*Must be 21. While supplies last.
*Must be 21. While supplies last.
Thomas Polger, Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati
Chair: Jeff Blevins, Professor and Head; Department of Journalism, University of Cincinnati
2:20 Break
Chair: David Stradling, Associate Dean for Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of History, University of Cincinnati
3:40 Break
Thomas Polger, Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati
Moderator: Mark Heyne, WVXU, Cincinnati Edition, Democracy & Me
5:30 Break
Moderator: Amber Hunt, Journalist, Author, and Photographer, Cincinnati Enquirer
1910 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202
What are you going to do with a degree in philosophy? Why study history? Or literature? Despite a long tradition of liberal arts education in the United States, students are sometimes wary of Arts and Sciences majors. Students, parents, and even legislators often prioritize educational paths that strike them as more "practical" or that are perceived to have more direct paths to employment. Even with the national push for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, the emphasis has tended to be on applications rather than basic research. Nationally the number of majors in humanities and social sciences has plummeted in the past decade. Despite being the largest college at the University of Cincinnati, many students--and even many faculty--are unclear about what the College of Arts & Sciences has to offer. Such uncertainty is a widespread phenomenon, especially at public universities.
Yet this phenomenon is puzzling in light of the frequent essays and editorials in which corporate executives and political leaders emphasize the need for exactly the sort of education that is provided by study of Arts & Sciences.
Arts & Sciences education is an experience in the discovery of truths and the production of knowledge. Some knowledge will have immediate practical applications, and some may have future applications we can't yet imagine. But the pursuit of inquiry is valuable for its own sake. The Arts & Sciences are the academic disciplines that both seek truth and knowledge, and study the very ideas of truth and knowledge.
Studying the Arts & Sciences is a path to becoming an informed citizen. Democracy requires more than just voting; it requires being able to make informed choices. That depends on having knowledge about the world. But just as importantly, making informed choices requires thinking deeply about difficult questions. That is the kind of skill that is acquired and practiced while earning an Arts & Sciences degree.
Socrates said that the unexamined life if not worth living. Arts & Sciences education gives students the skills and the opportunity to reflect on their own lives, and to compare their lives to other ways of living. They study the distinctive intellectual and cultural heritage around us. And they also study ways of living associated with peoples of the past, of cultures around the world, and of merely possible ways of living imagined by philosophers or brought to life by writers and artists.
Arts & Sciences education teaches skills that are valued by employers: critical thinking, creativity, innovation, communication, empathy, humility, patience, and hope. CEOs say that these are the skills they value now, and that will be necessary in the next generation workplace. These skills are not luxuries, but necessities. And Arts & Sciences education is the only kind that puts these general abilities at the center of study.
Every student hopes that education will help them secure gainful employment. But increasingly students say that they want more than merely gainful employment: They want meaningful employment. Students want to make a living and make a difference in the world. Which jobs, projects, or achivements are wothwhile and meaningful? These are the kinds of questions that are studied by the Arts & Sciences disciplines, and that an Arts & Sciences education prepares students to explore.
Some of today's hottest jobs didn't exist when current professors were in college, or even when current students were in middle school. A generation ago, the biggest threat to American jobs may have been outsourcing. But today the biggest threat to jobs around the world is automation. The skills and knowledge acquired by Arts & Sciences study are exactly the ones that robots are unliklely to replace: communication, problem solving, innovation, and creativity.
Tom Polger is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy. His is the author of over fifty artciles and chapters as well as two books, Natural Minds (MIT Press, 2003) and The Multiple Realization Book (Oxford University Press, 2016) with Larry Shapiro.
David Stradling is Associate Dean for Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Professor of History. He is the authors of numerous articles and six books including most recently, Where the River Burned: Carl Stokes and the Struggle to Save Cleveland (Cornell University Press, 2015), with Richard Stradling.
Dr. Blevins is Head of the Journalism Department, Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature, and holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Communication, and Department of Political Science. His Scholarship is grounded in U.S. telecommunication law and policy and engages critical political economy theory.
In addition to being Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Ken Petren is Professor of Biology. His lab studies speciation, population divergence, dispersal and species interactions in natural populations. Much of the lab's research is in the field of comparative landscape genetics, where molecular markers (like those used in forensics) are used to reconstruct migration, hybridization and population history.
