transformative rather than simply translational. No matter how you map public humanities, discussions of collaboration and social justice need to be at the center. I also map the on-campus world while knowing that we have many colleagues who work "in public" outside the university, and their contributions inform our own.

I teach in the Department of American Studies at Brown University and recently stepped down as Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. The center's master's students in public humanities often rewrote the Wikipedia entry on public humanities as part of their coursework in the introductory class as taught by Steven Lubar. I see Wikipedia as a gigantic public humanities project, and so the exercise worked on several levels. Recently the Wikipedia record read:

Public humanities is the work of engaging diverse publics in reflecting on heritage, traditions, and history, and the relevance of the humanities to...civic and cultural life. Public humanities is often practiced within federal, state, nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage people in conversations...and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public...Public Humanities also exists within universities, as a collaborative enterprise between communities and faculty, staff, and students. [2]

I find my own definition of public humanities within the field of social practice art as undertaken by New Urban Arts, a youth arts organization in Providence, Rhode Island. Putting the humanities in conversation with the arts proves crucial because the arts are the subject of the humanities. What can we learn from artistic methodologies? My definition moves away from the translational–the explanation of university-generated ideas to the public–and imagines the humanities as a process of discovery undertaken by collaborative groups–including university faculty, staff, and students–with communities outside the campus. [3]

Many programs that are doing the same work have different names. A series of university programs that center students and their experiences are called service learning. Others, coming out of the social sciences, talk about student and faculty work in the community as civic engagement. [4] The word engagement takes a prominent role in several of the efforts that seem closest to my definition of public humanities. A group of art historians has begun to think about building an engaged art history, and Daniel Fisher, at the National Humanities Alliance, talks of "publicly engaged humanities." [5]

Historian Robyn Schroeder brilliantly lays out the evolving definitions of public humanities, and their contradictions, in a recent anthology that I edited, Doing Public Humanities . [6] Schroeder writes about how public humanities evolved in response to concerns of the political left and right and of museums and universities, and how it was strengthened by fears of a decline in university jobs for PhDs. I recognize my own definition when Schroeder writes that "new 'convergences' between arts initiatives and publicly engaged scholarship shared a common critique of 'conventional' university practices which they hoped to unmake and a politics of the local which enlivened this work...of vernacular democratic educational action." Schroeder shrewdly shows how the public humanities "caught fire" when it "intersected with changing perceptions of the job market for humanities doctorates...influenced by neo-liberalization of university hiring practices, rapid growth in the museum and broader cultural sectors and a generational shift in career orientation which emphasized social outcomes over private gain." [7]

Using an n-gram, Schroeder traces the concept of public humanities to the 1970s but shows how the concept took off in the 1990s. Yet, in 2000, when I drafted a proposal for a Center for Public Humanities that would, in collaboration with the Department of American Studies, offer an MA program, my only references were to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State Humanities Councils. We knew about public history from reading and publishing in The Public Historian (now nearing its fortieth anniversary issue) and attending National Council for Public History meetings (which began in 1980). And we learned even more about museum studies by working and having fellowships in museums big and small. [8] We were also influenced by writers and bloggers about the field, by the new digital humanities, and by organizations beginning to move beyond the translational humanities described in our proposal.

Brown's Center for Public Humanities was established in 2002, with the two-year MA program starting in 2005. It is still the only program in the country offering a public humanities degree to both MA and doctoral students on the way to a PhD. Brown's public humanities MA program replaced one in museum studies as those of us in American studies sought a curriculum and students that were more interested in communities (like students in African American, ethnic, and women's studies), more interdisciplinary, and more expansive than museums. On our campus, the Center for Public Humanities and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) grew together, both with public-facing missions. Established as a result of the 2006 report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, authored by faculty in history, Africana studies, and American studies, the CSSJ declares its mission is "to examine the history and legacies of slavery in ways that engage a broad public." [9] An early project was a jointly funded fellowship for a public humanities MA student in "the public history of slavery." The CSSJ describes its work as public humanities, ranging from collaborations with global slavery museums to programs for local high school students. [10] The partnership between the Center for Public Humanities and the CSSJ has enriched the public humanities and kept race and justice at the core of Brown's definition of public humanities.

Beyond our campus, several intellectual currents at the turn of the twenty-first century proved important to how we taught and thought about public humanities. American culture scholar Julie Ellison's work, in particular, combined theory and praxis in illuminating ways. As we planned for public humanities at Brown, Ellison and her colleague David Scobey "were developing an engaged arts and humanities presence at the University of Michigan." In 1999, at a national conference sponsored by the University of Michigan, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the White House Millennium Council, they launched Imagining America: Artists + Scholars in American Life, a national organization. With publications, graduate students as important participants, and an annual conference, Imagining America became a touchstone and key resource for those working in public humanities. [11]

