Great article yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Anthony T. Grafton, professor of history at Princeton University, and James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
Title and excerpt below:
The Humanities in Dubious Battle:
What a new Harvard report doesn't tell us
Have you heard about the classics major who intends to be a military surgeon? Or the employers who think entry-level interviewees ought to show up having read the company history? No, of course you haven't.
Those people are not just unmentionable, they're unthinkable—at least in the vast, buzzing worlds of the news media, the blogosphere, and the many TED Talks. No one who studies the humanities could possibly have a practical career in view, anymore than someone who has a practical career in view would ever bother studying the humanities, right? And in the corporate world, only the CEOs, not the HR people, value a liberal education. Why would a company like Enterprise Rent-A-Car care if a prospective employee took the initiative to read the company history? What could the study of the past contribute to a career in, say, medicine?
No comments:
Post a Comment