Month: December 2024

This cluster of essays, How the Liberal Arts Work, emerged from a well-received panel at the 2023 MLA Annual Convention in San Francisco. The presidential theme Working Conditions prompted the participants to ask, In an era of neoliberal restructuring, political division, widespread misinformation, rising costs, and skyrocketing student debt, how and why and when do the liberal arts “work”?

College is variously seen as a provider of skills for the workplace, a laboratory for democracy (i.e., where students learn to be citizens), and a place where students may pursue learning for its own sake and in the process learn about themselves. The liberal arts constitute the acknowledged nucleus of college as an idea, if not statistically the source of the most majors. But how can college in general, let alone the liberal arts in particular, be all these things to all people? Indeed, liberal arts subjects have always been avowedly nonvocational, with an aim to teach young people to learn how to learn. But even as early as an 1828 report from Yale University (then Yale College), institutions of higher education have felt a need to explain their resistance to a curriculum “better accommodated to the business character of the nation” (Report 6).¹

Common wisdom affirms—and statistics confirm—that those with college degrees earn higher incomes: economists call this the college dividend. If one subscribes to the idea that the main reason to go to college is to get a high-paying job, it is easier to argue that nonvocational degrees (in literature or philosophy instead of engineering or business) are luxuries for elites. Abundant data show, however, that the notion that humanities degrees lead to the unemployment line is a canard. As the Humanities Indicators Project and other studies have shown (see, e.g., “State of the Humanities”), students pursuing humanities and liberal arts degrees do tend to end up in financially and personally rewarding careers. They are also better prepared to weather changes in the workplace and changes in the nature of work itself. Finally, they are more likely to commit themselves to the public good.

The essays in this cluster take several new approaches. The authors explore how and why the liberal arts work; the work liberal arts graduates do; and how scholars, instructors, and university leaders work to foster habits of mind, social commitments, and ways of seeing the world that come from the liberal arts. Those of us who work in higher education recognize that students from all backgrounds need to find jobs, but we also hope that each of them will find a vocation or calling in life. And, ideally, studying the liberal arts inspires graduates to find work that will benefit the public. Given the need today for solutions to pressing economic, environmental, social, and political problems, we need the liberal arts more than ever—which makes declining liberal arts enrollments a problem for everyone.

Leonard Cassuto’s “The Conflicted Role of Skills in Liberal Arts Education: The Case of the English Department” opens the cluster with an exploration of the antipathy in academic circles to the idea of skills development, and a broader resistance to the idea of learning outcomes and assessment, in conversations about the liberal arts. Encompassing historical reasons for this resistance (going back to German research universities that influenced the development of their American counterparts) as well as the practical fears about losing the liberal arts’ very raison d’être, Cassuto argues we need to overcome these fears if humanists (and scientists) are to follow a sustainable path forward in exigent times.

In “Valuing the Liberal Arts: Alumni Lessons,” Ricky Shear and I consider what works and what is not working in liberal arts education at a large public research university (University of Texas, Austin, where we both work), based on a survey of alumni who obtained a liberal arts degree between five and twenty-five years ago. Reading quantitative and qualitative data against popular and scholarly discourses on the value (pecuniary and otherwise) of majoring in the liberal arts, Shear and I reflect on the practical and less instrumental public and personal benefits of majoring in the liberal arts, as well as on specific ways in which alumni, in retrospect, assessed the value of their course of study. We give special attention to the ways that alumni say their liberal arts education prepared or failed to prepare them for their future work and lives.

Finally, in “Leading Generously: The Liberal Arts and Tools for Transformation,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that a reconsideration of leadership may help higher education face its panoply of crises. Many of these crises have origins external to our institutions, stemming from the larger political, economic, and environmental calamities that surround us. Others, however, have internal roots, stemming from profound misunderstandings about the nature of leadership and how it manifests in academic environments. Fitzpatrick’s essay considers ways the liberal arts may shape a reevaluation of the meaning and practice of leadership that might allow us to emerge from the current morass.

Note
1 The Yale Report, as it has come to be called, features a staunch defense of classical education.

Works Cited

Report on a Course of Liberal Education. Yale College, 1828. Internet Archive, ia600309.us.archive.org/35/items/reportsoncourseo07yale/reportsoncourseo07yale.pdf.

“State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce and Beyond.” The Humanities Indicators Project, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nov. 2021, www.amacad.org/publication/humanities-workforce-beyond.

At this hour of the world, beginning an essay about the profession with an invocation of crisis is hardly unusual. In fact, it veers dangerously into the territory of cliché, so expected as to say absolutely nothing. And yet, given recent events at my institution, Michigan State University—as well as events at all our institutions, not to mention the circumstances surrounding those of us without the privilege of institutional affiliation—to speak of the state of things without taking some time to dwell in the crisis feels all but impossible.

Many of the kinds of crises we talk about in academic life have been with us for quite some time, particularly those we experience in the shrinking corner of campus where the liberal arts seem to have been stuffed away. The enduring nature of these conditions and responses to them has been described by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon in Permanent Crisis, which traces the long history of the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities back to the establishment of the German university system. That system gave shape to much of the structure of research universities in the contemporary United States, and many of its fights have likewise come to be ours. Reitter and Wellmon, in digging into that lineage, argue that the existence of the humanities in the modern era is dependent on that sense of crisis:

For nearly a century and a half, claims about a “crisis of the humanities” have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of “the human” in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities. Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction. (132)

Whether this same sense of crisis and its causes can be extrapolated to include the entirety of the academy is of course an open question, and yet it’s easy to see the ways that contemporary agents of decay, the loss of intellectual authority, and a general process of dehumanization have been the enemy of higher education at large. Even at that scale it may be true that our sense of crisis, our sense of swimming against the cultural tides, has long given higher education its purpose.