In the essay "This American Life: How Are the Humanities Public?" Ellison presented a preliminary reading of Humanities Indicators' data on American life. She wrote of the "intense anxiety, across all sorts of colleges and universities, around higher education's public mission" and noted that "the tensions between universities and the communities that surround them are deeply cultural and are definitely a matter for the humanities." But she was also excited by "blurring" the line between the arts and humanities "in interesting ways." Finally, Ellison pointed to the importance of the "ongoing histories of race and ethnicity, migration and diaspora" as "one of a number of places where these histories can be told and rectified." [12] Considering collaboration, Ellison used the word "bridging"–a concept that blogger and curator Nina Simon also referenced in her Museum 2.0 blog and later work–to understand how humanities content could improve reciprocal collaborations. [13]

In 2013, Ellison, in "The New Public Humanists," describes "a new sort of public humanities...finding traction in American colleges and universities" and cites Scobey as calling for an "effort to knit together public work and academic work." Ellison was excited that "concrete, programmatic changes on campus point to a robust challenge to the habitual academic-public binary in the humanities." She credited graduate students for reimagining the public humanities as they reacted to negative factors (a difficult job market and a "simple neo-liberal pre-professional model") as well as to the positive appeal of potentially more interesting careers. In addition, Ellison noted that "practitioners of the new public humanities were producing books and essays that cannot be understood outside the conditions of collaborative production–direct, coequal involvement with living people and organizations." [14]

At this point on our map–and in the corresponding chronological story (historians never quit)–we have academic programs that have been established; we have the beginning of a theory and methodology for public humanities; and we have a national organization that is working on the ground. But one set of questions always arises when we talk about transformational public humanities: what changes are necessary for faculty and students, and eventually for the universities in which they operate?

In 2015, a group of college and university faculty and students interested in public humanities formed a regional organization to talk together about some of the issues raised by public humanities. The North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium (NEPH) had founding members from the Ivy League (Harvard, Brown, Columbia, and Yale); private universities (Tufts and Lehigh); and public universities (University of Delaware, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Rutgers University –Newark). During five annual meetings and from a variety of collaborations, participants explored what public humanities meant to college pedagogy, academic bureaucracy, faculty careers, and university-community interaction. Only Brown's and Yale's programs carried the name "public humanities," but the other campuses understood the work they were doing (including oral history, material culture, digital humanities, and community collaborations) as public humanities.

The NEPH collaborated on a white paper, which historian Matthew Frye Jacobson included as part of a recent essay. The white paper describes interlocking crises that faced the university–crises of atomization, division, confusion and doubt, amnesia, and anomie–and bemoans the diminishing of "the American university's most far-reaching public charge as a community resource and as incubator, catalyst and democratic steward of the society's intellectual resources." The most deeply felt part of the NEPH manifesto was, I think, the material on the role of knowledge creation, a description of the job of the faculty:

The knowledge we produce is squarely rooted in the best methods and practices of our professional training, yet it is often more expansive and dimensional for being generated in dialog with diverse partners...Our project is not merely to get the work of the university out into the world (though it is partly that, too), but to build new archives, create new paradigms, recover buried histories, and weave new narratives of the sort that can only be produced when guild members cease to speak amongst themselves exclusively. [15]

When discussing the ways in which faculty and students practice public humanities, I want to begin with the NEPH's positive vision of such a practice. Most such discussions start with the negative: with the question of whether public humanities scholarship "counts" toward tenure. The connected question is whether and how we should train graduate students to do this kind of work if it does not count or if such training exists only as a back-up plan for PhDs who cannot find tenure-track jobs (the so-called alt-ac track). I understand the materiality and importance of such questions but believe we should first explore why we would want to undertake this scholarship and then consider how it fits or reshapes current systems.

Many faculty members in the humanities–in the traditions of African American studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, American studies, public history, and cultural anthropology, for example–have long conceived, directed, and participated in public humanities projects. We have done them because we felt a special commitment to our communities; because it was part of the mission of our departments; or because such work fit our scholarly interests. While it has been part of our practice, it is not always recognized by our departments or universities. According to the Humanities Indicators, "in an estimated half of humanities departments," "faculty members (or staff and students) work with state humanities councils or community groups." At the same time, the Humanities Indicators demonstrate that most departments do not consider public humanities when evaluating scholarship: "only an estimated 11% of departments indicated that such activity was 'very important' or 'essential' for tenure." [16] Here, the Humanities Indicators provide evidence that faculty are doing public humanities work despite not being recognized professionally for that work. For many faculty members, public humanities projects supplement, or even make possible, the scholarship that is recognized. For at least some faculty members, tenure is not the only issue in planning their scholarly work. A closer look at these faculty practices might help us understand the true value of the humanities. A useful study would categorize and interview the faculty involved in the 1,800 public projects described in the National Humanities Alliance's blog, Humanities for All. [17] If such projects do not count, why do faculty undertake them?

The disconnect between faculty practice and tenure expectations deserves scrutiny, raising several issues and a couple of possible ways forward. First, there may be a simple (but challenging) stickiness to the rubrics. While public humanities has been widely accepted, tenure committees change their expectations slowly and only under pressure. The Humanities Indicators note that "a growing number of commenters in recent years have pointed to public humanities as a vehicle for elevating the profile of the field." [18] The American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council on Public History continue to update their joint report "Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian," which was first published in 2010 and last modified in 2017, to remind history departments of the importance of public, particularly museum, work for tenure. [19] We must continue to work at this ground level to have our contributions recognized.