There has recently been quite a bit of public discussion of Arts & Sciences education, the humanities, truth, knowledege, and the value of higher education. The below articles and commentaries are just a small sample that we highlight here to promote to discussion. Discussion of philosophy as a college major is a prominent theme, both because this event is hosted by the Department of Philosophy and because the discipline of philosophy is often used as an example of what is outdated or impractical with Arts & Sciences ("liberal arts") education — as illustrated by Marco Rubio's claim, during a presidential primary debate, that America needs more welders and fewer philosophers. What do you think?
The most recent items are at the top, and they come from a variety of publications ranging from blogs, to Wired and Forbes magazines, to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. A few articles are behind pay walls, but most are accessible through the University of Cincinnati Libraries or the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Here the humanities thrive, and a pure unadulterated passion for literature, history, philosophy, and the classics persists almost oblivious to the siege endured by counterparts across the sea.... Indeed, even the budding scientists here seem to reinforce the humanities. A graduate student and botanist with the fortuitous name of Flora speaks of plant processes using metaphors and similes any humanist would applaud.
On the theme of rebranding, Busteed published an essay Wednesday urging colleges to stop using the term "liberal arts." "Putting the words liberal and arts together is a branding disaster, and the most effective way to save or defend the liberal arts may be to change what we call them. Note, the problem isn't with the substance of a liberal arts education but with the words we use to describe it," he wrote.
“I think we sometimes forget that activities don’t have to be profitable to be valuable,” Ms. Wapnick said. “Learning enriches our lives and allows us to look at the world and our work from new angles. “If you’re someone who is yearning to broaden your focus, set some time aside to try a new activity, start a personal project or take a class.”
Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.
College is supposed to help young people prepare for the future. But as headlines warn that automation and technology may change—or end—work as we know it, parents, students, and universities are grappling with a new question: How do you educate a new generation for a world we can’t even imagine?
In our new book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities, we argue that the best of the humanities can help transform the field of economics, making economic models more realistic, predictions more reliable and policies more effective and just. But what do we mean by the “best” of the humanities? Is it what is often taught in colleges and high schools? If not, might that explain why so many have said the humanities are in “crisis”?
If the news media are to be believed, these are not heady days for the humanities. In the New Republic in 2013, for example, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed intoned, "You’ve probably heard several times already that the humanities are in...
An MBA isn’t the key to being successful in business, and it only teaches you some of what you need to know to make it as an entrepreneur. While you’ll learn about incorporating, revenue, hiring and more, founders are realizing that emotional intelligence and soft skills are what often get their businesses running like well-oiled machines. CEOs are even turning to surprising methods—like equine therapy—to learn what their business classes didn’t offer. For this reason, there’s something to the idea that a line of study in a realm completely opposite of business can set you up to be a great entrepreneur. Rather than being taught how to run a business, spending your years of education learning to think in a way that will help you start, grow and lead a business offers something that’s often overlooked.
Computer science is wondrous. The problem is that many people in Silicon Valley believe that it is all that matters. You see this when recruiters at career fairs make it clear they're only interested in the computer scientists; in the salary gap between engineering and non-engineering students; in the quizzical looks humanities students get when they dare to reveal their majors. I've watched brilliant computer scientists display such woeful ignorance of the populations they were studying that I laughed in their faces. I've watched military scientists present their lethal innovations with childlike enthusiasm while making no mention of whom the weapons are being used on. There are few things scarier than a scientist who can give an academic talk on how to shoot a human being but can't reason about whether you should be shooting them at all.
If self-made billionaire Mark Cuban was starting college right now, he'd choose philosophy as his major over accounting. That's because he strongly believes artificial intelligence will automate many jobs involving technical tasks, such as an accountant's. Jobs that rely more on personal judgement, critical thinking and creativity — skills more often associated with a liberal arts degree — are less at risk, he says.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with happiness. The pursuit of a mythical good life, achievement blending perfectly with fulfillment, has given rise to the quantified self movement, polyphasic sleeping, and stashes of off-label pharmaceuticals in developers’ desks. Yet Andrew Taggart thinks most of this is nonsense. A PhD in philosophy, Taggart practices the art of gadfly-for-hire. He disabuses founders, executives, and others in Silicon Valley of the notion that life is a problem to be solved, and happiness awaits those who do it.
What the world needs now, says Nicolas Berggruen, is more philosophy. He thinks that the great thinkers of human history just might provide some solutions in our time of political and economic upheaval. “I always felt philosophy…doesn’t get enough attention,” says Mr. Berggruen, a philanthropist and financier who seven years ago launched the Berggruen Institute, an unusual think tank with an endowment of $1 billion. “We’re still shaped by ideas and by the people that created them thousands of years ago.”