However, there are some particularities to the situation of higher education today—the threats our institutions, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face—that are not simply rhetorical: the labor crisis, the economic crisis, and the political crisis.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve watched as more and more good positions—with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom—have been sucked into the gig economy. This ongoing adjunctification is happening across all fields on our campuses but is especially acute at the introductory levels, in those areas of the curriculum that are meant to prepare students for anything that they go on to study. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold. As fewer teaching faculty members have the ability to obtain tenure, fewer gain an influential voice in campus governance, and undergraduate instruction becomes increasingly devalued in favor of grant- and publication-producing research. Service responsibilities are divided among fewer and fewer faculty members, leaving them overburdened and at real risk of burnout. Worst of all, the hierarchical divides on campus—between tenured and untenured, permanent and contingent, faculty and support staff—become deeper and wider.

This of course works hand in hand with the economic crisis that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they’re going to sink tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it’s not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure (whether internal or from their families or communities or the media) to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious and lucrative career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren’t shrink, and anything that seems the least bit impractical or, heaven forbid, critical becomes a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.

And then there is the political crisis, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the direct interference in the curriculum—all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that higher education serves in the world.

There are myriad other crises, from the local to the global, that have surrounded all of us in recent years. Reitter and Wellmon’s sense that “modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity” may well be “a circular story” of the “salvation” project that rests at the heart of the humanities’ mission, but the threat and the work we have ahead are not rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.

I believe that we have at hand the means of responding to the external crises faced by our fields and our institutions and of improving our responses to the internal crises we experience. I believe that we can demonstrate through the ways we go about our work a better path for the future of our institutions. In Generous Thinking, I argued for stronger connections between our institutions and the many publics that we serve, since these connections might help facilitate a renewed sense of higher education as a public good. A range of forms of public scholarship, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, might help us build those connections.

But this isn’t a simple proposition. Encouraging individual scholars to engage in more open, connected forms of scholarship requires deep institutional change, in order to ensure that the work they do is valued and supported. Our institutions need to transform the ways that they value and reward public work, create the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and adopt the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And, as I argue in the larger project, all of this requires us. Those of us who work for and care about our colleges and universities have to get active and organized on campus and begin developing the new structures that can enable our institutions to emerge from the current crises better than they were before.

Most important among those new structures is a new form of academic leadership. We need that new form of academic leadership because the crises we are mired in demonstrate that the current model is irreparably broken.

I want to be clear in what I’m saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they possibly can in many of our campus leadership roles. It’s not the people that need replacing, or at least not all the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a process of institutional deck chair rearranging while the ship continues to sink with the rest of us on board. The problem lies not with the people but with the systems within and through which they work. These systems form the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with boards and presidents and innumerable vice presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of nonprofit entities in general, as is argued by many of the folks involved in reimagining nonprofit leadership today, including Michael Allison, Susan Misra, and Elissa Perry; Simon Mont; and Aja Couchois Duncan, Mark Leach, Elissa Perry, and Natasha Winegar, just to name a few. And those ill-suited structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.

This is why our mission statements die a little every time someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all our institutions are already being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren’t producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our frontline labor in check, and so on. All of which we’ve been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we’re in.

Even worse, however, are the unspoken parts of “like a business”: the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures. These reward structures are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro level, where each student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro level, where our institutions, instead of developing any of the cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector, square off in the marketplace and create rankings-driven lists of winners and losers.

This is the bottom line: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and they shouldn’t be run that way. They are shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have—in this case, knowledge—support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.

Dean Spade describes mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse.” And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the twentieth century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies—it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation—Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for the ways we live and especially for the ways we learn:

[T]he practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his arts, knowledge, and intelligence; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in arts, industry, and science. (296)

The development, then, not just of the softer, more aesthetic subjects that we in the humanities study but of the broader forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid to continue developing. And the need for mutual aid should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.

In collective models such as the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built from relationships and built to sustain relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership.

Coalition and leadership may not seem to go together well, I’ll acknowledge; our ideas about what it is to lead have largely come to us from the corporate universe, as filtered through our business schools. A leader in that model is a strong, visionary individual capable of seeing the future and pressing an institution toward it. But if you’ve been paying attention to the higher education press for the last several years, you might already have a sense of why, coming from the MSU perspective, I am somewhat less than sanguine about the transformative potential embodied in the folks that our campuses designate as leaders. In fact, referring to members of upper administration and boards as leadership is a profound misnomer. They are, more properly, management, charged with keeping the institution running in accordance with the status quo.

Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of creating change, and not only can that work be done anywhere within the organizational chart, but it’s most effective when it emerges through a grassroots process of coalition building rather than through a top-down mandate. It’s not incidental that John Kotter has argued that most organizations today are “over-managed and under-led” (37), and academia is no exception. In fact, we have arguably been organized and disciplined into an inability to cope with—and, worse, an inability to create—change.

So how do we reorganize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? For the last few years I’ve been working on a project focused on exactly that question, a question that I left wide open at the end of Generous Thinking. For this new project, I’ve conducted interviews with a number of people, mostly mid-level managers within their institutions, whom I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them point to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, to create the ground on which transformation can grow. As Chris Bourg, the director of libraries at MIT, said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” This is true at every level throughout our institutions: our collective success at the department level, the college level, the university level, depends on our becoming and acting as a collective, on our developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process—determining what our shared goals are and should be and how we should go about realizing them—requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, of necessity, political.

When I talk about politics in this context, I do not mean to point to any of the politician-driven shenanigans taking place in Washington, in our state capitols, and on many of our campuses. Rather, I mean to point to the definition of politics Iris Marion Young offers in Justice and the Politics of Difference, which she uses to describe “all aspects of institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking” (9), and in particular the ways that she suggests “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions (34). Just institutions require political action, but the ways that collective evaluation and decision-making have been trammeled on our campuses by the erosion of shared governance into bureaucratic busywork have left most of us feeling less than enthusiastic about the prospects. And, in fact, that kind of depoliticization is a core principle of management: getting things done by minimizing input and eliminating controversy.

