APPENDIX
1. CNN.
blog
January 4th, 2013
12:41 PM ET
By Michael Bérubé, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Michael
Bérubé is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and director of the Institute for the
Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, and the 2012 president of
the Modern Language Association.
(CNN) - Almost
every college student who considers majoring in English - or French, or
philosophy, or art history - inevitably hears the question: "What in the
world are you going to do with that?" The question can come from worried
parents, perplexed relatives, or derisive, incredulous peers, but it always
implies that degrees in the humanities are “boutique” degrees, nice ornaments
that serve no practical purpose in the real world. After all, who needs another
50-page honors project on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire?
Well, strange as it may sound, if you’re an
employer who needs smart, creative workers, a 50-page honors project on a 19th
century French poet might be just the thing you want to see from one of your
job applicants. Not because you’re going to ask him or her to interpret any
poetry on the job, but because you may be asking him or her, at some point, to
deal with complex
material that requires intense concentration - and to write a persuasive
account of what it all means. And you may find that the humanities major with
extensive college experience in dealing with complex material handles the
challenge better - more
comprehensively, more imaginatively - than the business or finance major who
assumed that her degree was all she needed to earn a place in your company.
We have plenty of anecdotal evidence for the value
of the humanities. Over 25 years of teaching, I’ve had many students tell me -
sometimes five, 10, 20 years after they graduated - that their English major
gave them the intellectual skills they needed in their careers, while
introducing them to some of the most challenging and delightful works ever
written in our language. At the Modern Language Association, any one of our
almost 30,000 members can say something similar. That’s why we’re such
passionate advocates of study in the humanities.
And as Richard Brodhead, president of
Duke University, has pointed out, we can point to success stories
like Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Harold Varmus,
director of the National Cancer Institute, Nobel laureate and former director
of the National Institutes of Health. Each of them earned a Master’s degree in
English. Dempsey studied Joseph Conrad and William Butler Yeats; Varmus
concentrated on Anglo-Saxon literature. In other words, they immersed
themselves in dealing with complex
material that requires intense concentration, and they honed their intellectual
skills in so doing. It turns out that those skills are useful - and
transferable - anywhere there is thinking to be done.
But for the first time, we also have statistical
evidence for the value of the humanities. In 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa
Roksa published “Academically
Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” What most people took away
from that book (no doubt partly because of the title) was that college students
are goofing off: They spend far more time on social activities than on
homework. The results show up on a test called the Collegiate Learning
Assessment, which basically asks students to deal with complex material and write a persuasive account
of it. “At least 45% of students in our sample,” Arum and Roksa write, “did not
demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in CLA performance during
the first two years of college.”
That’s not a happy result by any measure - and it
makes college sound like a waste of time and money. But when you break down the
numbers, a funny thing happens: Students showed improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning,
and writing skills” largely to the degree that their courses required them to
read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages in a semester. The
more reading and writing they did - serious reading, analytical writing - the
more they learned. A remarkable finding!
All right, it’s not really a remarkable finding.
It’s precisely what you would expect - except that it’s precisely what everyone
manages to forget every time they ask a humanities major, "What in the
world are you going to do with that?" In Arum’s and Roksa’s findings,
humanities majors scored quite well; business majors did not.
Too many students (and their parents) think of
college as the place that will grant them the degree they need to work at X
job. The problem is, X job might not exist 10 or 20 years from now. Or X job
might be transformed into something else, something that requires critical thinking, complex
reasoning, and writing skills.
When that happens, and it happens all the time,
humanities majors find that their degrees were good investments after all - and
that they are employable anywhere in the economy where there is thinking to be
done.
The opinions expressed are solely
those of Michael Bérubé.
Comments
Jorge
You keep selling your English, American History and
Liberal Arts degrees long. In the meantime, more airlines will keep grounding
brand-new American-made airliners, Europeans will continue to envelope and
dominate the alternative energy industry, Asia will enact usury on the Federal
Reserve and growth of the Gross National Product in the Latin American Third
World will continue to exceed that of the United States.
January 16, 2013 at 11:25 am |
Dr.
Warren
I just left China after living there for six years.
The lack of liberal arts education there, coupled with the hyper-focus on
rote-learning and math, has devastated the minds of Chinese people in ways you
could only grasp if you live there long-term and work with the locals on a
daily basis. It astounded me how robotic the thinking was and what a terribly
difficult time even graduates of the "best" Chinese universities had
solving problems in clear-headed ways, offering opinions, and recognizing the
need for analysis–much less actually analyzing anything with originality and
depth.
January 14, 2013 at 5:24 pm |
D Cas
In the 1960s, a majority of the CEOs of Fortune 500
companies had undergraduate English degrees. By the 1980s, engineering was the
most prevalent undergrad degree. Though I stopped at the Masters, I was able to
make a better living than most of my grad school colleagues in English, partly
because I had some knowledge of the sciences and economics, but largely because
by teaching freshman comp and other writing courses for 8 years I mastered the
art of the short essay, a skill valuable in any field and essential in many,
not the least of which is engineering.
January 14, 2013 at 10:53 am |
Jorgle
I got a BA
in English, then an MA, then a PhD. So clearly I love to read and write and
was/am to some degree good at it. However, I have to honestly admit that I wish
I had double-majored with something in the sciences. There's something to be
said about utilizing critical thinking skills in a praxis oriented atmosphere.
January
11, 2013 at 9:00 pm |
Debbie Miller
I have an English degree, and this is spot-on. I
owe my professional life to the “critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” I
gained in college from my humanities education, as well as the humanities
internship program that placed me in a terrifying marketing internship in an
industry I knew nothing about.
January 11, 2013 at 3:11 pm |
Brigid
I am a BA
major in English. English studies is one of the most difficult one could
imagine. What is the medium of expression? English Language!..I know that
because one can speak english do not mean he or she can write it. It is an art
to be able to communicate by writing, and whether you are a Medical doctor,
Scientist, or anything on planet Earth, English is the most widely used for
book writing, drug prescription, weather forcast, or even classroom
interaction, or teaching. English Studies is very important all over the
world!!!.
January 10, 2013 at 1:16 pm |
lmori
I would hope
that just about everything you study in college requires deep concentration and
mastery of complex material. But concentrating deeply about Hawthorne and
Hemingway and mastering the complexities of Edgar Allen Poe just isn't quite as
impressive as mastering the complexities of engineering, science, medicine,
law, economics or math is it?
January 8, 2013 at 12:12 am |
Chris1985
The liberal
arts degrees just need to be made more demanding, and they will earn more
respect.
When people
drop out of the hard sciences or engineering, they go onto the liberal arts
side of campus and typically do very well. That's pretty telling.
January 10, 2013 at 9:11 am |
Clint
"the business or finance major who assumed
that her degree was all she needed to earn a place in your company"
Way to make an assumption about an assumption. Enjoy your fancy vocabulary and
pretentiousness...I'll take a degree with a higher probability of helping me
start a career.
January 7, 2013 at 8:47 pm |
siposter
This is ridiculous. If with all our fancy liberal
arts degrees we are still equating success with a high income, we've learned
nothing. Did it never occur to anyone on this board that perhaps folks
"working retail" (as if this were something to be ashamed of) are
also involved in something else that might change the world? 'Course not. In
your universe, earners of a minimum wage are failures and unworthy of being
taken seriously.
.
Pul-leeze.
.
Pul-leeze.
January 8, 2013 at 2:49 pm |
REFERENCES
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