Amid the current economic crisis, a common perception across the country is that many college and university humanities departments are feeling pressured as people worry about how a degree in the humanities will connect to a future career. Though the University is among the many schools facing state budget cuts, its humanities departments are staying strong, attracting students and effectively preparing them for careers, University officials and professors said.
A Historical Context
The debate about the practicality and usefulness of studies in the humanities is not new, said Richard Handler, associate dean of undergraduate academic programs.
“This goes back a hundred years, at least in the history of American higher education,” he said, “this tension between ... the notion of practical education versus the notion of a liberal arts education, or a humanities education.”
During his 30 years of teaching, Handler said, he has continually observed students struggling to decide between a major in subjects like economics or subjects like philosophy.
“I think it’s important to look at these sorts of issues historically,” said Bruce Holsinger, assistant dean of the arts and humanities. The humanities have gone through periods of growth and periods of contraction, he explained. After spiking in the late 1980s, they have remained stable for the past 20 years, he said. It is too early to discern the effects of the current recession, he added.
“There may be more intense anxiety at the present moment because the collapse of global capitalism’s quite stunning and people are quite frightened,” Handler said, “but it’s not a new issue.” Tension between the idea of making money for money’s sake and learning for learning’s sake has existed in the United States for considerable time, he added.
“You might want to say money’s more powerful,” Handler said, “but it’s not powerful enough to balance love or culture or education.” There will always be advocates for education and knowledge, he said.
Many students at the colleges and universities across the nation have started pushing in recent months more for pre-professional and practical courses, but Holsinger described this trend as mere “noise at the surface level."
“[The American university is] the institution in the society that’s entrusted with ... the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” Handler added, “and even though there’s always pressure on that ideal ... nonetheless the society continues to believe in that.”
The Humanities at the University
The current recession is impacting University humanities departments, but budget cuts are occurring across the board, without targeting specific fields of study, Handler said.
“It was more a question of looking at every program and seeing where you could save money, every department, every program,” Handler said.
The University faced cuts this year, but more money will be cut next year, he noted.
Budget cuts result in less travel funding for faculty to attend meetings or access sources, Vice Provost Milton Adams said. In addition, “not being able to hire faculty affects everyone, including the humanities departments,” he said. Although the University is not conducting layoffs, it also is not necessarily filling vacant positions, he said. “It may ultimately mean fewer classes offered and classes that have more students in them,” Adams said.
Meanwhile, cuts aimed specifically at the humanities departments are very unlikely, Handler said.
“I don’t see a university simply deciding, ‘humanities are useless; we’re going to cut humanities,’” he said. “Universities don’t believe that. I suppose it could happen but I don’t see it.”
Within the University, there has been very little pressure on humanities departments to justify themselves, partially because of the strength of these departments, Handler said.
“The University of Virginia has traditional strength in humanities across the board,” said Jeffrey Plank, associate vice president for research. “The humanities are some of the jewels in the academic part of the University.”
Despite the current economic and budget situations, professors and officials have not noticed a decrease in the popularity of study in the humanities. The number of English degrees has been about the same for the past several years, English Department Chair Jahan Ramazani said. History Department Chair Duane Osheim also said he has not seen any immediate changes, adding that he would not expect to.
Even if students are not majoring in the humanities, they take courses in the area, Handler said.
“We have so many good students here who want to take so many good courses, that we don’t have departments who are literally ... teaching empty classrooms,” he said. During his time as a dean, a lack of student interest in humanities has never been a problem, Handler said.
Collaborating across disciplines
The humanities also interact and collaborate with other areas of study at the University, Holsinger said. For example, the recent Poe exhibition at the Harrison Institute was a collaboration between the College and the University libraries. In addition, there are projects that specifically work with both the humanities and scientific research, Plank said.
“What we hope we can do is to preserve and enhance that traditional value [of the University humanities departments] by looking for projects that combine the strengths of the humanities and the strengths of the sciences and engineering,” he said.
One example of this is a multi-disciplinary faculty group looking at sustainability, particularly about conservation of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, he said.
“We believe that we have a lot of scientific information about watershed ecosystems and about solutions to pollution problems,” he said, “so why don’t we behave more sustainably? What kind of information would change our behavior? In our group, answers to questions like these come from scholars in the humanities, and the social sciences, especially psychology.”
Historians and anthropologists could both assist from unexpected vantage points, he said. Historians could offer methods for explaining and effecting change, while anthropologists could explain the cultural underpinnings of behavior, Plank said.
Collaborative research on a wider, global scale also relies on the humanities, he said.
“Our experience is that, despite the ease of communication, you can’t compress the time that it takes to form trusted relationships,” Plank said, “and trusted relationships across cultural boundaries require a kind of sophistication about those aspects of human behavior that we assign to the humanities in our modern institutions.”
Beyond the University
The humanities are also connecting with institutions outside the University by building a strong relationship with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Holsinger said. They are operating in new ways, collaborating through the Fellows Program and the Sesquicentennial Faculty, a sabbatical leave program, he said. The VFH also sponsors the Virginia Festival of the Book, part of the public outreach aspect of the humanities, Holsinger said.