So to come back around to the key question behind this essay: How can the future of leadership on our campuses be shaped by the liberal arts and our ways of working? What I want to suggest is that the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, are the areas on campus that are the most dependent on mutual aid in order to flourish and that have the most to gain from the full realization of mutual aid. Our fields and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we’ve been subjected. If there’s going to be change, it has to begin with us. This is not to say that we need more academic leaders to rise out of our fields, as we’ve all seen visionary colleagues whose transformative potential gets crushed by the structures of administration that subsume them. Rather, I would argue that our fields as we inhabit them on the ground might begin to model a new structure of cooperation that can serve as a starting point for the radical restructuring of academic hierarchies. We have the greatest opportunities—because of our training, because of our ways of working, because of our understanding of the always-already political, and in some ways because of our outsider status within our own institutions—to create an alternative to the failed model for academic leadership and its basis in the individualist principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. Similarly, we can ensure that our departments interact with one another guided by principles of mutual support. We can experiment with radical forms of collective governance and power sharing at the department level, and we can create a model that the rest of the institution might find persuasive.

This all sounds super pie in the sky, I recognize, and I’m willing to admit that my inner Pollyanna is running a bit wild. I hope, however, you’ll consider Dean Spade’s conviction that “crisis conditions require bold tactics” and that the boldest of these tactics is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises that beset us and toward a liberal arts that can transform higher education as a whole.

Works Cited

Allison, Michael, et al. “Doing More with More: Putting Shared Leadership into Practice.” Nonprofit Quarterly, 25 June 2018, nonprofitquarterly.org/doing-more-with-more-putting-shared-leadership-into-practice/.

Bourg, Chris. Zoom interview with the author. 25 May 2021.

Duncan, Aja Couchois, et al. “Butterflies, Pads, and Pods: Interdependent Leadership for the World We Want.” Change Elemental, 15 Oct. 2021, changeelemental.org/resources/butterflies-pads-and-pods/.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Kotter, John P. “What Leaders Really Do.” HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership, Harvard Business Review Press, 2011, pp. 37–55.

Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. William Heineman, 1902.

Mont, Simon. “The Future of Nonprofit Leadership: Worker Self-Directed Organizations.” Nonprofit Quarterly, 31 Mar. 2017, nonprofitquarterly.org/future-nonprofit-leadership/.

Reitter, Paul, and Chad Wellmon. Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. U of Chicago P, 2021.

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next). Verso Books, 2020.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton UP, 2011.

I begin with a problem: The literature curriculum as it’s currently designed is untenable.

I present this as practical problem, not an ideological one. For generations, most literature departments have employed a literary historical approach. To perform literary history, English departments have used a coverage model: one professor to cover medieval, another to cover early modern, another for the long eighteenth century, and so forth. (For the sake of focus and efficiency, I draw my examples from my own discipline of English, but most literary fields have their own versions of the problem I’m describing here. Nor is the problem confined to literature. Many of the humanistic social sciences rely on similar coverage metaphors to organize their disciplines.)

The problem is simply that most departments don’t have enough people to cover the historical range anymore, even when people wear more than one historical hat. Once, Gerald Graff observes, conflict “could be muffled by the expedient of adding another unit to an aggregate that remains unchanged” (250). Those times are long gone. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely contracted faculty ranks in recent times, but the academic job market has been squeezed for much longer than that.¹

The problem does not result simply from a downturn in the number of faculty positions. There has been a corresponding rise in what may be covered. This disjunction isn’t new, of course. It received trenchant expression some years ago in a widely circulated 2009 essay by the English-professor-turned-college-president William Chace. No dispassionate observer, Chace laments what English “has done to itself.” He deplores cultural studies in particular, especially how it has “dismember[ed] the curriculum” by inviting the consideration of a wide variety of textual artifacts: “myriad pursuits, each heading away from any notion of a center.” Chace complains that “everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture.” The resulting lack of “order to the curriculum”—especially a movement away from traditional literary texts—leads Chace to question what “the profession of literature amounts to.”

We might dismiss Chace as a curmudgeon whose rearguard action merits little attention—except for the skills-based solution he proposes to meet the incoherence he sees. But before considering his proposal, I present a few further observations concerning the problem.

Chace is surely correct that the traditional canon has been expanding. It has done so for at least fifty years, but the motivation behind the expansion is hardly malign. For good reasons related to social justice and representation of marginalized and formerly silenced groups, the list of necessary specialties—and necessary books—has grown beyond the ability of a single department to cover them all. The result has been a kind of canonical entropy: the center doesn’t hold anymore. The coverage metaphor is bankrupt.²

Most English departments haven’t done much to address this reality on an intellectual level. The main solutions amount to curricular Band-Aids. Some English departments have introduced “tracks” within the major (creative writing, rhetoric, or topic studies such as ecology, gender and sexuality, and literary-historical areas) in the hope that students might cobble together out of distributional requirements an English major that suits them. This may work in practice (and I believe it holds promise for that reason), but it does not answer the question of what the study of English is—or ought to be.

Other departments employ vitiated literary-historical approaches, also accomplished through distributional requirements: students might be required to take two courses in literature before 1800, at least two before 1900, and so on. But the result is not so much conceptual unity as an enrollment system that funnels bodies into the classrooms of professors with different specialties, historical and otherwise.

That’s the problem. Now let’s view it in relation to the history of American higher education. In the United States, the general public has long viewed higher education as an opportunity to acquire expertise that can be put to professional use. That idea asserted itself early. One of the founders of Princeton expressed it this way: “Though our great Intention was to erect a seminary for educating Ministers of the Gospel, yet we hope it will be useful in other learned professions—Ornaments of the State as well as the Church. Therefore we propose to make the plan of education as extensive as our circumstances will admit” (Pemberton 199). This emphasis on use value will be familiar to any observer of higher education today. My point is that in America this idea is so old that it emerged before the United States was even founded.