Beyond acceptance of this form of scholarship by universities and their tenure committees, public humanities challenges the rubrics themselves. Tenure requirements represent a retrograde way of defining and evaluating faculty work while public humanities points to a new, more expansive definition of scholarship. As the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium white paper notes,

we challenge the norms of the gatekeeping function of the modern university as arbiter of what ascends to the status of "knowledge." There is such a thing as vernacular theorizing and wisdom; communities know. This local knowledge is often lost to the university in its capacity as a credentialing institution and in its guild-like guardianship of instructional capital. [20]

By changing the definition of scholarship, public humanities blurs the lines between research, teaching, and service on which so many rubrics are built. I routinely serve on departmental tenure committees that struggle to contain innovative projects within one category. Creative junior scholars present scholarship that also contributes to their teaching and service work. The tenure committee struggles to discipline such unruly projects so that they are legible to university tenure and promotion boards. As such projects multiply, and as pressure continues from scholarly societies, departments, and faculty members alike, rubrics will have to change, but that change happens slowly.

As part of the process, and as a way to continue to grant tenure to innovative scholars, I have begun to think about a "scholarship of public humanities" and how that might be imagined. I recently edited the collection Doing Public Humanities , which presents case studies of work done by the faculty, staff, and students affiliated with Brown's Center for Public Humanities in collaboration with local communities. The book models the scholarship of public humanities and shows the central role of racial justice in the subject and approach of the essays; the importance of case studies as a format; and the intertwined nature of public humanities with the arts. The publication, featuring essays by scholar-practitioners, helped make our scholarship legible to the university and to the larger scholarly community.

I want to consider the scholarship of public humanities in a big frame: what would it mean to do a different kind of scholarship, to change scholarship itself? But we need to think in a small frame as well: how do we do this work in a university/department that has not changed? I learned about the big frame–how to change our scholarship–by working at New Urban Arts. I learned about the small frame by working at an Ivy League university, about three miles away. My essay in the Doing Public Humanities anthology compares New Urban Arts, and the education and creative practice they undertake, with what happens at Brown, and tries to explore both the big and small frames for public humanities.

New Urban Arts is an art studio for emerging artists and high school students, housed in a storefront across the street from three high schools in Providence. The artists serve as volunteer mentors–more guides than teachers–to the students; the students choose their mentors and have enormous power within the organization and over their own art-making. In 2016–2017, New Urban Arts served over five hundred students (about half came more than once a week) and twenty-five emerging artists who volunteered as mentors. Only 12 percent of the students identified as White and 82 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunch according to income guidelines. The organization had eight staff members and a budget of about $500,000. I have worked with New Urban Arts for more than ten years, at first more as a volunteer than as a faculty member, until my time there became my scholarly research.

The form of art practiced at this storefront provides important lessons for how we think about the humanities and scholarship. Newcomers to New Urban Arts repeatedly ask: "what is the art" in the organization's name? Is it the work the students produce? Or do the students serve as apprentices and their mentors produce the art with student help? Or does the studio offer classes ("How to Make Art") and the art is produced somewhere else, maybe after the students and the mentors leave, education in hand?

New Urban Arts has collectively thought about these questions. They state that they foster a "creative practice":

What if creativity were a social enterprise rather than an individual one? What if our creativity was measured not by a finished artwork–the innate talent it may suggest or the prescribed expectations it may meet–but by the extent to which that work was fueled by our own process, our own questions, and by our relationships with one another? [21]

With this definition, New Urban Arts places itself directly in the field of social practice art and changed how I thought about humanities scholarship. Exploring social practice art (which, like public humanities, goes by many names), I looked not only at New Urban Arts but also at Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, the work of Wendy Ewald, and Project Row Houses in Houston and, by extension, the organization Creative Time. [22] How social practice artists understand their practice changed mine. For my purposes, social practice art believes that art is public and community-based; the creative process is as important as the product; work is collaborative; and the practice employs a social justice framework, examining oppression and inequality. Like all social practice art, what happens at New Urban Arts is participatory and engaged with and answerable to a community. And from its beginnings, New Urban Arts rooted itself in social justice activism, addressing issues of racial inequality in its programming and service, and saw its work as a chance to create with students enrolled in the poorest schools in Providence.

I looked at New Urban Arts and asked: why does our scholarship not look more like social practice art? Why is there not a New Urban Humanities? I hope that our book Doing Public Humanities documents and analyzes a public humanities rooted in process and collaboration and dedicated to political activism: we do not do research about communities; we do research with communities and then present what we have learned together. We see the essays as exploring, as well, the small-frame view of the scholarship of public humanities. The book shows that public humanities scholars can write about their projects (what they have learned and been taught) in formats that can be peer-reviewed, following historians and anthropologists in relying on case studies. Public humanities as a collaborative humanities, undertaken in a social justice framework and written through engaged case studies, could change how the humanities are viewed and provide a road map for changing the world. This is the kind of humanities I want to practice.

