Oh, the Humanity

I have a liberal arts degree. By the way—would you like fries with that?

The above is a bumper sticker I bought for myself while I was an undergrad. I hung it proudly on the cork board above my desk next to my favorite Far Side cartoons ("Although it lasted only 2 million years, the Awkward Age was considered a hazardous time for most species"), a rather ambitious to do list (including "Write Great American novel," "Become quadrilingual," and "Stomp out feminism"), and fortune cookie fortunes ("The road to knowledge begins with the turn of a page").

Humanities students have long since resigned themselves to the likelihood that they will not hold lucrative jobs after graduation (if they are fortunate enough to hold a job at all). I recall one day my junior year when our rhetoric professor joked, "I know, you guys are all going to graduate and start out making six figures." One of my classmates replied, "Not as English majors." The professor stopped short, then said, "Oh, come on. You all know English is one of the most important majors. Don't make me give you guys a speech."

She was right, of course. Few other disciplines push their students to think critically and write analytically. (Or even write well.) But try convincing an employer of that fact.

Recently, the Times published an article titled, "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth." The article doesn't say much humanities majors don't already know: it's difficult enough to come by jobs, so students should just study a "useful" subject.

After all, what use are the humanities in today's society? Why even study literature?

Look at the word itself: the humanities make us human; they make us whole. Literature exposes us to ideas and worlds we would otherwise never experience. They teach us about history—even fiction reflects the context in which it was written. (As Mr. Heltzer, my high school Humanities teacher, often said, "No one writes in a vacuum.")

This is evidenced by my Writing 102 students. They are mostly of the pre-med variety, yet they revel in our literary analysis unit. Last semester we read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," Hughes's "Salvation" paired with O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," and Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." Precious few of them had any exposure to these works—or anything else written by these timeless authors. But reading works of such depth, underscored by their thorough analyses of these works, helped them realize ideas they had never really considered. Hemingway made the plucky 18-year-old girls reassess their own relationships; Hughes and O'Connor spoke to the religious and atheistic alike; Faulkner exposed the class of northerners to the decomposition of the American South; Orwell demonstrated the complexity—and the weakness—of the British Empire, which especially touched students whose ancestry is from the Indian subcontinent.

Less than one hundred pages of text and two weeks of class discussion exposed these students to concepts that would never have otherwise entered their periphery. Many of them came to see me during office hours and marvelled at the pieces we read—and how much they learned from them.

So the humanities have little value in today's job market. It seems that it would be more beneficial to society if we train our students to engage in critical thought—and not to meerely fill a position. Wasn't it a horde of unthinking lemmings who got us into this mess in the first place?