Very interesting conclusion in this article. Fish says, "To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject."
I don't agree with Fish's take on humanities studies. Studying humanities is a lot more than just learning to appreciate art and beauty. Humanities studies help you learn how to learn and think on a general level, not just in one area of expertise, and give you valuable tools for tackling other studies and vocations. By studying humanities you gain valuable perspectives on life and culture and can better see where both arts and sciences influence societies and thought.
I thought one poster brought up an interesting point: "He [the poster's uncle] said that people who majored in technical or professional subjects (e.g., accounting, engineering) tended to get jobs quicker out of college, and at higher salaries. He went on to say, however, that people who majored in “the humanities” (e.g., literature, philosophy, history) surpassed their more technical peers in salaries and job opportunities at about the 10 year mark as the job demands got more complex and they moved up into management."
I don't know how verifiable that is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's true in many cases.
What do you think? Does humanities have more use to the world than just intrinsic worth? Should humanities departments receive more attention and better funding from universities?
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Originally posted by advice for robots: I thought one poster brought up an interesting point: "He [the poster's uncle] said that people who majored in technical or professional subjects (e.g., accounting, engineering) tended to get jobs quicker out of college, and at higher salaries. He went on to say, however, that people who majored in “the humanities” (e.g., literature, philosophy, history) surpassed their more technical peers in salaries and job opportunities at about the 10 year mark as the job demands got more complex and they moved up into management."
That doesn't match my experience. I don't know anyone with a humanities degree (history, literature, philosphy) who has moved into a high paying managerial position with out a graduate degree in business or law. I could probably find some exceptions for people with Ph.D's in the humanities, but most of them would be academic positions.
As an undergraduate, I had a lot of friends who were majoring in the humanities. Many of them were very proud of the "purity" of the their academic pursuits and tended to look down their noises at people who were worried about getting jobs after graduation. Almost all of them ended up in either law school or business school after a couple of years of working in unsatisfying positions.
I do know a couple of people who majored in history and went on to get masters degrees both in history and library sciences. They've spent more than ten years trying to work their way into positions that pay less than a starting engineers salary.
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Double-major in humanities and something that pays well. It doesn't have to be engineering - a double major in English and Business would work fine.
I would absolutely love to live a life dedicated to the "purity" of a humanistic subject. However, I see no virtue in being poor, I don't have a trust fund, and I don't think the world owes me anything anyway.
Maybe the problem is that people are using a major or a job to define themselves. You can be a poet and work as a programmer. A job or a major does not define a person. Americans have buckets of leisure time with plenty of time for the humanities if they just turn off the television.
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I haven't got time to read the whole post that you link to at the moment (I look forward to doing so later), but I do have a first reaction based on your post.
Technical and professional subjects tend to train in quantitative thinking (there are exceptions; the first that comes to mind is law), while subjects in the humanities (and the social sciences, which I see as more akin to the humanities than to technical and professional subjects), I think, tend to train in qualitative thinking. Both are important.
This isn't to say that those whose schooling is in technical or professional subjects can't or won't think qualitatively, but on the other hand I have known engineering majors to argue that they don't need to know anything about literature or art or history because they are of no value at all to their planned careers.
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The humanities provide a common framework for all the "experts" in different fields to communicate over.
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Now on to the real question. Whether or not the humanities have any "use" all depends on what you mean by "use". If what you mean by "use" is limited to what can be readily bought and sold on the market then the answer is probably no, at the humanities don't have any direct use.
But if what you mean by "use" is that it fills basic human needs then absolutely yes. Although my degrees are in engineering, I have an unusually broad education in literature, history, art, philosophy etc. Some of that is from formal classes but much of it is just through personal study and interaction with scholars. I believe that asthetics and ideas (central parts of the humanities) are as essential to human well being as material goods. The humanities are useful because they make our lives richer even if that richness can't be bought and sold on the market.
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A BA in the humanities is rather useless. It's the easy path to a quick MBA, though, which is basically the modern equivalent of the high school diploma.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I should have posted Fish's initial question as well--"How does one justify funding the arts and humanities?" In the article he's mainly talking about universities and how they allocate their funding to different departments. Humanities departments often get the crumbs from the table.
Universities would tend to translate "use" as "immediate financial benefit for the university." But I think Fish is talking about both that kind of use and, at the end of the article, the worth of humanities to humanity in general.
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Well, heck, the study of the humanities is what college is for. There's no reason engineers couldn't just move to a journeyman model.
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I majored in English. It would have been a good base for going on to an MBA or law school. I've managed to have a fairly good career without going beyond my English degree, although probably without the pay of an engineer or lawyer.
I do sometimes wish I had studied something a little more tangible as an undergrad, and then used that to back up my career. I wasn't thinking that way in college, though.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: A BA in the humanities is rather useless. It's the easy path to a quick MBA, though, which is basically the modern equivalent of the high school diploma.
