Are you, dear reader, one of the wretched who naively misplaced his or her faith in the worthiness of a sociology degree? Or are you one of the few who, out of some strange perversity, was compelled to pursue a career as a political scientist? May the heavens have mercy upon those sad-sack souls saddled with dual majors in music and theatre studies and minors in European history. Frank Donoghue, author of “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” asserts that “all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.”
He also predicts that in “two or three generations, humanists . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”
Without apology, Donoghue forecasts a gloomy future for our much-beloved humanities departments. I can sense the groundswell of anger forming as furious student-scholars prepare to descend upon this hapless man, armed with an Emersonian optimism and an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespearian soliloquies.
But stay your keen knives, friends. We must not stab the messenger.
As shocking as these assertions appear to us, many of us have never walked the hallowed corridors of a billion-dollar-endowed research university or had to ponder the ways to retain teaching staff during a budget crunch.
As Guilford students, all we have ever known are discussion-centered classes.
Unfortunately, according to Donoghue, the humanities have been in steady decline since the turn of the century, when the nagging waves of industrial pragmatism first began to erode the foundations of the scholar’s ivory tower.
In his address to the graduating class of Pierce College of Business, Andrew Carnegie rejoiced “to know that (students’) time has not been wasted upon dead languages, but has been fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting.”
Alas, the price you put on a liberal arts education may be worthless in the near future. The dissemination of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is quickly being supplanted by the drive to instill a marketable skill in today’s college youth.
Donoghue points to the dire straits tenured professors now face in the business-model institution. Tenured and tenure-track professors constitute a mere 35 percent of the U.S. college system’s staff, and this number is rapidly declining.
Intimate classroom debates are anachronisms in this day and age, as professors are reduced to little more than conduits for the delivery of the skills needed to secure a job in the wide-world of a globalized economy.
As students (and customers) of Guilford College, how should we consider this soothsayer’s warning? Why pour tuition (second only to Duke University) into a liberal arts education that will soon be defunct?
Political policy wonks would gawk at Donoghue’s predictions. The presidential primaries alone generated hundreds of thousands of man-hours for bloggers and pundits, as well as journalists and news anchors.
And when art imitates political life, it manifests itself in projects such as Frost/Nixon, which is in turn an adaptation of a play. All of the actors, actresses, directors, screenwriters and playwrights involved at one time called themselves students of the fine arts.
Anyone who pays attention to headlines could tell you that the future of Asia shines brightly, and topics of interest ranging from Chinese politics to Indian diet habits are integral to the strategic quarterly planning of any aspiring international entrepreneur.
In an article for Newsweek, Jeremy McCarter ruminates on how culture and the arts helped shape and prepare our country for the historical ascendancy of Barack Obama.
McCarter entreats us to “think of what we’ve learned from Huck and Jim, ‘Invisible Man,’ Alvin Ailey’s dances, ‘Angels in America,’ the blues. Better yet, try to imagine how we’d relate to one another without them.”
Obama himself proclaims that, “In addition to giving our children the science and math skills they need to compete in the new global context, we should also encourage the ability to think creatively that comes from a meaningful arts education.”
I am confident that my time spent studying the humanities at Guilford has indelibly shaped the perception of myself and the world; this is no simple lip service to the principles of this institution or the merits of liberal arts educations at large.
In the same ways that chemistry or physics light our understanding of the natural world, fields such as sociology, dance, literature and philosophy illuminate the way we interact with one another. They jointly document our history and predict our trajectory into the future.
Needless to say, that humanities degree is worth a lot more than the cynics would have you believe.