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), “The Costs and Net Returns to College Major,” finds that offering a philosophy major may be as good an investment of educational dollars as offering engineering and health majors.
Talk to presidents of liberal arts colleges and they are proud of how their institutions educate graduates and prepare them for life. But ask the presidents to prove that value, and many get a little less certain. Some cite surveys of alumni satisfaction or employment. Others point to famous alumni. And, privately, many liberal arts college presidents admit that their arguments haven’t been cutting it of late with prospective students and their parents (not to mention politicians), who are more likely to be swayed by the latest data on first-year salaries of graduates, surveys that seem to suggest that engineering majors will find success and humanities graduates will end up as baristas.
When I was a freshman, half a century ago, I asked one of my professors — an eminent mathematician named Lars Ahlfors — for advice on my academic program. As a budding mathematician, I knew about a lot of math courses I should take and some physics courses as well. I asked what other courses in math and science I should include in my program. Ahlfors replied, "Don’t take more courses in those subjects. Once you get to graduate school, you’ll be studying nothing but mathematics. Now is your chance to become well-educated. Study literature, history, and foreign languages." I sometimes repeat this story to my students and hope that the message is not drowned out by what they might be hearing from parents, friends, and the media.
Dr. Damon Horowitz quit his technology job and got a Ph.D. in philosophy — and he thinks you should too. “If you are at all disposed to question what’s around you, you’ll start to see that there appear to be cracks in the bubble,” Horowitz said in a 2011 talk at Stanford. “So about a decade ago, I quit my technology job to get a philosophy PhD. That was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.” As Horowitz demonstrates, a degree in philosophy can be useful for professions beyond a career in academia. Degrees like his can help in the business world, where a philosophy background can pave the way for real change.
An accomplished writer once warned me that if I were to become a writer, I would have to work another job to make a living, without any guarantee of success. And if I were to be an academic, success would come very slowly, if at all. Contemplating these facts I asked myself, “When it comes to literature, do I love it enough to go broke for it?” The answer was yes, for myself alone. Though I can easily measure my wealth in the scholarship of literature, I will not ask my family to do the same. I am a first-generation college student. My mother raised my two sisters and me by herself. For much of my life we lived on government assistance and help from family friends, shuffling from one small apartment to the next. The relentless cycle of poverty and violence left me mentally crippled and emotionally exhausted. College was my way out.
At a time when the great challenge for the higher-education system as a whole is to raise graduation rates, a suite of general-purpose courses, if well designed and taught, can help the many students who are struggling with the transition from high school to college. The lesson we should take from the diminution of the liberal arts in recent years is that they have to be made stronger, clearer, and more sustainable. And as a matter of principle, the higher purpose of college — education for independent thought and active participation in democracy — can’t be achieved without the liberal arts.
The disorientating political upheavals of recent times have put several pillars of the State under the spotlight, the legislature and the media included. Education should not escape this soul searching. Events in the US and Europe have revealed a worrying degree of political disengagement among the young, amid prejudice-infused and ever-less civilised public debate. We ignore this at our peril. Reflecting on the threat, President Michael D Higgins has called for philosophy to become an integral part of the Irish education system. holistic response to our current predicament”.
In Denis Villeneuve’s lyrical sci-fi movie Arrival, a dozen mysterious vessels from an unknown planet appear on Earth. The military sends in the experts: a professor of physics and a professor of linguistics. Their task is to procure the answers to two questions: what do the aliens want? Where are they from? The physicist asserts that “the cornerstone of civilisation isn’t language, it’s science”. But the linguist is not so sure. She suggests that they might try talking to them. The film gently asserts the possibility that the humanities hold the key to understanding an alien culture – that speaking someone else’s language, literally and metaphorically, might be what’s required to avert violent disaster.
As academe’s hoped-for recovery from the 2008 financial crisis recedes before it like the shimmer of water on a hot roadway, the problems of its humanities component are up close and all too real. There is no doubt that the United States is now producing an unprecedented number of B.A.s who know little or nothing about humanistic thought — and a growing number of humanities Ph.D.s who cannot find jobs. As Alexander I. Jacobs noted last year in a Chronicle essay, defenses of the humanities have tended to take two paths. One, the more traditional, points out that life is not simply a matter of careers, and that the humanities address the higher concerns that make it worth living: A person who knows some Shakespeare and Plato, or who has some acquaintance with Bach and Canaletto, will live a happier and more interesting life than someone who does not.