If an MBA is the equivalent of a high school diploma, what does a high school diploma equate to?
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Well, heck, the study of the humanities is what college is for. There's no reason engineers couldn't just move to a journeyman model.
Perhaps in your imagination this is true. Reality is something somewhat different.
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A quick counterexample to the "humanities majors don't earn much without adanced degrees" meme: Abhi, who is now a year and a half out of college is currently earning over $70k, not including bonuses or stock options. He graduated with majors in English lit & religious studies. He didn't have any work experience prior to college, but made sure he got some while *in* college via summer jobs in order to develop marketable skills. To my mind, it's the skills you posses, not your specific majors, that matter. I'm starting to get resigned to the fact that he'll probably always be earning more than me, even when I've earned a ph.d in the most practical field of economics (unless I went into finance in a private firm but - uuugh! so boring).
(and for anyone who's been keeping track, I'm back from India! Currently sitting in Abhi's office at a quarter to 9, watching him earn his paycheck, using hatrack to keep me awake from bad jetlag. )
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Mind if I ask what he does? Be as general as you feel safe to say.
I'm also a major in literature and religious studies and will be graduating in May. Not quite sure what I'll be doing, not because I doubt my skills so much, but because I'm not sure what's out there in the job market for me.
My dad always tells not to worry because while he graduated from college with a degree in accounting, he quickly found his way into managerial work at his oil company and couldn't be happier. He's pretty high up in the financial division and is incharge of promoting employees and hiring new ones. He says he's hired LOTS of English majors because he finds that they're creative, analytical, and quick-studies. As he says, most of what business students learn in school is obsolete or their company just does things in their own way. So he gets stuck having to re-train these accounting majors who think they know so much and gripe about their entry-level positions. He's told me that his best employees have been English, Art, and History majors, and many of them now hold similar positions in other departments.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: As an undergraduate, I had a lot of friends who were majoring in the humanities. Many of them were very proud of the "purity" of the their academic pursuits and tended to look down their noises at people who were worried about getting jobs after graduation.
As an undergraduate double major in one humanistic field and one scientific one, I found that all my friends in the humanities sneered at folks in the sciences, and all my friends in the sciences sneered at folks in the humanities. It always made me sad that neither group could see the value in the other.
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At my graduation, the E-school folks chanted "We have jobs" at the humanities folks. The humanities folks chanted back, "We have souls."
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quote:Originally posted by littlemissattitude: I have known engineering majors to argue that they don't need to know anything about literature or art or history because they are of no value at all to their planned careers.
I have known far more humanities majors who refuse to have the first thing to do with math and science. There are a lot more people in my experience who can't do Math on a 9th grade level than people who can't read on a 9th grade level.
Oh, and
quote:We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
posted
While I would have loved to study humanities in college, there's no way I could justify the financial investment required to do so at that point in my life.
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In college, I loved the humanities courses I took, but did find the majority of the class actually needed to learn how to think. In my science courses, I did not feel that way. However, as a grad student in science, I find many of my peers think about nothing but science. I don't really think anymore, just follow protocols with minor variations.
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Way to make me feel good about being a history major people. Thanks. Though to be fair, I've been considering law school fairly seriously lately.
On the other hand, if we dumped the humanities entirely, who is going to teach your kids history and English in school? I don't think it's a matter of them not being any use, clearly they ARE of use, but studying them doesn't seem to be much use in life as a career when they are so undervalued that you can't make a decent living with them. In summary: teachers are underpayed.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: I have known far more humanities majors who refuse to have the first thing to do with math and science.
In my experience, the numbers are about equal.
quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: There are a lot more people in my experience who can't do Math on a 9th grade level than people who can't read on a 9th grade level.
In my experience, the numbers are about equal.
Reader's Digest, my friend. That's where most people are at.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: I have known far more humanities majors who refuse to have the first thing to do with math and science.
In my experience, the numbers are about equal.
Then I'd have to say your experience is nothing like mine. At nearly every University, the general education classes in the humanities are exactly the same classes as the first year classes for majors. In the sciences, there are separate courses for majors and general education because most students can't handle the math in the sciences courses. In both chemistry and physics there are typically three levels of courses, the general education courses that have no prerequisites, a course for nurses, premeds, education majors, etc that requires some algebra and trig, and a course for scientists and engineers that requires at least 1 (some times 2) years of calculus.
As a professor, I've worked with many humanities professors who have never taken a college algebra course let alone a calculus course, who don't know the fundamental physical laws, who don't know that molecular biology has a central theorem or that quantum theory is defined by a differential equation.
And while I've met many professors of science and engineering who aren't interested in the humanities, I have yet to meet one who hadn't read any Shakespeare or Dickens, who didn't know the rough outline of US history, or who wasn't familiar with Plato, Aristotle and Kant.