One important influence in thinking through a public humanities scholarship would be the field of digital humanities, which emerged at the same time as, and is often intertwined with, public humanities. Digital humanities takes up, for example, the issue of expertise and its location. When archives are accessible online for all to see, what is the role of the scholar? In addition, digital initiatives often make room for collaboration (crowdsourcing in digital parlance) and so need to consider questions of authorship and authority. The two fields have much to learn from each other and continued dialogue could help both. [23]

A good example of the scholarship of public humanities is the Humanities and Public Life series from the University of Iowa Press, edited by Teresa Mangum and Anne Valk and sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Study at the University of Iowa. [24] The series currently has seven books in print, ranging from English literature to history to geography. [25] The books "strike a...balance between reflection and analysis of the project's significance and impact...and the 'story' of the project as it unfolded." Mangum notes, "we started so that people who are doing public scholarship or working with communities would have a way to represent their work in a format that would be intelligible to their colleagues." The challenge in such work, according to Mangum, is not that the university scholarship overwhelms the community programs who struggle to understand it, but the opposite: humanities scholars sometimes forget that they have anything to contribute when faced with the compelling and successful community organizations with whom they collaborate. [26]

The "goals of the publicly engaged humanities," as Daniel Fisher outlines, show what the humanities scholar brings to public work. Fisher uses examples from the Humanities for All website and presents five overarching goals for the public humanities: informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; expanding educational access; and preserving culture in times of crisis and change. [27] Case studies that simply document the community knowledge that the scholar has "discovered" are incomplete as public humanities projects. They should also highlight the contribution of the humanities to the shared knowledge production. Fisher's ontology pushes faculty and students to think about their contributions.

Conceptualizing the role of the humanities in public projects must be a starting point for training graduate students in public humanities, particularly those enrolled in humanities PhD programs. Just as flipping the switch on the "does it count?" question forces faculty to consider the role of the humanities in the university and in the larger world, in graduate training, we must also change the way we think about what has come to be known as alt-ac. Training in public humanities for graduate students should not only provide skills needed for a job outside the university; it should cultivate a set of approaches that changes how we mobilize and consider the humanities to improve all of our practices, whether working on campus or off. Without changing anything else about how academic jobs are built; transforming the relationship between the university and the community; or recognizing the vibrancy of the nonprofit world and the jobs it includes, the concept of alt-ac is bankrupt. [28] Given the crisis in university hiring, students will need to see the boundaries between universities and nonprofits as porous and train flexibly to move among job options in the nonprofit sector. Both Matthew Jacobson and I have described our work with PhD (and, in my case, MA) students in public humanities introductory and methodology courses that try to enlarge the definition of the humanities and humanities scholarship as they introduce certain approaches to the public. [29]

A public humanities framework should also change undergraduate teaching. For example, humanities faculty could help students understand the nonprofit sector, as business and communications faculty help students with job advice in the for-profit world. The Humanities Indicators show that despite "the need to expose humanities students (at the undergraduate and graduate level) to information on a range of career options," few programs in the humanities required internships or offered "occupationally oriented coursework or workshops." [30] A public humanities approach to the undergraduate curriculum need not be career-driven in order to help students understand how the knowledge and skills they have learned can help them with a job in the "third largest employer in the U.S. economy," namely, the nonprofit sector. [31] In fact, a wider view of the humanities, taking into account how the humanities can be valuable beyond the campus, makes such pedagogy newly important.

One significant project that engages primarily undergraduate students in public humanities and public memory is the Humanities Action Lab (HAL), now headquartered at the Clement Price Center at the University of Rutgers–Newark. HAL brings public humanities back to a focus on social and racial justice. Beginning with the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, HAL now has more than forty partners who "collaborate to produce community-curated public humanities projects on urgent social issues." Humanities students join with community groups to develop local contributions to traveling national exhibits and then host the exhibits in their campus communities. [32]

So teaching public humanities to undergraduates brings a social justice focus and helps humanities departments imagine postgraduate lives for their students. In addition, if we reconceptualize what we teach, how we teach it, and why we are important through a public humanities lens, our projects will be at the center of the university's mission. As the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium's white paper insists:

The ambitions of Public Humanities, then, require qualities of heart and will that have largely eroded within the neoliberal university–an idealism, a vision, a caring, a humanity that have all suffered under regimes of over-specialization, professionalization, pragmatism, hierarchy, and scale within the postwar academy. [33]

Despite the successful and transformational stories of public humanities in this essay, the pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2019 to 2021 have changed the future in ways this historian cannot foretell. The nonprofit sector, including universities, face big challenges, moral perhaps even more than financial. Within public humanities, the pandemic has halted many projects; changes in program leadership in the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium and the move to virtual campuses have slowed interactions; and students have joined with communities in an important and continuing racial reckoning that might help some public humanities programs transform their universities or hold some programs to account for their failures. [34] The Mellon Foundation has begun big and exciting initiatives to fund public humanities (named in just that way) in programs situated in universities as well as in communities. But who receives new grants presents, as is the case with all humanities funding, a struggle over too little.