When I assigned an 800-page biography of Andrew Carnegie for a new undergraduate course on wealth and poverty at George Mason University a few years ago, I wasn’t sure the students would actually read it. Not only did most of them make it to the end, however, but many thanked me for giving them the chance to read a popular work of history. Curious, I inquired how many were history majors. Of the 24 honors students in the seminar, there were none. English? Philosophy? Fine arts? Only one. How was this possible? I asked. Almost in unison, half a dozen replied: “Our parents wouldn’t let us.” The results were similar when I surveyed freshmen in another honors seminar this spring. This time, I asked how many would have been humanities majors if the only criteria were what they were interested in and what they were good at. Ten of the 24 raised their hands.
According to neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, science can answer moral questions. According to philosopher Alex Rosenberg, science can answer "persistent philosophical questions," including the purpose of life and the meaning of human history. According to geneticist-turned-writer Adam Rutherford, "the domain of knowledge amenable to science has only ever changed in one direction: at the expense of all others." Against this backdrop, it's natural to wonder what's left for the humanities to answer or reveal. As scientific methods answer more and more, is the scope of humanistic inquiry reduced to less and less?
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they’ll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it’s why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts education.
As the demand for quality computer programmers and engineers increases, conventional wisdom assumes we need more students with computer-science and engineering degrees. Makes sense, right? I’ve been preaching this exact message for the past 10 years as I’ve fought to recruit the best programmers. Recently, though, I’ve realized that my experience has proved something completely different. Looking back at the tech teams that I’ve built at my companies, it’s evident that individuals with liberal arts degrees are by far the sharpest, best¬-performing software developers and technology leaders. Often these modern techies have degrees in philosophy, history, and music – even political science, which was my degree.
In 2006, the highest court in New York affirmed that students in the state have a right to civic education. It was a decision thirteen years in the making, and it spoke to a fundamental question: What is an education for? Lawyers representing the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), which brought suit, argued that the purpose of education is to develop not only vocational capacities, but also civic agency. Students, in other words, are entitled to learn in public schools the “basic literacy, calculating, and verbal skills necessary to enable children to eventually function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury.”
So what about those philosophy majors who want to enter the work force, rather than continue their studies? Surprisingly, there is good news for them as well. For example, philosophy majors are projected to earn an average starting salary of $49,000. Philosophy majors are tied with mathematics majors for the highest percentage in salary increase from beginning to mid-career salary. This is not surprising to those of us who are philosophers, however, because the skills that a philosophy degree cultivates–critical thinking, excellence in written and oral communication, clarity of thought, careful analysis, and problem-solving skills–are precisely the skills that enable one to do well and advance in their chosen career.
Worries about the preparation of college grads for the world of work have been around for a long time. A century ago, business groups and labor unions came together to support a stratified system of high-school education that trained some students for specific tasks, while giving others a broad education that would allow them to continue their studies in college. The movement led to the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which financed vocational education, initially for jobs in agriculture and then in other industries. The goal of separate-but-equal education for vocational and academic students predictably degenerated into protecting wealthy people who wanted a broad education for their offspring, while leaving those in vocational tracks vulnerable to losing their jobs when technology and other economic changes made their specific—and narrow—skill sets obsolete.
We are living through an “extended moment of making fun of philosophers” in America, according to National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chair William D. Adams…. Adams said a presidential candidate boldly and unapologetically stated in a recent debate that our country needs more welders than philosophers. But Americans, Adams argued, should not forget that our nation was founded by highly educated people who debated constitutional values in “one of the great public humanities moments in the history of the United States.” Others joined the chorus of debate in newspapers. We are still “literally drowning in issues that have fundamental philosophical significance,” Adams said.
My brother and I live in different cities, but I have never lost my conviction that one’s outward form — the shape of people, but also of surfaces and things — may not be what it seems. That personal intuition is of a piece with my career as a professor of literature, since I am convinced that great works of art tell us about shape-shifting, about both the world and ourselves as more mobile, more misperceived, more dimensional beings, than science or our senses would have us believe.
The idea that schoolchildren should become philosophers will be scoffed at by school boards, teachers, parents, and philosophers alike. The latter will question whether kids can even do philosophy, while the former likely have only a passing familiarity with it, if any — possibly leading them to conclude that it’s beyond useless. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, nothing could be more important to the future well-being of both our kids and society as a whole than that they learn how to be philosophers.
