“The corporate attack on the university” is scarcely news, writes Peter Fettner in his 2011 academia.edu essay on “The Crisis in the Humanities”.
And if you do anything with social media, you’ve already seen some of the many web postings that strike back in support of humanities programs, the liberal arts degree, and the discipline of English studies. The arguments range across registers of value – individual, social, cultural, economic – and it’s worth paying attention to them. They hold in common at least one claim: that now is a time when the case really needs to be made.
Here are some of those articles:
Why Learning the Humanities Is a Key to Success
The Decline and Fall of the English Major
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html?_r=0
Don’t Abandon Classics In Order To Get A Good Job, Says Oxford
http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/3572536
Why Does Reading Matter?
http://whydoesitmattercanada.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/why-does-reading-matter/
Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen
The Future Of The University: A Vision
http://printculture.com/the-future-of-the-university-a-vision/
And on a storify.com site,
storify.com/janineutell/the-value-of-a-liberal-arts-degree
there’s a list of articles including:
Liberal Education News Watch
http://www.aacu.org/press_room/liberalednewswatch.cfm
Why Businesses Prefer a Liberal Arts Education
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100642178
Why I Hire English Majors
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-strauss/hiring-english-majors_b_3484409.html
The Best Argument for Studying English? The Employment Numbers
Are Humanities Degrees Doomed? Experts Weigh In
http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/06/06/whats-a-college-student-to-study-experts-weigh-in
Is There a Place for Liberal Arts in Business?
http://www.inc.com/laura-entis/6-cases-for-the-value-of-a-liberal-arts-education.html
Michael Bérubé. My View: What will you do with an English degree? Plenty.
http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/tag/michael-berube-special-to-cnn/
The Irreplaceable Value of the Liberal Arts
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-benson/liberal-arts-education-_b_1603436.html
Revenge of the Liberal Arts Major
Christopher Keep (U Western) adds to the list with this link:
Why English Majors Are the New Hot Hires
https://www.openforum.com/articles/why-english-majors-are-the-hot-new-hires/
Categories: English Matters