We might, in these uncertain times, learn from our failures and challenges as well as from the many successes noted in this essay and in other narratives of public humanities. My colleagues at Brown's Center for Slavery and Justice, Maiyah Gamble-Rivers, Shana Weinberg, and Anthony Bogues, wrote about the difficulties of exhibiting the Rosa Parks House in Providence. The project's curators explained that the putative exhibit showed how "the practice of doing public history collided with the neo-liberal ethos of the monetization of historical memory" and, more specifically, about the White commodification of Black history. [35] Even before 2021, we faced obstacles to change around issues of racial and social justice as well as because of the difficult relationship between universities and communities. The work is hard and made more complex by the times in which we find ourselves.

I never believed that public humanities alone could change the university or even the humanities. Yet I find hope for change in digital humanities scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick's beautifully conceived and described concept of "generous thinking," a road map for how to remake the intellectual foundation of the humanities. Fitzpatrick takes her title concept, generous thinking, from David Scobey, one of the founders of Imagining America, and finds its early manifestation in public humanities projects. [36] Many of the most interesting descriptions and prescriptions for a renewal of the humanities, and of the universities that depend on them, begin at the site of public humanities. I like being in the center of the map. Let's see where we can travel from here.

Author's Note This essay draws from work done in collaboration with staff and students at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University, including Sabina Griffin, Ron Potvin, Marisa Brown, Majida Kargbo, Jim McGrath, and Robyn Schroeder, as well as with friends at New Urban Arts.

About the Author

Susan Smulyan is Professor of American Studies at Brown University. She is the editor of Doing Public Humanities (2020) and author of Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century (2007) and Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting (1996).

[1] "The New Tour: Innovations in Place Based Story Telling," conference, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University, September 24–25, 2015, https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/events/new-tour-innovations-place-based-storytelling-conference (accessed July 19, 2021); Rhode Tour (accessed July 19, 2021); Aurash Khawarzad, "A CUNY Public Humanities Map," The Center for the Humanities, City University of New York, June 10, 2021, https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/distributaries/a-cuny-public-humanities-map (accessed July 19, 2021); and "Torn Apart/Separados," Columbia University, http://xpmethod.columbia.edu/torn-apart/volume/1/index (accessed July 19, 2021).

[2] "Public Humanities," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_humanities (accessed June 29, 2021).

[3] Susan Smulyan, "What Can Public Art Teach Public Humanities?" in Doing Public Humanities , ed. Susan Smulyan (London: Routledge, 2020), 28–38.

[4] In an important early book, Doris Sommer uses all the words. Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

[5] Erin Benay, "Building an Engaged Art History," virtual conference, April 22–23, 2021, https://arthist.net/archive/33444 (accessed July 20, 2021); and Daniel Fisher, "A Typology of the Publicly Engaged Humanities," Humanities for All blog, https://humanitiesforall.org/essays/five-types-of-publicly-engaged-humanities-work-in-u-s-higher-education (accessed May 19, 2021).

[6] Susan Smulyan, "Doing Public Humanities," Humanities for All blog, November 3, 2020, https://humanitiesforall.org/blog/doing-public-humanities.

[7] Robyn Schroeder, "The Rise of the Public Humanists," in Smulyan, ed., Doing Public Humanities , 10–16.

[8] National Council on Public History, "Public Historian," https://ncph.org/publications-resources/publications/the-public-historian/; and National Council on Public History, "About: Our History," https://ncph.org/about/our-history/ (accessed July 20, 2021).

[9] "Home Page," Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, https://cssj.brown.edu/ (accessed May 16, 2022).

[10] "Public History of Slavery Fellowship," John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/graduate-program/fellowships-and-funding/public-history-slavery-fellowship (accessed June 29, 2021); and "Public Humanities Projects," Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, https://cssj.brown.edu/work-center/public-humanities-projects (accessed June 29, 2021).

[11] Imagining America, "History," https://imaginingamerica.org/who-we-are/history/ (accessed June 29, 2021).

[12] Julie Ellison, "This American Life: How Are the Humanities Public?" in The Humanities in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2009), 1–8, https://web.archive.org/web/20111005051231/http:/www.humanitiesindicators.org/essays/ellison.pdf.

[13] Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Museum 2.0, 2010); and Nina Simon, The Art of Relevance (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Museum 2.0, 2016).

[14] Julie Ellison, "The New Public Humanists," PMLA 128 (2) (2013): 289–298.

[15] Matthew Frye Jacobson, "Afterword: The 'Doing' of Public Humanities," in Smulyan, ed., Doing Public Humanities , 168–172.

[16] Humanities Indicators, "Survey, 7. Other Department Policies and Practices," American Academy of Arts and Sciences, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education-surveys/7-other-department-policies-and-practices#footnote1_acpb6s9.

[17] National Humanities Alliance, "Humanities for All," https://www.nhalliance.org/the_publicly_engaged_humanities (accessed July 13, 2021).