This utility-based aim became more specific when research universities came to the United States in the postbellum era. Private and public research universities were founded in great numbers during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During this same time the middle class was coalescing as a social identity. (That is, people started thinking of themselves as “middle class” and describing themselves that way.) In the United States, the simultaneous rise of college education and middle-class professionalization created a need for credentialed expertise to demonstrate one’s membership in this newly visible professional class. University presidents recognized the value of meeting that need, and the resulting intertwined coil of higher education, middle-classness, and professional credentials forms part of the DNA of American higher education.³

In English, the content of a graduate’s credentialed expertise was first filled by philology. Philology gradually gave way to literary history, which was interrupted by the New Criticism after World War II. Literary history then reasserted itself.⁴ “Literary history” was the content-based answer to “What does an English major know?” It remains the main answer to that question, even though the expanded canon—not a bad thing!—has fragmented that history from the student’s point of view, and the shrinking of department faculty ranks has made that history increasingly difficult to teach.

Where does that leave us? At the key word of my title: skills.

When we talk about what students learn from an English major—or any humanities major, for that matter—we don’t stop at literary history. Instead, we may expect to hear phrases like, “We teach critical thinking,” “We teach clear and concise expository writing,” and other such true statements. Critical thinking and clear writing are skills, not historical “content.” Accordingly, gatekeepers allow them into the forum, but only if they stand at the back. Those writing and thinking skills—along with the important skill of close reading—have always been part of what English instructors teach students. And those skills increasingly define what we teach our students, in part because of the breakdown of the literary historical curriculum that I have described.

Let’s now return to Chace, who says that he is eager to “map a way out of this academic dead end.” His advice to English departments: teach writing, and double down on the value of doing so. English departments, recommends Chace,

should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

To do so, Chace says, will turn a recognized “liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset.” As all graduate students and faculty members in English know, teaching composition is a low-caste activity. Chace notes that college writing teachers “are among the lowest paid of any who hold forth in a classroom; most, though possessing doctoral degrees, are ineligible for tenure or promotion; their offices are often small and crowded; their scholarship is rarely considered worthy of comparison with ‘literary’ scholarship.”

If this solution is so simple, why aren’t English departments considering it? That’s the rub. The answer lies in the vexed reputation of skills.

During a visit to a Midwestern university in 2022 I got into an informal conversation about skills with an advanced graduate student, a dean, and a visiting former foundation president (who started as a faculty member at a different Midwestern university). We were talking about whether skills should drive the liberal arts curriculum.

All of them objected to the word skills.

The graduate student said that skills sounds like what you do when you capitulate to the capitalist system. The dean said that skills sounds like “something that a robot would do.” The former foundation president said that “skills sounds like it’s not even college.” To him, the word suggests manual labor.

Why the many-sided opposition? What makes skills a dirty word in so many academic hallways?

First of all, there’s the idea that skills is a stalking horse for service. The fear is that if departments embrace a skill-centered mission, English and other humanistic disciplines will wind up as service departments. Everyone in English will teach freshman composition all the time, and research will be just a memory. (Other departments have their own version of this fear.) I’m not going to deny that this is a risk.

A second, related, concern is that a focus on skills will weaken professors’ professional identity as researchers. That identity actually evolved fairly recently—it’s a Cold War development. Only when the federal government started investing in universities as a source of innovation (to compete with the USSR in the space race, the arms race, and elsewhere) did many professors gain the resources to allow them to think of themselves as researchers first and teachers second.⁵

The professional identity of humanists as researchers is surely under threat right now. The threat is decades old, and it’s growing more dire. The opposition comes from students, parents, and sometimes state legislators who take a narrow view of what academics do—and who often focus on our role as teachers of skills.

But that doesn’t mean that teaching skills is the problem—or that we should be viewing it only as a Trojan horse. As I suggested, the pursuit of skills has been a goal of American academia since its beginnings. We deny that fact at our peril.

Laurence R. Veysey argues that the American research university is driven by three imperatives: research, utility, and “liberal culture” (an idealized, individual freedom of thought, informed by education in the liberal arts). These three interests don’t work in harmony in Veysey’s model; they compete for resources. One and then another has gained the edge at different historical moments at different institutions, but the tension among them endures. Imagine a triangle in which each corner pulls against the other two. That tension, Veysey argued, has shaped the culture of American higher education.

The three vertices of Veysey’s triangle can maintain distance from one another when there’s enough rain to water the gardens of all three camps. But we’re in a time of literal and figurative climate change. The drought in higher education is forcing everyone closer together, jostling to irrigate their gardens from the same limited source. That’s creating conflict.

It’s safe to say that the utility vertex of the Veysey triangle is winning the three-way tug-of-war. Preprofessional majors like business threaten the traditional liberal arts curriculum. Everyone, including state lawmakers and tuition-paying parents, seems to be questioning the “usefulness” of majors that don’t provide explicit training for specific jobs.

Even in 1965, when American academia was flush with government money and growing at a rate seen neither before nor since, Veysey was a disappointed utopian. He saw these enduring oppositions, and he saw the way that universities sublimated the debates between them.⁶ Maybe, nearly sixty years after Veysey wrote about them in The Emergence of the American University, we should look more closely at the meaning of those oppositions. Why do these three elements have to oppose one another?

John Guillory argues in his magisterial 2022 book Professing Criticism that “Literary study became a profession before it became a discipline” (vii). He means that literary study behaved like a profession (including behaviors like founding the MLA) before the members of that profession fully understood or agreed upon what their profession entailed. That is, the shifting definition of the expertise that we’re supposed to be teaching dates from an original instability in that definition. Our expertise was never fully clear even to us—and Marjorie Perloff’s 2006 complaint that “we literary scholars, it is tacitly assumed, have no definable expertise” is really a recycling of very old news (qtd. in Chace).⁷

With that history in mind, as well as the current exigencies that beset the humanities from all sides, we ought to be more generous to new, more pragmatic formulations of our mission. Resistance arises, explains Eric Hayot, because faculty members are “loss-averse, so much that they won’t make changes even in the face of death” (Interview). Simply put, we’re not succeeding with what we’ve got, so we must chart a sustainable path forward.