As an engineering professor, I can and do read the recent publications of many of my humanities colleagues, but I'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the humanities who understood enough math and science to read my latest publications.
quote:
quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: There are a lot more people in my experience who can't do Math on a 9th grade level than people who can't read on a 9th grade level.
In my experience, the numbers are about equal.
Then once again your experience is very different from mine. I know of none who have graduated from college with a degree in math, science or engineering who can't read at a 9th grade level. Even within the technical fields reading and writing are essential skills and you couldn't pass your classes without them. In contrast, a good 90% of the humanities majors I know with PhDs can't do high school level math.
Reader's Digest, my friend. That's where most people are at. [/QB][/QUOTE]
Context man, context. The comparison going on here is between college graduates with degrees in math, science and engineering versus college graduates with degrees in the humanities.
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quote:I have yet to meet one who hadn't read any Shakespeare or Dickens, who didn't know the rough outline of US history, or who wasn't familiar with Plato, Aristotle and Kant.
I've met a number of science professors who don't know these things, and several more who are completely incapable of reading/writing at a "high school" level. Heck, there are at least two at this college, and I've run into one or two from MIT.
quote:Even within the technical fields reading and writing are essential skills and you couldn't pass your classes without them.
That assumption only holds if you assume the professors (or TAs) grading the papers know how to read and write.
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quote:I've met a number of science professors who don't know these things, and several more who are completely incapable of reading/writing at a "high school" level. Heck, there are at least two at this college, and I've run into one or two from MIT.
I quite frankly don't believe you! Please provide details to back up your assertion.
quote:That assumption only holds if you assume the professors (or TAs) grading the papers know how to read and write.
I also assumes that you can't pass a class unless you can read a textbook and read and understand problem statements. A very good assumption.
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The aspects I find most ennobling in American history weren't developed by scientists working as scientists.
Studying the humanities may not immediately qualify one for an easy job, but I think it impoves the chances that one will grow into a person I like to be around, and since I constantly have to be around myself, I'd like to appreciate the company. Honestly, for reasons I won't go into here, I think that there is something a bit more insidious about the soft sciences than engineering. Check out the Dismal Science.
______
Here is a parallel: It doesn't seem to me that too many people get rich on mormon missions, or go in with the primary purpose of parlaying the language training into a fruitful career, but what missionaries receive in those two years seems to be not easily qualtifable in dollars or degrees, but is quite possibly more important to the human spirit than knowing differential equations or the central theorem of molecular biology.
quote:Originally posted by Shanna: Mind if I ask what he does? Be as general as you feel safe to say.
I'm also a major in literature and religious studies and will be graduating in May. Not quite sure what I'll be doing, not because I doubt my skills so much, but because I'm not sure what's out there in the job market for me.
My dad always tells not to worry because while he graduated from college with a degree in accounting, he quickly found his way into managerial work at his oil company and couldn't be happier. He's pretty high up in the financial division and is incharge of promoting employees and hiring new ones. He says he's hired LOTS of English majors because he finds that they're creative, analytical, and quick-studies. As he says, most of what business students learn in school is obsolete or their company just does things in their own way. So he gets stuck having to re-train these accounting majors who think they know so much and gripe about their entry-level positions. He's told me that his best employees have been English, Art, and History majors, and many of them now hold similar positions in other departments.
I don't mind at all, Shanna. He's a Product Manager at a (funded) internet start-up in the DC area. It's a very good job for a generalist with excellent computer skills - he does a little bit of graphical design, some programming, a lot of concept work on the product, writes user requirements, and generally has to interact with all of the different departments in the company in order to make sure the product is the best it can be.
And I think your dad is right. Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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quote:Though to be fair, I've been considering law school fairly seriously lately.
You should keep considering it - I think you'd be pretty good at it. I would only recommend it, however, if you intend to practice or teach law. There are far better ways to learn what you need to know about the law if your career goals are not being a lawyer.
I found my math (near) major to be far more helpful in law school than my political science major. It's not that I actually used the specifics of the degree, but much of the way of thinking I learned in math is incredibly useful in law. Systems analysis and data design were even more helpful.
Pure science and math people often did well, but many of them were hampered by their reading and writing speed.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: The aspects I find most ennobling in American history weren't developed by scientists working as scientists.
Studying the humanities may not immediately qualify one for an easy job, but I think it impoves the chances that one will grow into a person I like to be around, and since I constantly have to be around myself, I'd like to appreciate the company. Honestly, for reasons I won't go into here, I think that there is something a bit more insidious about the soft sciences than engineering. Check out the Dismal Science.
Hear, Hear!
I need to read that book.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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That was a disappointing essay, especially Fish's conclusion that the humanities "don't do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don't bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them." If so, then why should we publicly fund the study of the humanities, any more than we should publicly fund the production of video games? Of course, maybe Fish is implying that we don't need to publicly fund such study, though that view is at odds with his first paragraph about how the New York State Commission on Higher Education's report neglects the humanities.
