Recent Humanities Publications
Despite the declining number of humanities majors, or perhaps because of, there are a variety of new and vibrant resources available to help people understand the value of the humanities. Most notably is the free online resource Study the Humanities Toolkit as well as the following list of recent publications:
The Study the Humanities Toolkit
The Study the Humanities Toolkit located at www.studythehumanities.org is a collection of resources for higher education faculty and administrators to use in making the case for the value of studying the humanities as an undergraduate. The site contains six sections of free information divided across a variety of issues: performance, skills, careers, examples, benefits, and articles.
Anders, G. 2017. You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education, Little Brown and Company.
An easy to read publication, and the most practical among the list here, designed to provide relief to liberal arts majors that they can indeed have a wide variety of careers. English majors can work in sales. Anthropology majors can leverage their skills and work in market research. Classics majors can have a career in management consulting and philosophy majors can find employment in investing. “At any stage of your career, you can bring a humanist’s grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future. And if you know how to attack the job market, your opportunities will be vast.”
Hartley, S. 2017. The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Hartley believes that fuzzies (humanities majors) are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas and not the techies (computer science majors). Humanities majors better understand the life issues that need solving and offer the best approaches for doing so. By examining the fuzzy-techie collaborations that are disrupting today’s world, Hartley demonstrates that the liberal arts are at the center of innovation in business, education, and government, and, thus, are still relevant today. Liberal arts majors bring context to code, ethics to algorithms, and the soft skills so vital to spurring growth.
Madsbjerg, C. 2017. Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, Hachette Books.
The modern obsession with big data often masks stunning deficiencies. Blind devotion to number crunching imperils businesses, schools, and governments. Too many companies have lost touch with the humanity of their customers, while marginalizing workers with liberal arts-based skills. Madsbjerg coined the term sensemaking to highlight the value of deep, nuanced engagement with culture, language, and history to help address some of today’s most pressing issues that big data alone is unable to solve.
Morson, G.S., and M. Schapiro. 2018. Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
Morson and Schapiro argue that the study of literature offers economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and just. Demonstrating the relevance of the great writers to the field of economics remains the most esoteric publication in this list. For those looking for a detailed illustration of the value of the humanities, this book remains original, provocative, and inspiring.
Stross, R. 2017. A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees, Stanford University Press.
Stross provides a practical explanation of the tangible merits of the humanities. A Practical Education reminds readers that the most useful training for an unknowable future is the universal, time-tested preparation of a liberal education. A Practical Education investigates the real-world experiences of graduates with humanities majors, the majors that would seem the least employable in Silicon Valley’s engineering-centric workplaces. When given a first opportunity, these majors thrive in work roles that no one would have predicted.
These resources support J. M. Olejarz’s observation in the Harvard Business Review that “people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do.”1 To illustrate the relevance of the humanities to the 21st century workplace, however, we need to begin with having higher education admit to several problems that continue to exist.
Zaharia, F. 2015. In Defense of a Liberal Education Kastella Rylestone, LLC.
Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education―how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders’ vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning―precisely the gifts of a liberal education.
1 Olejarz, J.M. July-August 2017. “Liberal Arts in the Data Age.” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2017/07/liberal-arts-in-the-data-age (accessed February 22, 2019).
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