Hayot is one of a very few humanists who has tried to develop a new rationale for humanistic study. He starts from first principles—most important, that students should want to take the classes. “What if,” Hayot asks, “we reorganized the undergraduate curriculum around a set of concepts that instead of foregrounding training in the graduate disciplines, foregrounded topics, skills, and ideas central to humanistic work and central to the interests of students?” (“Humanities”). To structure this reorganization, Hayot proposes a series of curricular “modules.”

Not surprisingly—because students care about acquiring them—some of these modules center on skills. These would include “language learning, writing and speaking, historical, cultural, and social analysis.” “Theme modules” would focus on “topics,” including contemporary and historical subjects (“Humanities”).⁸

Humanists, says Hayot, should “lean into writing and making in a way that we don’t now” (Interview). That’s good advice in both concept and practice. After all, faculty members rely on their own skills—as opposed to the facts that they know—more than they want to let on. David Porter, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, reconsidered the meaning of his expertise when he taught a professional development seminar to graduate students a few years ago: “I thought about the use of my dissertation in my career, and I realized that for me, too, it was about the methods, about learning how” (qtd. in Cassuto). As Robert Frost says, “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts” (my emphasis).

With these ideas in mind, I will conclude with an example devised by the English department at Marquette University. It’s a proposed blueprint for a reformed graduate program in English. The graduate-level focus gives force to the argument, because the fear of emphasizing skills is even more pronounced in graduate education than at the undergraduate level. Here is how Marquette English faculty members have reconceived their mission:

The English graduate program values the broad diversity of our students’ objectives and strives to help them to fulfill their unique goals for their futures. In recent years, the program has moved away from a model that privileged narrow coverage of literary time periods and traditions as its primary organizing principle and has focused instead on the following goals:

• Training students in the methodologies of literary, cultural, and writing studies.
• Helping students cultivate high-order critical and creative thinking skills that prepare them for a wide range of futures.
• Preparing students to teach thoughtful, high-impact courses in a number of different settings. In recent years, we have also developed a framework for students to be trained in antiracist pedagogy and issues related to equity and justice in relation to teaching reading and writing, assessment, and class design.
• Preparing students to perform independent, original research and write up this research in a compelling way that is responsive to the demands of academic and various public audiences.
• Fostering a sense of curiosity and awareness in students that is interdisciplinary and in tune with the realities of our world, and helping students become self-aware of what they are learning in graduate school and how that learning prepares them for a diverse set of future pathways.
• Offering students at least one significant professional development experience in their training. This might be achieved by working in the Ott Memorial Writing Center or the Center for Advancement of the Humanities or, more recently, in campus offices such as the Office of Mission and Ministry.
• Preparing students to be able to translate their skills to a multitude of settings and to demonstrate the distinctive preparation that they have gotten in their English graduate education. (“Envisioning”)

This version of English study places skills at the center of the enterprise. I’ve italicized some of the language that spotlights the pedagogical aim of developing expertise not in disciplinary content but methods. This version of “skills” doesn’t look like robotics, neoliberalism, or manual labor. Instead, it’s an example of student-centered education—which is something colleges and universities need more of.

These curricular changes at Marquette are, not surprisingly, motivated by necessity, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. And they make more sense than a historical approach that we can no longer support or sustain. It’s past time that we gave ideas like these a try.

Notes

1 The diminishing professoriat is not a status quo that we must take as an immutable given. But amid efforts to change it, colleges and universities must still teach. I aim at that latter need here.

2 I draw the idea of the coverage metaphor from my reading of Graff’s Professing Literature, esp. 101–02.

3 This broad account owes much to Bledstein.

4 I am necessarily being schematic here. Graff questions the widely held view that the New Criticism was ahistorical: “It would be more accurate to say that the New Critics accepted and worked within the view of history held by most literary historians of their time” (183).

5 I refer here to the prestige pyramid that governs the academic profession. Of course, professors with higher teaching loads may think of themselves as teachers first and researchers second, but the research universities that train everyone throughout the pyramid communicate the research-first values that shape professorial ambition across the arts and sciences. The influence of the research university has created an ethos that privileges research over teaching.

6 Graff has a witty and salient aphorism that describes this tendency: “A university is a curious accretion of historical conflicts that it has systematically forgotten” (257).

7 Like Chace, Guillory is suspicious of cultural studies, which he sees as diluting the authority of literary scholars: “If literature is the basis of our entitlement to enter the public sphere, what does this imply for our public-facing representation of what we do?” (80). In short, Guillory suggests that literary scholars should stay in their lane.

8 Hayot elaborates his curricular plan further in Humanist Reason.

Works Cited

Bledstein, Burton R. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. W. W. Norton, 1978.

Cassuto, Leonard. “Can You Train Your Ph.D.s for Diverse Careers When You Don’t Have One?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Aug. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/can-you-train-your-ph-d-s-for-diverse-careers-when-you-dont-have-one/.

Chace, William. “The Decline of the English Department.” The American Scholar, autumn 2009, theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/.

“Envisioning the Future of the Marquette English Ph.D.” Unpublished document prepared by members of the Marquette University Department of English, 2022.

Frost, Robert. “At Woodward’s Gardens.” 1936. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Henry Holt, 1969, pp. 293–94.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. U of Chicago P, 1986.

Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. U of Chicago P, 2022.

Hayot, Eric. Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. Columbia UP, 2021.

———. “The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 Mar. 2021, www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-have-a-marketing-problem.

———. Interview. Conducted by Leonard Cassuto, 20 June 2023.

Pemberton, Ebenezer. Letter. Ca. 1748–50. A Princeton Companion, edited by Alexander Leitch, Princeton UP, 1978, p. 199.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. U of Chicago P, 1965.