[18] Humanities Indicators, "Survey, 7. Other Department Policies and Practices."

[19] American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, and National Council for Public History, "Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian," April 8, 2010, updated June 4, 2017, https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/tenure-promotion-and-the-publicly-engaged-academic-historian (accessed July 12, 2021).

[20] Jacobson, "Afterword," 168–172.

[21] New Urban Arts, "About," https://newurbanarts.org/about/#squelch-taas-toggle-shortcode-content-3 (accessed July 13, 2021).

[22] Wendy Ewald, Wendy Ewald: American Alphabets (Zurich: Scalo Verlag Ac, 2005). See also Wendy Ewald, Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969–1999 (Zurich: Scalo, 2000); and Project Row Houses, https://projectrowhouses.org/ (accessed December 29, 2017). For more on social practice art, see Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2012).

[23] Sheila A. Brennan, "Public, First," in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 , ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/11b9805a-a8e0-42e3-9a1c-fad46e4b78e5#ch32 (accessed July 19, 2021); and Jim McGrath, "Our Marathon, Five Years Later: Reflections on the Work of Digital Public Humanities," History@Work, National Council on Public History, April 30, 2018, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/our-marathon-five-years-later/ (accessed July 19, 2021).

[24] "Humanities and Public Life," The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the University of Iowa Press (accessed July 19, 2021), https://humanitiesandpubliclife.uiowa.edu/.

[25] Anne Basting, Maureen Towey, and Ellie Rose, eds., The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016); Ruth Sergel, See You in the Streets: Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016); Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019); Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt, Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019); and Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

[26] Interview with author, May 25, 2021; and Teresa Mangum, "Going Public: From the Perspective of the Classroom," Pedagogy 12 (1) (2012): 5–18, https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1425083.

[27] Daniel Fisher, "Goals of the Publicly Engaged Humanities," Humanities for All blog, https://humanitiesforall.org/features/goals-of-the-publicly-engaged-humanities (accessed October 12, 2020).

[28] Katina L. Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).

[29] Susan Smulyan, "Introduction," in Smulyan, ed., Doing Public Humanities , 1–5; and Jacobson, "Afterword," 165–173.

[30] Humanities Indicators, "Preparing Students for the Workforce," American Academy of Arts and Sciences (accessed July 19, 2021), https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education-surveys/5-preparing-students-workforce.

[31] Chelsea Newhouse, "The 2020 Nonprofit Employment Report: The 3rd Largest Employer Faces the COVID-19 Crisis," Nonprofit Economic Data Project, Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, July 16, 2020, http://ccss.jhu.edu/2020-nonprofit-employment-report/ (accessed July 19, 2021).

[32] Humanities Action Lab, "About," https://www.humanitiesactionlab.org/about (accessed July 19, 2021); and Liz Svencenko, "The Humanities Action Lab: Mobilizing Civic Engagement through Mass Memory Projects," Diversity and Democracy: Association of American Colleges & Universities blog, February 18, 2017.

[33] Jacobson, "Afterword," 168–172.

[34] For one small example of racial reckoning, see Susan Smulyan, "Les Vues d'Amérique du Nord," John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities blog, February 3, 2020, https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/blog/les-vues-d%E2%80%99am%C3%A9rique-du-nord (accessed July 19, 2021).

[35] Maiyah Gamble-Rivers, Shana Weinberg, and Anthony Bogues, "The Rosa Parks House: Doing Public Art and Public History in the Age of Neoliberalism," in Smulyan, ed., Doing Public Humanities , 132.

[36] Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 1–45.

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The Future of the Public Humanities

Roland Greene

Divers on a Yellow Background by Fernand Léger

Is the future of the humanities a public one? In an era of challenges to history, philosophy, literature, and the other humanistic disciplines, utopian thinking about new outlets and broad audiences has become commonplace. Institutions of all sorts promote projects in the public humanities as an unequivocal gain for all, while reflection on the compromises of such projects—not to mention their hazards and omissions—is rarer, and sometimes difficult or unwelcome.

This Colloquy is conceived to demonstrate that a truly public humanities will encourage critical attention to its own premises. The arguments and questionings gathered here generally proceed from an awareness of the long history of intellectual work addressed to the public. They tend to recognize both that now scholarship may go public in more channels than ever—from publication to video to new media—and that, for good reasons, some of the most important work of our time will never find a wide audience. In light of these realities, one might begin by inquiring how the two terms, public and humanities , change as they come into contact, and how what they mean together might be different from what they mean apart.

Judith Butler's essay, which appeared in a number of the journal Daedalus dedicated to "The Humanities in American Life" in 2022, sets a frame around the Colloquy by insisting that the public humanities must exist not to promote the relevant fields of study for instrumental or market-driven purposes, nor to serve or advertise, but to bring a truly public dimension to the work humanists do. Butler envisions that public dimension as introducing topics of the broadest concern into the work of the humanities, at best reorienting both "the mission of the university" and "the relation between universities and the public." She concludes with a call for a public humanities that issues "a life call, to foster a critical imagination that helps us rethink the settled version of reality."

