In his commencement address recently at
Brandeis University, New Republic literary editor
Leon Wieseltier posed a critical two-part question to graduates about to embark
in a brave new world. “Has there ever been a moment in American life,” he asked, “when the
humanities were cherished less, and has there ever been a moment in American
life when the humanities were needed more?”
Good question. As for its first part, humanities
departments and liberal arts colleges across America face a serious challenge
in an unforgiving job market. Among recent English
major graduates, the unemployment rate is 9.8%; for philosophy, history, and
religious studies majors, 9.5. By contrast, recent
chemistry graduates face a mere 5.8% unemployment rate, and elementary
education graduates are at 5%. In 2010, just 7% of
college graduates nationally majored in the humanities, down from 14% in 1966.
A report released recently stated that Harvard humanities
majors have fallen from 36% in 1954 to 20% in 2012, accelerating in the last
decade. The report’s conclusion is that Harvard’s humanities division is
attracting fewer undergraduates because it is training them to be academics
rather than preparing them to succeed in “the real world.” Shannon Lytle, a sophomore at Harvard, considered
majoring in history but selected computer science instead. “People say you should do what you love,” he said. “But...
I don't want to be doing what I love and be homeless.”
In his hilarious faux commencement address, “A Message for the Class of 2013,” The Simpsons writer Rob LaZebnick poked
fun at humanities students who end up with unmarketable skills: “You’ve spent four years percolating in a warm stew
of beer, gender studies and online pornography—which led to the subject of your
senior thesis, ‘Jacobean Dramatic Tropes in Modern “Massage Surprise” Videos.’”
But now, “You're headed into the most challenging labor market of the last 80
years.”
But are the humanities really so useless?
Answering part two of his own question, Wieseltier offered at Brandeis
a rousing defense of the humanities:
We live in a
society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the
values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological
mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer
practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are
true or false, or good or evil, but how they work...
The machines to
which we have become enslaved… represent the greatest assault on human
attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal,
which make us wider only by making us less deep.
In this age of relentless technological distraction, Wieseltier regards a
commitment to the humanities “as nothing less than an act of intellectual
defiance, of cultural dissidence.” “You
are the counterculture,” he counseled the graduates, “you who have elected
to devote yourselves to the study of literature and languages and art and music
and philosophy and religion and history.”
“In the digital universe,” he continued, “knowledge is reduced to the
status of information… There is no task more urgent in American intellectual
life at this hour than to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of
science and technology.” Numbers, he tells them, “will never be the springs of
wisdom.”
Choosing a major is a decision of no small consequence, and as the Harvard
report suggests, humanities departments must do more to convince students that
the degrees they offer have practical value beyond the ivory towers of academe.
For students like Harvard’s Shannon Lytle, torn between passion and job security,
the most meaningful choice may be, as the late mythologist Joseph Campbell
urged, to “follow your bliss.” In any case, Leon Wieseltier presents a
final thought for those future graduates to consider: “In upholding the
humanities, you uphold the honor of a civilization that was founded upon the
quest for the true and the good and the beautiful… Act as if you are
indispensable to your society, because – whether it knows it or not – you are.”
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/24/13)