How can we assess both the actual and the perceived value of a liberal arts degree? At its core, liberal arts study is associated with the preparation of responsible citizens, implying an important role at state universities, which have an inherent commitment to the public good. Upon close examination, narratives about the liberal arts’ lack of practical value, ideas that, we discovered, are embraced by many liberal arts alumni themselves, prove to be myths and misconceptions. Nonetheless, that Republican governors in places like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have called liberal arts degrees “economically irrelevant, unaffordable luxuries” suggests the cultural and institutional pervasiveness of the liberal arts’ devaluing (Kleinman 86). College has long offered students the promise of increased economic mobility, and, beginning in the 1930s, the vast majority of students have enrolled in higher education institutions primarily to advance their careers (Grubb and Lazerson). For that reason, especially since the 2008 recession, many students are being drawn to STEM fields, business, and other areas of study perceived as expedient routes to well-paid positions. Meanwhile, as emphasized in Nathan Heller’s recent and perhaps premature pronouncement of “the end of the English major,” the number of majors in history, English, languages, and religion has plummeted (Schmidt). The trend of equating value with a quick return on investment has meant that the true worth of a liberal arts degree frequently goes unrecognized.

Many scholars have articulated the extra-economic value of the humanities and, by extension, the liberal arts, arguing that robust education in such subjects plays an important role in generating just, democratic, globally conscious, culturally rich societies (Belfiore; Butler; Fitzpatrick; Kent; Nussbaum). According to these thinkers, becoming skilled at things like undertaking critical analysis, encountering others with empathy, communicating a distinctive perspective, and identifying meaningful connections between seemingly disparate entities contributes to the public good. However, the “rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills” that liberal arts study fosters (Fitzpatrick 17), skills that are essential in our increasingly polarized but also interdependent world, defy quantification and, by extension, easy valuation. Moreover, there are compelling reasons to be concerned that a perceived need to justify the value of the liberal arts or make their value more readily apparent to more people plays into a neoliberal regime that puts profitability, measurable impact, and marketable skills above all else (Butler 18–31). Nonetheless, as devaluation of liberal arts education becomes increasingly normalized, the need for a range of innovative “argument[s] for the employment relevance of liberal arts and humanities education” is urgent (Kleinman 87).

There is real risk in accepting the idea that liberal arts study is a luxury for the privileged few. As the philosopher Elizabeth Minnich makes clear, in situations “when the extraordinary becomes ordinary” (here we might consider acceptance of “the big lie” about the 2020 election), to create a serious crisis “it just takes . . . an ability to go along thoughtlessly—by which I mean without paying attention, reflecting, questioning—to play the game as careerists everywhere do, hoping to win, if, by unquestioned rules, one plays it well” (2). Individuals can succeed without a liberal arts education, but there may be a cost to democracy and the public good. Currently, concern about the liberal arts certainly exceeds the economic sphere: because liberal arts students are trained to question foundational power structures like patriarchy and white supremacy, it is no coincidence that attacks on higher education disproportionately affect the liberal arts.

Democracy itself has become threatened by widespread partisan gerrymandering as well as by initiatives designed to suppress voting rights. According to Christopher Newfield, this political environment has prompted public universities to reduce their commitment to the public good, causing the liberal arts’ extra-economic value to be underestimated even within the institutions meant to make liberal arts education widely accessible (81). A metric like financial return on investment captures only a fraction of such society-shaping value, and attaining an accurate understanding of what the liberal arts offer us demands that we find new and nuanced approaches to assessing and communicating value.

We sought new evidence by surveying liberal arts alumni of a large public university, the University of Texas, Austin. We emailed a survey with both quantitative and qualitative components to thousands of alumni who graduated between 1996 and 2016—that is, those who finished their degrees in the last few decades but have had a few years to establish themselves in their professions. Acknowledging the economic importance of higher education, we asked alumni to describe skills they developed through their majors and how those skills apply to their professional lives. But we also asked about their participation in public life and the extent to which the liberal arts influenced their sense of purpose and their capacity to respond to social and personal issues. Finally, we included a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, asking alumni how likely they were to recommend a liberal arts degree to students today. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most revealing data we gathered from over four hundred responses were qualitative: stories about how studying the liberal arts shaped lives and careers. These data are difficult to summarize, and we do not have space to do them all justice here.

Most of the liberal arts alumni we surveyed are engaged citizens who are passionate about their work and satisfied with their incomes. Even so, a significant number raised concerns about whether the nonvocational emphasis of a liberal arts degree remains viable for students in the current economy, given the price tag. Others claimed their education left them underprepared for professional life. Narratives in public discourse—and in some of the alumni responses—about the liberal arts’ lack of value reflect a neoliberal logic that prioritizes immediate return on financial investment over all other factors. Qualitative responses to our NPS question reveal this most vividly, conveying the concerns and faulty assumptions central to the debate over the value of the liberal arts. The real benefits of the liberal arts are being lost in a false dichotomy between supposedly practical and ostensibly nonvocational educational paths.

We focus here on the NPS responses, but a few other findings are notable, including the range of fields in which our respondents are employed (see table 1) and their tendency to be leaders. Job titles varied widely, but nearly half the respondents who gave a job title identified themselves as holding leadership roles, among them manager, account executive, owner, development officer, senior editor, senior data analyst, senior strategic adviser, CEO, founder, general counsel, vice president, principal, and so forth. Most respondents are professionals, and a significant majority (71.0%) agreed with the statement “I’m passionate about my job. I value the work and/or the organization I work for highly.” Nearly as many (69.9%) agreed with the statement “I am satisfied with the compensation I receive for the work that I do.” Given concerns about the liberal arts’ lack of practical value, we asked respondents to identify skills they developed through their liberal arts study. The three most common selections were “communicating clearly in written form,” “identifying connections between or patterns among disparate concepts or situations,” and “empathizing with others and understanding different perspectives” (see table 2). When asked to select which skill is most useful to their current professional or personal lives, participants’ top three responses remained the same but in a slightly different order: communicating (22.2%), empathizing (18.7%), then identifying connections (16.0%). That these three skills were repeatedly emphasized highlights their value and flexibility. Our data affirm that writing clearly and persuasively, making meaningful connections, and being able to understand others’ perspectives—skills often gained from studying the liberal arts—are critical for a wide range of professional and personal pursuits. However, that no more than a quarter of respondents selected the same skill as being most valuable indicates a high degree of variance in the skills demanded by alumni’s professional and personal lives. With paths available to liberal arts majors open and uncertain, they are likely to find value in skills with flexibility and broad applicability.