I always thought that the standard answer to why you should study the humanities was that they (here I'm thinking mainly of history and literature) show you how different people have valued different things at different times and thereby help you think more clearly about what you value. No, studying them won't necessarily make you as "generous, patient, good-hearted and honest" as a person can be, as Fish thinks humanities professors would be if the humanities made people better; but surely they make you more thoughtful about everything than you otherwise would have been. Of course, it would be hard to quantify this view.
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: The aspects I find most ennobling in American history weren't developed by scientists working as scientists.
Studying the humanities may not immediately qualify one for an easy job, but I think it impoves the chances that one will grow into a person I like to be around, and since I constantly have to be around myself, I'd like to appreciate the company. Honestly, for reasons I won't go into here, I think that there is something a bit more insidious about the soft sciences than engineering. Check out the Dismal Science.
Hear, Hear!
I need to read that book.
Wow. I haven't read the book, but if the excerpt is at all indicative of the contents of the book, the author clearly has not kept up with economics as practiced in the past couple of decades. As a student in an orthodox economics ph.d program, I can guarantee you that it is not true that
quote:Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths
Maybe this was true in the 70's & 80's, but with the surge of behavior economics recently, among other things, it no longer is.
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Yeah, it is one of the biggest movements in economics (and has been for a decade or two) to investigate the ways in which rationality breaks down and assumptions of efficiency no longer hold (among other things).
The author is a professor of economics, so I can only assume he's been rather selective in his reading.
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He's tenured at Harvard, but it looks like his big papers were done in the 70's - something about combining Marxism with Keynesian demand theory. Guess he's one of the token minorities there - two for the price of one!
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quote:Though to be fair, I've been considering law school fairly seriously lately.
You should keep considering it - I think you'd be pretty good at it. I would only recommend it, however, if you intend to practice or teach law. There are far better ways to learn what you need to know about the law if your career goals are not being a lawyer.
I found my math (near) major to be far more helpful in law school than my political science major. It's not that I actually used the specifics of the degree, but much of the way of thinking I learned in math is incredibly useful in law. Systems analysis and data design were even more helpful.
Pure science and math people often did well, but many of them were hampered by their reading and writing speed.
To be perfectly honest, I don't really know all the different kinds of lawyering to know which one I'd want to do. But, I think if it came down to it I'd want to do something in research. Research is part of what I like about history so much, and it's a combination of the history of law and the fun construction of arguments by pulling together facts and historical precedent that has me so interested in law. Teaching law has a certain allure, but, I think that'd be a bit drier than I'd want. If I was going to do that I'd lean towards history professor. I still have a year or so before I'd need to make a real decision on a kind of grad school, but I really need to look into what lawyers actually do other than argue stuff in a court room before I make that decision. But I'm giving serious, serious thought to it. It'll be something to do until I'm 35 and run for president anyway .
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I would say that the education you receive from a humanities major can be among the most useful you can get, but I would also say that the piece of paper you get at the end is one of the least useful. So, if you go to college only to get the benefits out of that piece of paper that says you are a graduate, then you are probably better off with another major. But for those who are looking for an education they can apply to life in general, I might recommend humanities.
I'd emphasize "might" and "can", though, because it all depends on how you choose to use the major. If you take the easiest humanities classes available and do only what is minimally required, you probably won't learn that much and thus the major won't serve you very well. If you read a lot of books but don't think about what you are reading, or do think but don't apply what you learn to your real life, then reading the books won't help you much. In my experience from college, a lot of humanities majors fit into categories like these - and so it would not be a huge surprise to me if their major didn't end up helping them much. Humanities differs from more career-oriented majors because it requires more self-direction. For those who direct themselves well and then go on to apply the things they learn to their actual lives beyond college, I think a humanities major will likely make them a better person, or at least someone who can better define and achieve their goals. But it is only part of the puzzle. Humanities by itself will get you little; it is how you apply the things you learn from the humanities to other areas that matters.
Of course, there's still the issue of that piece of paper. Employers definitely favor other fields, so if you are just out to maximize your immediate earning potential, humanities aren't as useful. I'd say there are three flaws in that mode of thinking though... The first is what a humanities graduate probably knows: that there are more valuable things in life than money. The second is what a economics graduate probably knows: that advantages in the short-term doesn't always equate to advantages in the long-term. And the third is what a business graduate probably realizes: that wealth comes less from your starting salary than from the way you manage your money. So, practically speaking I can see how one would say having a humanities degree is not very beneficial financially, but I don't think it follows that the humanities is not a useful thing to study.
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Plus, you know, not all people who study business do so just for the piece of paper. I know that's a widespread belief, but it's a pretty ridiculous one.
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