I have always had a sneaking sympathy with parents who react with despair and horror, as mine did, when their beloved offspring announce that they want to read philosophy at university. Bang go dreams of social prestige (medicine! law!), wealth (economics! maths!) or, indeed, anything that is easy to explain to the neighbours. And it has to be admitted that philosophers have done little to help dispel the shock: for much of the 20th century, many in German and French traditions actually prided themselves on being incomprehensible, while those in so-called Anglo-American philosophy took an equally lordly attitude to anyone philistine enough to ask what we do, or to find the answers opaque. Times have changed.
“We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. No, I do not mean the global economic crisis.... I mean a crisis that goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government: a world-wide crisis in education.” That’s the opening blast from Martha Nussbaum’s new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
Deep in the corridors of Stanford University’s English department, graduate student Jodie Archer developed a computer model that can predict New York Times bestsellers. Her soon-to-be published research landed her a top job with Apple iBooks and may revolutionise the publishing industry. At the University of Notre Dame, philosopher Don Howard worked with a computer scientist to develop a code of ethics for “human-robot interaction” that could change the way Silicon Valley designs robots. Japanese universities are cutting humanities and social sciences in favour of ‘practical’ subjects, sparking global concern Both scholars share an academic background in humanities. And they join countless others working in fields such as technology, environmental sustainability and even infectious disease control. But humanities is experiencing a crisis. Public support has dwindled. Enrollment in humanities majors is down and courses are disappearing from university curricula. A tightening job market means more humanities PhDs than ever are looking for – and not finding – jobs outside of academia.
The Berggruen Institute, an independent think tank based in Santa Monica, California, announced a $1 million prize for achievements in philosophy. The reason, says billionaire philanthropist and Berggruen Institute chairman Nicolas Berggruen, is that, “ideas really matter.” Berggruen told HuffPost Live in an interview on Tuesday that he thinks philosophical achievements should be rewarded the same way that the Nobel Prize recognizes achievements in science, literature and human relations. The prize would be the second-largest monetary award in the world for philosophy, behind the U.K.’s Templeton prize, which is worth about $1.8 million.
The answer used to be easy: College is a place where you come to learn such things. But as higher education expands its reach, it’s increasingly hard to say what college is like and what college is for. In the United States, where I now teach, more than 17 million undergraduates will be enrolling in classes this fall. They will be passing through institutions small and large, public and private, two-year and four-year, online and on campus. Some of them will be doing vocational courses — in accounting or nursing or web design — at for-profit institutions like DeVry University and the University of Phoenix. Many will be entering community colleges hoping to gain a useful qualification or to prepare themselves for a transfer to a four-year college. Others will be entering liberal-arts colleges without plans for a major, let alone a profession. On whatever track, quite a few will encounter Descartes as part of their undergraduate requirements. Why should that be? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a consensus on such things. That’s because two distinct visions of higher education contend throughout our classrooms and campuses.
In less than two years Slack Technologies has become one of the most glistening of tech's ten-digit "unicorn" startups, boasting 1.1 million users and a private market valuation of $2.8 billion. If you've used Slack's team-based messaging software, you know that one of its catchiest innovations is Slackbot, a helpful little avatar that pops up periodically to provide tips so jaunty that it seems human. Such creativity can't be programmed. Instead, much of it is minted by one of Slack's 180 employees, Anna Pickard, the 38-year-old editorial director. She earned a theater degree from Britain's Manchester Metropolitan University before discovering that she hated the constant snubs of auditions that didn't work out. After winning acclaim for her blogging, videogame writing and cat impersonations, she found her way into tech, where she cooks up zany replies to users who type in "I love you, Slackbot." It's her mission, Pickard explains, "to provide users with extra bits of surprise and delight." The pay is good; the stock options, even better.
Ambitious and provocative as revamping the PhD may sound, it’s actually just one part of a sweeping reform of scientifıc methodology, culture and structure that I am advocating. You might ask, why change something that’s not broken: Science has cured disease, unleashed the Green Revolution, taken us into space and shrunk the world through rapid transportation and instant communication. I would respond: The question is not whether science is failing us, but rather, whether the current scientific enterprise is as healthy as it should be.