The applicability of liberal arts skills to work that appears unrelated or distantly related to liberal arts fields emerged as a striking theme in respondents’ comments. One alumnus in residency as a physician explains, “[M]ost of my patients do not speak English. Because of my linguistics degree I am able to break down this foreign language and find what similarities there are with English, and then use context clues to gain further understanding. I find that many of my colleagues who don’t have linguistic backgrounds are struggling with this, even those who are already bilingual.” Another respondent notes, “I work with software now, testing against certain criteria. The computational parts of philosophy, which I didn’t even realize were computational at the time, helped me pick up coding on my own relatively quickly.”

Yet, when prompted to identify competencies they wish they had, many respondents reported a desire to learn skills more obviously applicable to jobs, including finance and business skills, quantitative skills (especially statistics), and tech skills. More prominent however, was the desire to have been better prepared to navigate the job market and to identify and apply skills they already had.

The NPS question asked participants to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely they were to recommend studying the liberal arts to someone pursuing a degree today. By NPS logic, those who answered with a 9 or 10 are considered promoters, those who gave a 7 or 8 are considered passive, and those who gave a 1–6 are considered detractors (“What”). The NPS metric, almost always phrased as “would you recommend today” is commonly used in the business world, but it is increasingly applied in other realms as well, and survey specialists encouraged us to include an NPS question in our study. Offering a quantitative approach to assessing value, the NPS, unlike statistics related to income or return on investment, is not inherently financial. Our NPS question yielded some fascinating responses, but the NPS framework has real limitations, especially when assessing an idea as complicated as the value of the liberal arts. Though sometimes framed as the “ultimate question,” even some marketing and business researchers have misgivings about the NPS’s reliability (Kristensen and Eskildsen).

The use of NPS as a measure in higher education raises particular concerns: Does a metric created for businesses tend to reify value as financial return on investment? Our question was not Would you make the same choices if you could go back in time? but, rather, Would you recommend a liberal arts degree to someone today? NPS questions are generally posed to customers shortly after they have used a product or service, not years later. Moreover, respondents’ internal calculus for answering the question “How likely are you to recommend studying the liberal arts to someone pursuing a degree today?” is likely to be incomparable to their approach to recommending a product or service. In the end, alumni’s NPS responses may shed more light on their assumptions about higher education and their own notions of value than the actual value of a liberal arts major for current students. Still, these notions of value are worth considering.

Most notably, the NPS gauged by our survey seems incongruent with our other findings about alumni skill development and career satisfaction. A -11.7 NPS, derived from subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors, seems to suggest that most liberal arts alumni do not perceive their course of study to be valuable enough to actively promote it. However, in isolation, the NPS presents a distorted perspective. The NPS framework of promoters who chose a 9 or 10 and detractors who chose a much broader range of numbers (1–6) casts measured, thoughtful responses as irrelevant or wholly negative and responses that deal in absolutes as disproportionately significant.

Qualitative responses elaborating on respondents’ NPS choices indicated that alumni understood choosing a course of study in college or graduate school as a considerable investment, an exploration of core passions and values, and a lifestyle choice with decades-long repercussions. The repetition of comments like “it was great for me, but I would tailor my advice to the individual,” by someone who would be considered by the NPS framework to be a detractor (because they gave a 5), suggests that many alumni would prioritize recommending a major that is a good fit for a given student over offering a blanket recommendation of the liberal arts. Indeed, most alumni comments (65.3%) expressed willingness to recommend a liberal arts major in certain situations. This qualitative analysis complicates some of the NPS framework’s simplistic assumptions.

The qualifications alumni offered for recommending a liberal arts degree contained practical advice, misconceptions, and expressions of internal conflict between economic concerns and appreciation for the long-term multidimensional value of liberal arts education. Indeed, another detractor (giving a 5) said they would strongly recommend studying the liberal arts to someone trying to find their calling or whose primary concern is social justice but not to someone whose “ideal role in the future involves making buckets of money.” Many respondents qualified their recommendations by suggesting that liberal arts students need to get a graduate degree “to earn a decent living” or take on another, more practical major. These qualifications are half sound advice and half underestimations of liberal arts degrees’ value. Attaining a graduate degree does have a positive impact on liberal arts graduates’ income, but living a fulfilling life with only a liberal arts bachelor’s degree is quite possible. The prevalence of a narrative that liberal arts students benefit substantially from training in an additional field obscures the fact that the reverse is also true: most other degrees benefit substantially from liberal arts training.

Alumni comments suggest the rising cost of higher education, combined with the perception that liberal arts majors simply do not pay off financially, dissuades many alumni who had positive experiences themselves from recommending a liberal arts path to upcoming generations. Some alumni can be understood as genuine detractors: they not only tended to assume that liberal arts majors won’t attain a desirable level of income in the current economy, but they also frequently implied that making money is the sole or primary purpose of higher education. A comment such as “I would not recommend a degree in a field that barely pays the bills” is representative of genuine detractors’ belief that financial gain is the main point of higher education and that a college education without a clear and obvious path to employment is a waste of money.

Respondents repeatedly expressed concern that liberal arts graduates would be ill prepared for the most competitive jobs because they would not finish school with a “tangible skill set”; the notion that liberal arts skills have no application in “the real world” was a recurring theme as well. The tendency to understand liberal arts education as distinct from “the real world” suggests a revealing myth about the liberal arts. According to this myth, the world that matters is a world of commerce and hard skills that manages to be independent of other human concerns. Within this myth, liberal arts skills are effectively rendered unreal and unimportant by their perceived lack of association with financial gain. Related to detractors’ sense of the liberal arts’ irrelevance to “the real world” is the sentiment that, as another respondent wrote, “a liberal arts degree is a luxury for those who can afford it.” In this view, a liberal arts degree is an impractical pursuit that, to draw on another alumni comment, “seems increasingly for” those “whose parents are able to support them no matter what career path they pick.”

