Maybe, just maybe, majoring in the humanities isn’t such a terrible idea.
That is one of the messages contained in a set of reports released on Thursday by Harvard University’s Arts and Humanities Division.
The reports outline the decades-long slide in the percentage of undergraduate humanities majors, both at Harvard and nationally, and describe coming changes in the curriculum, new internships, and improved advising, among other remedies.
“We need to show undergraduates that majoring in the humanities is not an impractical thing to do, and not something unrelated to what they want to do afterward,” said Julie A. Buckler, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures and of comparative literature.
Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, has been outspoken in support of the humanities. Still, the fact that the reports needed to be issued by an institution with a storied history in those disciplines reflects the broader skepticism about the value of a humanities degree in an increasingly competitive job market five years after a financial crisis and economic recession threw graduates’ job prospects into a tailspin.
Recently developed state-level databases consistently show that graduates with degrees in fields like philosophy and English earn substantially less in their first year after college than do accounting and engineering majors. Advocates for the humanities argue that such a limited snapshot gives a misleading picture of their graduates’ life outcomes, in terms of both their earnings and their overall satisfaction.
A Job Orientation
While concerns about the humanities are certainly shaded by today’s economic conditions, they are also longstanding. But what makes the current moment for the humanities especially difficult, say some observers, is a political climate that is increasingly dismissive of—or even hostile to—the fields.
“The backdrop is the deliberate defunding of these disciplines by people who have the power to defund these disciplines,” said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, for example, has said he would favor legislation to overhaul how the state supports higher education by putting emphasis on job creation instead of the liberal arts. “If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school and take it,” he said in January. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”
President Obama’s advocacy of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM disciplines, also has often come at the expense of the humanities, said Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association. “The emphasis on STEM, which has been part and parcel of Obama’s discourse, has been influential,” she said.
Faculty members in the humanities, both at Harvard and elsewhere, are trying to rebut the notion that their graduates suffer from dim job prospects.
A survey of employers conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that companies wanted graduates who could demonstrate strong analytical, communication, and critical- and creative-thinking skills, among other attributes.
“If you interview anyone in the business community, they’ll say, ‘Give me someone who knows how to write and is deeply literate, and I can teach them the particulars of this industry. Without those skills I can’t teach them very much,’” Ms. Feal said.
Humanities majors can write, analyze, and ask questions, she added. “You might say, ‘You can learn all those things in chemistry,’” she said. “Yes, you can, but it’s a different kind of learning when it’s in the humanities” because of the writing skills students in the fields tend to develop.
Those skills do help Harvard graduates to land jobs, eventually as doctors, lawyers, or venture capitalists, said Diana Sorensen, who commissioned the reports as dean of arts and humanities at Harvard.
More important, she said, the humanities serve a larger purpose. “Isn’t it relevant to wonder what the meaning is of our actions? How do you build a life of some merit and distinction? What is the meaning of love or war or any of the huge problems that confront us?”
While students at Harvard may hear that argument, many are not persuaded. Students may express interest in the humanities before they enter college, said Ms. Sorensen, but they are drawn to majors that “seem to be more attached to some form of success that may, perhaps, be more material and more immediate.”
Blowing Students’ Minds
Getting to students during their freshman year, and before, is a crucial part of the humanities strategy.
The number of Harvard freshmen who say they will major in the humanities has dropped by one-third, to 18 percent, since 2006, a period coinciding with the Great Recession. Over the past eight years, more than half the freshmen who plan to major in the humanities switch by the time they formally declare in their third semester. Most of them switch to the social sciences, especially government, economics, and psychology.
To counter those trends, the humanities division plans to make a greater effort to highlight its offerings when potential students first visit the campus and during freshman orientation. Faculty members are being called on to take a more active role than they do now in advising freshmen.
It would be nice, Ms. Sorensen said, if more students decided to major, or in Harvard parlance “concentrate,” in the humanities, but that is not the main objective of the reports or of the larger Humanities Project of which they are a part. “We’re less concerned with counting how many concentrators we get,” she said, “and more concerned with reigniting the intellectual profile of an undergraduate’s life.”
Faculty members in the humanities effectively have one shot at firing up Harvard students’ interest in their disciplines. General-education requirements call for students to take one course in aesthetic and interpretive understanding.
“We don’t like that,” said Ms. Buckler, of the Slavic-languages department, who was a leader of the committee that drafted the curricular changes.
One of those changes is a series of courses that span disciplines but touch on a common theme, such as cities, empire, water, war, or medicine. In those courses, a group of students will spend up to two years, Ms. Buckler said, examining such topics from different disciplinary angles.
New internships will be pilot-tested this summer, and the report calls for the university to financially support a “multiyear program,” though details remain vague.
In the fall, students will be able to take a new array of introductory courses—"The Art of Listening,” “The Art of Reading,” and “The Art of Looking"—to complement existing surveys and seminars. The goal of the courses, said Ms. Buckler, is to help students develop a broader “predisciplinary training to think like a humanist,” rather than having them plunge deeply into just one discipline.
While some details are still being worked out, the courses will be taught by interdisciplinary teams: “The Art of Listening,” for example, will be led by professors of musicology and comparative literature.
“They are designed to blow students’ minds,” said Ms. Buckler, “to really thrill them and excite them with cutting-edge thought in these fields.”