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, represented here by an informal reflection that appeared in Arcade's journal Occasion about ten years ago, complements Butler's argument by challenging one form of instrumental thinking about the humanities, namely rational choice, and countering that with a robust defense of the literary imagination. Spivak's argument was developed in her book An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2013), which was in press at the time of the essay for Occasion . As Spivak's essay shows, comment on the humanities in the public world has appeared in Arcade for many years now.

Several other recent items propose their own interpretations of a public humanities. Doris Sommer narrates three engrossing examples of how the provocations of public art (especially conceptual, avant-garde, or marginal) can prompt social change. Natalie Loveless describes "research-creation" as a practice of art informed by scholarly work (say, in history or cultural theory) that forces a reconsideration of the boundaries between not only disciplines but intellectual media and of the "rendering public (publishing) of research within a university context." Hannah Kim discusses the potential as well as the costs of applying virtual reality to the public representation of history. In a searching interview on the evolving idea of liberty, Quentin Skinner reflects on how his view of the relation of the applicability of the past to the present has changed and why he accepts the role of a public intellectual today.

In a talk for the Stanford Humanities Center in 2022, Kyla Schuller responded to my first question—about how her public-oriented book The Trouble with White Women (2021) evolved from a more conventionally academic project—by noting the diversity and sophistication of public readerships. "People are hungry for what scholarship can teach us," Schuller said, as she observed that audiences for books like hers do not exist in waiting but are convened by work that dares to educate and confront them. In an interview, Rey Chow expands on her book A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (2021), in part a critique of recent adaptations (not only public-oriented but environmental, digital, and computational scholarship) as more or less at odds with a non-utilitarian kind of humanities. Two influential figures who are active in institutions, Susan Smulyan and Zrinka Stahuljak, describe how their centers at Brown and UCLA are adapting to the needs of public scholarship today.

As in all Colloquies, especially on topics as open as this one, the work continues. We encourage contributions about the responsibilities of public-oriented writing in a post-factual society; the challenges of accommodating multilingual, recondite, or profoundly historical scholarship into the public humanities; and the nature and value of research that will never go public. We would be glad to receive first-person accounts of careers and projects in terms of the public humanities. Comments, suggestions, and submissions are welcome.

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Essay on Students

Why Study Humanities Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Students , Social Studies , Human , World , Knowledge , Life , Future , Culture

