Matthew Guteri, a professor of American Studies at Indiana University, has written just the kind of essay that I wished for
in a previous post. He acknowledges the seeming irrelevance of an idealist defense of the humanities:
There is a profound richness in everything, I offered – even in the seemingly predictable life of a barista or waitress. No one knows what the future might bring, and no one can predict what sort of skills might be useful. Invest in your mind, I said, for the long term.
This, one might suppose, is old-fashioned advice given by a dying breed: the starry-eyed dreamer-professor who has been rendered increasingly irrelevant by the new matrix of instrumentalist, quasi-vocational, more-easily-assessed training that is ascendant in the universe of higher education.
He counters this by pointing out certain naive but common assumptions about the value of a college education:
...we need to stop blaming the humanities for not preparing students for some idyllic life – filled with afternoon martinis, big property, and gleaming SUVs – that wasn’t for everyone to begin with, and isn't available anymore, except without the dangerous extension of credit.
Finally, he argues that humanities graduates are well equipped to contribute to America's chief export at the moment, culture:
Oh, we love to celebrate our ingenuity in science and manufacturing, but in this epoch of the flat world, our dominance in those fields is no longer assured. What we do best – despite the near total absence of public support – is paint, and sing, and compose, and write, and read, and watch. And then argue and debate over all of it.
Read the whole thing.
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