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Want to Enhance Humanities Career Outcomes? Engage the Faculty

The job of preparing students for the workplace can’t be left to career services offices alone. Professors are key, Emily J. Levine and Nicole Hall argue

By | Emily J. Levine | Nicole Hall | www.insidehighered.com

After years of being on the back foot, the humanities have launched a counterattack. A shelf of new books, including Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World (Houghton Mifflin, 2017) and Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities (Princeton, 2017), attest to the usefulness of the humanities for the 21st-century job market. Their fresh message makes the old creed that the humanities are a “mistake” or not “relevant” seem out of touch. Surveying these works in the July-August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review, J. M. Olejarz dubs this countermovement “the revenge of the film, history and philosophy nerds.”

But what exactly makes the humanities useful? Many of the new studies attest to the significance of the humanities by drawing on biographies. How could the humanities not be useful if countless CEOs in Silicon Valley, as Hartley points out, have humanities degrees? Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube, history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. The list goes on.

But where we go from here requires the hard work of identifying just what is the common denominator being learned in the humanities and how to parlay that knowledge and those skills into professional success. How do you apply Virginia Woolf to write better code or marshal your skills conjugating Latin verbs to execute an IPO?

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www.insidehighered.com
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