The public function of the humanities is one of its most practical aspects, he said. Each time a student group goes to a museum and learns about art, history or other topics, “what they’re learning comes from advanced research in the humanities at universities,” he said. This research is also behind student textbooks about history, literature, world cultures and geography, Holsinger added.
“That’s one of the strongest arguments for sustaining and enriching the role of the humanities in the 21st century,” Holsinger said, “that practical, public interface that the humanities has always provided between the University and our culture at large.”
Careers through the humanities
Typically, students with a specific skill set — those who studied outside of the humanities — land jobs more easily than humanities majors, Osheim said, but the effects of the recession should be taken into account.
“It’s a lousy market, but I don’t know that it’s a better market for some relatively speaking than for others,” he said. “I think even for those people [with specific skills], things are tougher now than they were a year ago.”
In light of the recession, Ramazani said a broad, flexible background may have more advantages than a specific, skills-focused background. “I think, in fact, you limit yourself by not getting a degree in the humanities,” he said. Investment banking, for example, is a field that requires narrowly targeted training but that has now disappeared, Ramazani said. “What happens if, as happened recently, the jobs in some particular sector ... evaporate, and that’s what you’ve been training for?” he asked. “I think this is the moment to get the broadest, most flexible foundation possible, now more than ever.”
Holsinger also sees advantages to studies in the humanities.
“In fact, students who do a double major in a humanities and a science discipline will write a much better application for medical school or law school,” he said. “They’ll be better critical thinkers in a business environment because they’ll have learned to ask a richer set of questions than they would have through pre-professional training alone.”
Osheim noted that humanities graduates may have more difficulty obtaining a job, but said their liberal arts background can be useful for future career advancement.
“I think if you were to talk to liberal arts graduates from 15 or 20 years ago who are now in business, they probably would tell you that it took them a little bit longer to get into the door,” Osheim said, explaining that recruiters come to Grounds looking for those students with specific skill sets. But those who study humanities can advance in companies because their broad backgrounds lend themselves to more basic and transferable skills, he said.
Compared to the Sciences
Jobs may be available in fields outside the humanities, but that does not mean that everyone will succeed in those fields, Osheim said.
“The [majors] that might guarantee you a job quite often are ones that a student might feel they have no interest or ability in,” he said. A student may become a third-rate computer programmer, but it’s difficult for a third-rate computer programmer to find work, he noted. “So, just saying that there are jobs in field X doesn’t really do you any good if you don’t have a skill set that matches that kind of job.”
But students majoring in the physical sciences are more likely to have better chances of finding a job, Physics Department Chair Dinko Po?ani? said, though that is not the only issue when it comes to choosing a major.
Po?ani? spoke of potential barriers to studying the sciences at the University level, including the need to have an affinity for the sciences and solid high school preparation. A student can enter the University with a strong background in math and physics and choose to study poetry, but doing the opposite is much more difficult, Po?ani? said.
“It’s not impossible, but they may have to do a lot of catching up,” Po?ani? said.
That is not to say the physical sciences are more difficult or important than the humanities, Plank said.
“There may be a demand for scientists and engineering folks for positions in companies that can convert their intellectual property into a kind of [tangible] economic value,” Plank said. “We would argue in the vice president for research’s office that the intellectual property produced by the people in the humanities is every bit as valuable, perhaps more so, but our modern economy doesn’t place an economic value on that intellectual property the same way it does for the sciences and engineering.”
Parental Pressure
Changing one's area of study and the general movement away from the humanities might be the result of external pressure. Some parents tell their students to focus on pre-professional studies or other areas outside the humanities, Handler said.
“Some [students] do want to go to the Commerce School, and some do want to be [economics] majors,” he said. “I’m just saying that the pressure for those departments is often external. If you left the students alone, they would want to take the variety of courses they can find in the College.”
Osheim agreed that there may now be more parental pressure on students to justify their majors.
“It’s not necessarily related to a better understanding of the market, but just fear,” he explained. “Parents worry about where their children are [going to] have jobs and they don’t necessarily understand the market or how you get into these things ... [They] would just like to be assured that [their] kids are going to be OK.”
First-year College student AJ Delauder said she is hoping to major in neuroscience and is considering medical school. Nevertheless, these goals are not influenced by her parents, Delauder said.
“The only thing my parents ever insisted is that I like what I do,” she said, noting that the economic turmoil has not had an effect on her future plans, either. Those plans will only change if her interests do, Delauder said.
On the other hand, Second-year College student Colleen Beichert — who said she is considering double-majoring in economics and Spanish — noted that she always tries to gauge what she will be able to do with her potential majors.
Beichert said her mother is also concerned about her future career. “It’s that she wants to make sure I’ll be able to market myself, especially in the current job market,” Beichert said.
The parental pressure some humanities students face has always been a fact of life, Holsinger said. The success of graduates from humanities departments will hold up well against graduates from the professional schools during the next decade, he said.
“I think the response to [parental pressure], and the response that I encourage students to give to their parents, is that ... the College is not a vocational school; it’s a liberal arts college within a great research university.”
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