Despite alumni concerns about the financial and employment potential of liberal arts degrees, our own data and other studies show that liberal arts students’ professional outcomes contrast sharply with liberal arts detractors’ views. Liberal arts majors’ earning potential is greater than some may believe, and they have similar life and job satisfaction and unemployment rates as other majors (State of the Humanities). Moreover, scholars of business are themselves increasingly likely to recognize that “innovation needs the liberal arts, and the discipline, focus, and skill set that comes with serious study of them” (Gobble 51).

Our respondents’ comments suggest that liberal arts subjects’ nonvocational nature and the broad applicability of liberal arts skills can make it relatively challenging to find desirable work immediately after college. Liberal arts majors trade some early career remuneration for the very nonvocational skills that many alumni characterize as widely “useful in the long term.” As one alumnus insists, “I’m more successful than some people with business or engineering degrees.” Moreover, we suspect that the most efficient approach to helping students attain lucrative jobs is likely an inefficient approach to helping students become thoughtful contributors to the public good.

The vast majority (79.1%) of our respondents agreed with the statement “My liberal arts education helps me to better understand and respond to societal issues.” But promoters distinguished themselves from other respondents by highlighting the public value of liberal arts study, and their responses suggest a positive correlation between valuing liberal arts education and contributing to the public good. Promoters were significantly more likely than detractors to strongly agree that they act in ways that support their communities (54.9% of promoters vs. 29.8% of detractors) and were more likely to say they voted in state and local elections (85.1% vs. 72.8%). As one promoter notes, “[The liberal arts] teach you how to think” and are “one of the greatest tools to prevent domestic chaos and the disintegration of our democracy as a result of miseducation, misinformation, and anarchy.” Promoters also revealed a tendency toward a holistic view in which the most valuable professional preparation also serves as preparation for public and personal life. “A Liberal Arts degree cultivates lifelong learning,” one alumnus notes. “Students spend four years in college and forty years in the labor market. A lot of economic and technological change happens in that time. What students learn in a Liberal Arts education is uniquely suited to serve them well throughout their working lives.”

To create long-term solutions in the face of increasing political polarization, widespread disinformation, out-of-control gun violence, and a climate crisis threatening our very existence, we must recenter higher education’s commitment to the greater good, alongside its well-established capacity to enhance economic mobility. Higher education institutions should emphasize how and why the education they provide equips students to contribute to the public good and why this is important. We did not find a correlation between the level of debt alumni had taken on to finance their educations and whether they were likely to recommend studying the liberal arts. But we did find concerns about the short-term job prospects of liberal arts graduates to be the outstanding factor limiting alumni’s willingness to recommend the liberal arts to individuals pursuing degrees today. So, what is to be done?

Liberal arts skills are flexible and have long-term value. However, students need guidance to recognize the distinct value of a nonvocational education. We recommend training instructors to identify—and communicate—the “competencies” that students are gaining in their classes. This is especially true for PhD students in the liberal arts, whose professional development typically presumes they will wind up as tenure-track professors (Cassuto and Weisbuch; Rogers). In addition, liberal arts programs could make a few curricular adjustments to equip students with a better foundation for pursuing meaningful career paths without shifting the focus of the liberal arts degree from education of the person to job training. The rise of interdisciplinary fields like health humanities and digital humanities indicate the value of bringing the liberal arts to seemingly disparate subjects. Students stand to gain a great deal from discovering new approaches to standard subjects: for instance, courses in business and finance informed by literary theory, courses that critically examine the history of statistics, or courses that discuss the intersection of psychological studies and web design. Such course content need not water down or devalue the liberal arts but instead can emphasize their widespread value. Finally, we would strongly encourage all students to pursue professional experience during college and to make use of career services early in their college careers. Internships and mentoring that help students understand how to put their liberal arts skills to work should be integral to the liberal arts experience. A liberal arts education should include pathways for recognizing and discovering just how a student’s skills and knowledge may be applied in unexpected and new ways. Learning how to quickly adapt and gain competencies in any context while recognizing one’s role and responsibility as a citizen and community member are crucial liberal arts skills that are too easy to undervalue.

Works Cited

Belfiore, Eleonora. “‘Impact’, ‘Value’ and ‘Bad Economics’: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanities.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp. 95–110.

Butler, Judith. “Ordinary Incredulous.” The Humanities and Public Life, edited by Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett, Fordham UP, 2014, pp. 16–37.

Cassuto, Leonard, and Robert Weisbuch. The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. Johns Hopkins UP, 2021.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Gobble, MaryAnne M. “Innovation Needs the Liberal Arts.” Research-Technology Management, vol. 62, no. 2, 2019, pp. 51–55.

Grubb, W. Norton, and Marvin Lazerson. “Vocationalism in Higher Education: The Triumph of the Education Gospel.” Journal of Higher Education, vol. 76, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–25.

Heller, Nathan. “The End of the English Major.” The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major.

Kent, Eliza. “What Are You Going to Do with That? Arguing for the Humanities in an Era of Efficiency.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 11, no. 3, 2012, pp. 273–84.

Kleinman, Daniel Lee. “Sticking Up for Liberal Arts and Humanities Education: Governance, Leadership, and Fiscal Crisis.” A New Deal for the Humanities, edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 86–100.

Kristensen, Kai, and Jacob Eskildsen. “Is the NPS a Trustworthy Performance Measure?” TQM Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 202–14.

Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck. The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017.

Newfield, Christopher. “What Are the Humanities For? Rebuilding the Public University.” A New Deal for the Humanities, edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 160–78.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Updated ed., Princeton UP, 2016.

Rogers, Katina L. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom. Duke UP, 2020.

Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” Atlantic, 23 Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/.

State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce and Beyond. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2021, www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2021_Humanities-Indicators_Workforce.pdf.

“What Is Net Promoter Score^®? Your Introduction to NPS.” Hotjar, www.hotjar.com/net-promoter-score/. Accessed 18 Oct. 2024.

Table 1. Fields in Which Liberal Arts Alumni Are Employed

Table 2. Skills Liberal Arts Education Best Helped Students Develop

Respondents selected up to three skills their liberal arts education best helped them develop.