(The State Journal, April 29, 2011 - by Scott D. Miller)
Outcomes assessment is more than a hot topic in education these days. It is at the heart of what and how we teach. As the pressure on educators to quantify those outcomes has intensified in recent years—often in support of economic growth—the value of the humanities has been perceived to decline in favor of more vocational, career-centered majors.
How, goes the argument, does studying art history, philosophy, religion, or literature support job creation or any other useful result? Or, in the traditional words of some parents to their college-enrolled children, “what are you going to do with that after graduation?”
A severe recession does about as much good for the liberal arts as humidity does for a rare book. As the nation’s financial crisis deepened two years ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed succinctly, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”
So what exactly is the worth of the humanities? First, professors cannot possibly impart everything that students will need to have in order to flourish in the 21st Century. What we give our students at Bethany College is a toolbox grounded in the skills of being human—the ability to write, think, analyze, investigate, to roam purposefully across the range of knowledge and endeavor, and adapt to the ever-shifting career marketplace. Such an education can best be achieved by exploring the human experience through the liberal arts and thereby unlocking one’s own passion for one or more subjects.
As a Bethany alumna, Marie DeParis, recently advised students at our Kalon Scholarship luncheon, “You can do many different things in college and in your career. The best thing I ever did was to follow my passion wherever it took me.” As vice president of marketing and business development for SNY, the official television home of the New York Mets, Jets, and Big East Conference, Marie confirmed that her Bethany education prepared her well to pursue an exciting and rewarding career in a ferociously competitive field.
Second, because our students live and increasingly work in a global marketplace, they can ill afford to be ignorant of the world’s peoples, their cultures and aspirations. All business students are trained to interpret financial trends. They must also be educated to know how to read social, cultural, and political trends—which clearly influence the world’s economies, and America’s ability to compete with them.
Third, issues ranging from stewardship within our financial institutions, to genetic research in our science laboratories, to the tone of discourse in the halls of our government underscore the value of ethical awareness, discussion, and decision-making. As the American writer Joseph Wood Krutch once famously noted, “science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.”
The benefits of the humanities may take a lifetime to appreciate, but they are there. Nevertheless, higher education struggles to define and communicate the worth of disciplines that are easily shelved in favor of more attractive (lucrative) majors. The proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded in humanities disciplines lags behind those in science and business, according to online data of the Humanities Resource Center of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
I recently attended a “Symposium on the Future of the Humanities,” sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, which sought to clarify the value and “future vitality” of the humanities. A key conclusion of the participants was that despite the broadening-the-horizons merit of studying the humanities, and the usefulness of these disciplines to understanding, formulating, or challenging public policy, higher education does an inadequate job of “selling” the humanities to the general public.
We haven’t proved our case, moreover, in connecting the good old liberal arts to contemporary modes of learning and career development, which are driven more and more by technology, and subject to shorter and shorter attention spans. Students today process information in a vastly different way than did their counterparts just a decade ago. Lecture them that reading Shakespeare is good for the soul, and they’re ready to hit the escape key.
The reality is that reading Shakespeare is not only good for you, it also has practical benefits. Bethany annually hosts dozens of presentations by alumni and others with cutting-edge careers in business, communications, law, public service, and other fields. Without fail, they underscore the value of lifelong study of more than just narrowly vocational subjects. The benefits of such mental discipline, they say, range from holding one’s own in conversation at business functions, to thinking and communicating clearly, to establishing and managing multimillion-dollar companies. The ability to process the world through skills gained in the study of the humanities will sustain students regardless of how many jobs they hold—and for today’s college graduates, there will be many.
The challenge for higher education is to market the humanities to students, their families, and their employers—to work with schools, businesses, and other organizations to clarify the enduring value of these disciplines to one’s life, career, and personal satisfaction as well as to the public good. That is a tall order, but it is one worth pursuing.
It would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions if we failed to provide our students with the tools to explore the history and meaning of who they are as they go about the task of learning, in a career sense, what to do.
