By Alexandra Itzi
You may have experienced the following situation firsthand, or perhaps you’ve witnessed it happening to someone else. It might have gone something like this…
Two people meet for the first time. Maybe they’re in a group of mutual friends, hanging out in Ground Zero or shuffling their feet as they wait in line at the book store. “What’s your major?” person A asks—a typical and respectable icebreaker. “Oh,” drawls person B. “I’m interested majoring in Philosophy.”
This pronouncement usually generates the following reaction on the part of person A: 1) excessive snorting/laughter, or 2) a look of complete and utter bewilderment. Don’t feel bad if you’ve been person A. Our generation has been raised to respect the sciences—math, biology, chemistry, even petroleum engineering. If you want to make money with your degree, society shouts, you need to go into a field that’s in demand; this is a logical answer. The jobs that a STEM degree prepares students for are important. We need doctors, engineers, chemists, and electricians. We rely on them for scientific advancement and the support of the infrastructure contemporary society has in place.
So why are liberal-arts degrees offered at all if students, freshly printed Theatre degrees in hand, are promptly thrust into the world only to be relegated to waiting tables for the rest of their lives? The answer is two-fold. Liberal arts (or humanities) students study, question, and complicate our concept of humanity itself. Secondly, a humanities degree trains students with a very specific skill set that lends itself nicely to almost any field you can think of. Not convinced? Let me explain.
College ostensibly serves the needs of a society by addressing different areas of study in which it is required. If we can divide all degrees into two categories—that is the sciences and the humanities—what facet of society, then, does each category serve? The economy and its infrastructures are supported by the sciences. However, we must ask ourselves this—what does the technological infrastructure support?
The answer is simple: our humanity. Electricity, running water, airplanes, cell phones, and medical treatments all provide a standard of living in which we have both the time and resources to cultivate this thing we call humanity. Music, painting, literature, plays, and films all address in some form or another that central question of what it means to be human. If we are at a relatively stable place in terms of personal health and safety, why wouldn’t we exalt the poets, the bass players and the dancers?
I could blame capitalism, corporatism, or just plain laziness. The truth is that I don’t have a solid answer because, if I did, I’d be on my way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. What I can tell you is that a current attitude toward the humanities does not immediately negate centuries of artistic expression. We’ve had a pretty good run on this planet so far, and art has largely been a testament to this fact.
Idealism and rose-colored glasses aside, what about the practicality of earning a humanities degree when it doesn’t seem to pay off in a financial sense? Like with any degree, students need to get creative. No one majors in English to get a job at English. There isn’t a big, book-lined building where all English majors go to wander among stacks of musty tomes until they die under an avalanche of encyclopedias and Stephen King novels. Students who have studied the humanities can take their critical-thinking skills, ability to articulate ideas clearly, and gently cultured sense of empathetic reasoning skills and apply them to the infrastructure that’s already in place. He or she is now strongly suited to a multitude of jobs that require sound social and comprehension skills. The possibilities are endless, just as a science degree also can prepare students for navigation into a complicated world with a multitude of needs.