Backpage: If I Just Wanted A Job, I’d Have Gone To A Trade School

By: Grant Dissette ’12

Grinnell is a liberal arts college.

If you haven’t read this yet, do yourself a favor and look up the S&B’s interview with Geoffrey Harpham about the liberal arts and the humanities. It’s on their website, www.thesandb.com. Here’s an excerpt:

“There is increasing drive for efficiency, to vocational training… There is a sense that the results of education should be measureable in the short term. Of course, the humanities [don’t] look good, because it’s hard to measure their effects in the short term… the drive to reduce everything to something accessible … to something measureable … has the effect of diminishing the importance and the value of humanities.”

President Kington recently sat in on a Humanities divisional meeting, and brought up an issue that he perceives in the division. He said that some students and their parents had expressed concern that their humanities majors were not preparing them for a job post-graduation. Kington then implied that the professors were to blame for this issue, and that if they could not solve the problem, they would see a significant drop in support from the administration.

I am firmly of the belief that Kington (along with these concerned students and parents) does not understand the point of a liberal arts degree, or why one should pursue a humanities major.

A liberal arts education is meant to create a well-rounded, adaptable individual with strong critical thinking skills. The humanities division in particular emphasizes critical thinking through writing, which is arguably the single most valuable vocational skill one can cultivate. A student who receives a good liberal arts education with a strong grounding in the humanities should be prepared for virtually any job they encounter. It’s also unlikely that such a student will settle into a stable career path within a few years of graduation, if they do at all.

I would even venture to say that your typical humanities student is not of the ilk to desire a stable career that lines up nicely with their major. I certainly don’t – I’m majoring in Russian, with no plans to even visit Russia in the near future, let alone seek a job that directly uses my Russian skills. If you think that’s foolish, you’re looking at me from the wrong perspective. I didn’t come to Grinnell because I wanted a degree, or a job through that degree. I came to Grinnell to become a sage individual with an open mind and an open heart. My path to that happened to be through the Russian department. And I gained invaluable guidance from my professors, in and out of the classroom, that I wouldn’t trade for any job security in the world.

Where the other divisions deal in knowledge, the humanities deal in wisdom. And wisdom, not a job, should be the goal of a liberal arts education.