The Value of Liberal Arts in a Recession

The New York Times recently published an article, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” by Patricia Cohen.  I was told about this article by McMaster University English and Cultural Studies Professor, Dr. Sarah Brophy.

NYT Article at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/books/25human.html

There are a few points in the article I would like to explore, from the perspective of someone who has partaken of the pastures on both sides of the fence.  First of all, I suggest that the dichotomy of liberal arts – the humanities – as an Ivory Tower luxury opposite the greenback-printing mill of technical disciplines is an artificial dichotomy.  Secondly, I suggest that it is a dangerous one.

Cohen sets out this dichotomy right at the beginning of her article, though she rightly questions whether it is a good idea to shift resources to technical training and sciences from liberal arts:

“A traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation.  Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose:  They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.”

I would like to add to this:  The humanist training, the whetting of mental faculties that not only separate us from the animals but allow us to weigh and manage the fruit and potential fruit of our technical wizardry, is as essential to a growing society as the freedom that makes it possible.  Growth in our society, as it was during the renaissance and in Athens two millennia earlier, is predicated on inseparable democratic and intellectual freedom.  Participation in a free democracy cannot be accomplished without growth, and growth cannot be accomplished without the intellectual ardour for which the humanities train us.

There was no clearer call to prevent this dichotomy than in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the call to prevent science without philosophy.  Our age of technical wizardry, predicted by Shelley, has an important difference from ancient Greece that we would be wise to obliterate:  We obsess over this dichotomy between natural science and philosophy; we assign disciplines to one category or the other.  Chemistry, physics, biology, and mathematics are sciences.  Philosophy, literature, history, and language are humanities.  Computer science, which is really logical engineering, is lumped in with the sciences because of its mathematics requirement and because it yields fungible product.  Yet logic is taught in the Department of Philosophy.  In fact, mathematics has always straddled this artificial line, as it is as much philosophical exercise as it is natural science.  Having studied logic both in philosophy courses (symbolic logic) and in math courses (algebra), I can tell you that they are both crucial to an understanding of the manipulation done to information in computer programming.

Aristotle is taught in philosophy courses, the occasional critical theory course (labelled as an English or Cultural Theory course at McMaster, where I finished my undergrad), and if you’re lucky, a law course (my nod to UBC Law’s Professor Wexler, both in formal study and in group readings).  Yet Aristotle was one of the earliest natural scientists; he documented his observations of the natural world in a manner that looks suspiciously like an early form of today’s scientific disciplines.  Leonardo da Vinci was one of the world’s greatest theoretical engineers, collectors of natural observation, and artists. My point here is that the division is a recent contrivance, and its maintenance has no good historical precedent.

Cohen goes further into the purpose of the humanities and the effect of the recession and the consequent demand for obviously marketable skills and training:

“This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, ‘what it means to be a human  being.’

“The study of the humanities evolved during the 20^th century ‘to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,’ said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education.  ‘But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities to use in the world.  We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.’”

I have seen advertisements for seminars on marketing one’s liberal arts degree.  Supposedly these courses will tell me how to tell potential employers that my English degree taught me to think critically, which means x, y, and z to a given business.  The problem, perhaps, is that this marketing is being left to the graduates.  Perhaps this marketing should be done directly to the potential employers.  Perhaps marketing is the wrong approach.

There is a fundamental misconception in our society that education in the humanities requires justification, as opposed to, say, a degree in law.  My degree in law prepares me to be a lawyer, an entrepreneur, and a politician.  What does my degree in English prepare me for?  (Other than noticing when I end a sentence with a preposition.)  Cohen observes that simply looking at the problem as a marketing one – a problem solved by directly answering my question – “makes some in the field uneasy.”  She is right.  Coming up with a simple, sound-bite well-spun answer, defeats the purpose of recognizing the role of humanities education as a predicate to a growing, evolving, improving society.

Cohen then quotes Derek Bok, former Dean of Law and then University President at Harvard:  “There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy.  I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make – not being able to see beyond that.”

This is the same criticism I levelled at Jack Balkin’s essay, “Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds.”  He predicated the need to protect freedoms in virtual worlds on their importance to members of society on the whole as determined by economic indicia.  In other words, it’s because of the direct economic impact that we place value on the civil liberties for which he advocates.  I respectfully disagree with Professor Balkin, and prefer a position proposed by Dan Hunter and Greg Lastowka in “The Laws of the Virtual Worlds;” it is not because there is money involved that legal philosophy should venture into cyberspace; it is because the in-world manifestation of the player is an extension of the player, and thus there is a human element with which we must concern ourselves.  (There’s a lot more of this in my essays, but I suggest “Sheriffs and Vigilantes of the Cyber-Frontier: Justice within Virtual Worlds.”)

As I mentioned at the beginning, my attention was drawn to Cohen’s article in the NYT by my former professor of cultural theory, Dr. Sarah Brophy, last Thursday.  I’ll end with my comment to Sarah’s post:

There is a popular misconception that studies in the humanities and studies in pragmatic technology are diametrically opposed in the academic spectrum. I think this is simply because people who are drawn to one are not always drawn to the other, and often dissociate themselves socially from those who are drawn to the other. This is simply not the case, however.

There are countless people whom I know, including myself, who have backgrounds in both, and in fact use the humanities to understand better the ramifications of technology (i.e. we learn the lesson of Frankenstein), use technology to broaden the scope of the humanities, and even see a convergence. For example, we study identity in cyberspace, collaborative gaming as a new form of narrative, cultural theory of social networks and virtual worlds, philosophy of Internet law…

The humanities are absolutely necessary if the information age is to be anything more than an electronic industrial revolution, and if we are to avoid the now-next-door nightmares of Orwell and Huxley. These are nightmares not only familiar to students of literature, but also a bridge between the apparent two social circles as dystopia science fiction is embraced on both sides of that diameter.