The Western World once believed, as Aristotle did, that the political unit preceded the economic one. We changed our minds in the 17th century. John Locke argued that in order to have a government at all, one first had to embrace the concept of private property, and so political freedoms were dependent upon economic liberty. Governments existed for limited purposes, with the consent of the governed, and primarily to defend the property of free citizens. This economic freedom is also what Adam Smith meant when he wrote of the “Invisible Hand.” Smith argued that if individuals were free to choose their own labor, they would choose the most profitable labor possible. By doing so, each individual, guided by a force he or she did not understand (“an Invisible Hand”) would maximize the wealth of the nation. To greatly simplify matters, this innovation in thought spawned the American political and economic system. For more than 200 years, that system has proved remarkably durable, efficient, and successful.
The Western World once believed, as Aristotle did, that the political unit preceded the economic one. We changed our minds in the 17th century. John Locke argued that in order to have a government at all, one first had to embrace the concept of private property, and so political freedoms were dependent upon economic liberty. Governments existed for limited purposes, with the consent of the governed, and primarily to defend the property of free citizens. This economic freedom is also what Adam Smith meant when he wrote of the “Invisible Hand.”
I am a professor of philosophy at a public university. What is the value of philosophy to the taxpayers who subsidize my teaching? Philosophy is an abstruse and difficult field. Many of those whose taxes support higher education probably would have a hard time seeing the point of most philosophical debates. Why ask people to pay for discussions of seemingly arcane and incomprehensible topics? Besides, does a field like philosophy have any quantifiable or objectively measurable value, or do its putative benefits seem vague and elusive?
What’s the most transformative educational experience you’ve had? I was asked this question recently, and for a few seconds it stumped me, mainly because I’ve never viewed learning as a collection of eureka moments. It’s a continuum, a lifelong awakening to the complexity of the world. But then something did come to mind, not a discrete lesson but a moving image, complete with soundtrack. I saw a woman named Anne Hall swooning and swaying as she stood at the front of a classroom in Chapel Hill, N.C., and explained the rawness and majesty of emotion in “King Lear.”
In business and at every level of government, we hear how important it is to graduate more students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, as our nation’s competitiveness depends on it. The Obama administration has set a goal of increasing STEM graduates by one million by 2022, and the “desperate need” for more STEM students makes regular headlines. The emphasis on bolstering STEM participation comes in tandem with bleak news about the liberal arts — bad job prospects, programs being cut, too manyhumanities majors. As a chemist, I agree that remaining competitive in the sciences is a critical issue. But as an instructor, I also think that if American STEM grads are going lead the world in innovation, then their science education cannot be divorced from the liberal arts.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once said that the average English degree holder is fated to become a shoe salesman, hawking wares to former classmates who were lucky enough to have majored in math. Meanwhile, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, who studied philosophy at Stanford, refers to degrees like his as “antiquated debt-fueled luxury goods.” Faced with such attacks on the liberal arts, it’s no wonder that interest in the humanities is waning. As the college year begins, many students are likely to take President Obama’s advice and forgo an art history degree for a certificate in skilled manufacturing or some other trade.
“There’s a myth out there—that somehow if you major in humanities you’re doomed to be unemployed for the rest of your life. This suggests otherwise,” Debra Humphries, a co-author of the report and vice president for policy and public engagement at AAC&U, told an online publication called Inside Higher Ed. Humphries called the career progression for humanities grads “more of a marathon than a sprint.” To put together the report, the authors relied on 3 million responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 and 2011 American Community Survey. They compared people who majored in humanities and social science disciplines like philosophy, history and sociology with people who did pre-professional majors like nursing. They also looked at those who graduated with math or science degrees like chemistry, and finally, those who got engineering degrees.
How many people in your organization are innovative thinkers who can help with your thorniest strategy problems? How many have a keen understanding of customer needs? How many understand what it takes to assure that employees are engaged at work? If the answer is “not many,” welcome to the club. Business leaders around the world have told me that they despair of finding people who can help them solve wicked problems — or even get their heads around them. It’s not that firms don’t have smart people working with them. There are plenty of MBAs and even Ph.Ds in economics, chemistry, or computer science, in the corporate ranks. Intellectual wattage is not lacking. It’s the right intellectual wattage that’s hard to find. They simply don’t have enough people with the right backgrounds.
This event is organized by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, with support from numerous other groups. We would like to thank the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Taft Research Center, Rhinegeist Brewery, WVXU Democracy & Me, Cincinnati Enquirer, Vesna Kocani, Juliana Saneholtz, Julie Campbell-Holmes, and the Office of the President of the Mount St. Joseph University.