Words: 1300

Published: 11/14/2021

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Human behavior, relationships, ethics, and life experiences cannot be learned adequately in a science lab where humans are subjected to several scientific experiments to prove a certain theory, claim or concept regarding human practice, deeds, and reasoning since every person respond and act differently to stimuli in their locality. As such, life experiences and human behavior can only be learned exhaustively in real world environment through real-time events or borrowing from the historical perspective. Thus, humanities offer an opportunity for us to be critical in assessing events, human acts and at the same time think creatively and provide new insights to a variety of phenomenon in problem-solving. Arguably, we are living in a world where there is chaos between the old and modern traditions, hence, humanities provide its learners with skills and knowledge to liberate themselves from life dilemmas by providing understanding on human culture and values that are cherished by individuals, in particular, region and provide ways to adapt to current world while still keeping old traditions and how to incorporate change without compromising humanity. Notably, the current society has been obsessed with the notion of “employability degrees” for instance engineering without considering the knowledge gained by studying Humanities. The connection between job market and the studies which students decide to pursue is a major concern in the public arena which has put students in a dilemma about their future and what they ought to study in order to be marketable for jobs when they clear college/university education. However, this stigma can be overcome by higher learning institution teaching students how they can apply the knowledge gain in class to real-world scenarios and future events. Thus, there is the need to change how humanities courses are delivered and tuned them to the current business world, politics, economics and human resources. The humanities ought to be a backbone of all disciplines, not elective courses when it comes to providing knowledge and understanding of human behavior and what needs to be done to manage citizens, workforce couple with consumers across the globe and ensure success different entities in achieving their goals in future and providing services that are culture sensitive. According to Terry Eagleton, it is nearly impossible to eliminate humanities from the University since they are a major component of these institutions which they cannot survive without (Eagleton). If humanities are removed from college, this will turn these institutions into training and research facilities which will only concentrate on passing knowledge from one generation to another or from tutor to students without evoking critical thinking and being creative with the knowledge gained in class (Eagleton). As such, these institutions would be similar to military training grounds where recruits ought to follow orders without questioning the importance, origin, future applicability and effects to mankind of skills and information being passed to them by their tutor. Therefore, from Terry perspective, I agree that humanities and other disciplines go hand in hand with each other. There is a common belief that real men ought to take engineering and alike course while those who considered weak ‘sissies’ should take humanities, but this is far from the truth since subjects such as ethics, history, and philosophy cut across all discipline. These small portions of humanities courses taught as elective subjects help students studying law and engineering have a good understanding of the origin of some of the concepts and effects to humans. Thus, the usefulness of humanities cannot be ignored since they form an integral part of the education system which deal social aspect of every discipline. The humanities ensure that human values, culture, and traditions are maintained in the modern societies to protect the social order (Eagleton). Universities have a vital role to play in ensuring humanities studies are maintained to offer a venue to preserve human values, culture, and wisdom which are under threat from industrial capitalism whose main aim is to make profits despite the adverse effects it impacts on the environment and humanity. As such, universities ought to be the center of critique, where they question and assess the effect of modernization and globalization to societies. However, according to Terry this is far from the truth since Universities are yet to take their right place in the society as being the center of wisdom and critique since they are controlled by the politics through states funding, as such, Universities are fighting to retain the status quo than challenging social justice and human welfare to secure a bright future for all persons (Eagleton). There have been calls around the political and economic sphere to cut state funding on humanities courses but increase the funding on the scientific, business, law and engineering courses which guarantee employment right after graduating from the University (Moorthy). There is a common belief that humanities are lesser courses and do not assure students employment after college. Thus, they are not important disciplines which can drive the economy. However, Terry assert that, human values and principles should be central to everything and Universities through humanities should fight for social justice, maintain our traditions and offer imaginations of better future by improving human welfare (Eagleton). Martha Nussbaum asserts that higher learning prepares and equips students with necessary knowledge which will be instrumental in dealing with challenges related to globalization and citizenship, in addition, to have imagination thinking where a person can see things from another person’s perspective while improving their talents (Nussbaum). However, there is a segment of the society which see the modern learning as immoral, rebellious and which has the potential of destroying the nation which is closely related to Socrates’ teaching (Nussbaum). According to Martha Nussbaum, the modern education ought to liberate students from old traditions where they were supposed to follow instructions to the contemporary environment where they are encouraged to take matters into their hands and starts thinking, questioning, examine life dynamics, reflect and critic common human practices from business to political debate (Nussbaum). This will enhance personal growth, and as such; individual will discover themselves, govern their life, be in a position to identify challenges in their locality, offer solutions and respect the dignity of other persons (Wendy). I support Martha Nussbaum comments that there is the need for University to change old ways of teaching allow students to have the capacity to think for themselves. We are living in a diverse society which is a democratic couple with internationalization (Nussbaum). Thus, Universities ought to prepare students to be good citizens who can interact with people from other nations with different culture without difficulties. Therefore, humanities play an essential role in shaping students to have a global mindset which aims at solving problems of wider spectrum across different culture, ethnic and religion across the globe (Carolyn). Martha assert that humanities not only prepare students for future careers but to have concrete knowledge about life and citizenship (Nussbaum).This will help students to reason logically, question and test the information they come across to have an accuracy of the facts contained in the information before making judgments (Nussbaum). Therefore, humanities are essential to every student and need to be incorporated in their studies irrespective of their major.

Works Cited

Carolyn, Gregoire. "This Is Irrefutable Evidence Of The Value Of A Humanities Education." The Huffington Post. N.p., 2014. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/the-unusual-college-major_n_4654757.html>. Eagleton, Terry. "The death of universities." (2014): Web. Moorthy, Neelesh. "Value of Humanities Education Doubted in Academic Circles." The Chronicle. N.p., 2015. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/02/value-humanities-education-doubted-academic-circles>. Nussbaum, Martha. "EDUCATION FOR CITIZENSHIP IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL CONNECTION." (2002): Web. Wendy, Earle. "Let's Stop Being Defensive About the Value of Arts Degrees | Higher Education Network | The Guardian." The Guardian. N.p., 2014. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/29/study-arts-humanites-enrichment>. .

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What are the humanities?

Why are the humanities important?

So, why study humanities?

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April 14, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Why study Humanities?

Why Humanities at McMaster?

Humanities at McMaster

The question isn’t "What can I do with a Humanities education?" It's "What can't I do?"

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Why Science Needs The Humanities To Solve Climate Change

Humanities provides career benefits

How Studying the Humanities Helps Humanity

Why study humanities?

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Faculty of Law - Academic Appointment Opportunities

Operations Manager

Senior Education Technologist

Audience Development Coordinator (fixed-term maternity cover)

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

Why Study the Humanities?

Rachel Maddow

The Value of the Humanities

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Introduction: Why Study the Humanities?

The Humanities: Exploring What It Means to Be Human

Reverse Teaching

Cogito, Ergo Sum —Proof of Human Existence

Meta-Cognition: Thinking About Thinking

How Do We Humans See the World?

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Hilbert College Global Online Blog

Why Are the Humanities Important? ¶

Why We Need the Humanities ¶

Benefits of Studying the Humanities ¶

1. Learn How to Think and Communicate Well ¶

2. Ask the Big Questions ¶

3. Gain a Deeper Appreciation for Art, Language and Culture ¶

4. Understand Historical Context ¶

5. Explore What Interests You ¶

6. Prepare for Diverse Careers ¶

5 Humanities Careers ¶

1. Public Relations Specialist ¶

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for PR ¶

Public Relations Specialist Salary ¶

2. Human Resources Specialist ¶

How a Liberal Studies Degree Prepares Graduates for HR ¶

Human Resources Specialist Salary ¶