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Institutionalizing Public Humanities Projects

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This past weekend I was asked to come in and give a plenary address to a group working through the second cohort of the CIC’s “Humanities Research for the Public Good” initiative.  Messiah was in the first cohort and I served as a team member, though in truth almost all the work was done by David Pettegrew, Jean Corey, students, and our community partners working on the Commonwealth Monument project.  In the course of our efforts, I think the CIC became aware of all the many good things we do here in Public Humanities work, so I was glad to be able to share with them a little about what we do and how we’ve managed to do it and sustain it over time.   Slides from the presentation are available at slideshare, and embedded at the end of this post.

What follows are a few snippets from my presentation—the parts that were a little more written out rather than just talked through extemporaneously. 

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In preparing for this talk, Phil and Anne gave me about two pages of possible things to address in my talk, things like 

  • How can we make public engagement a part of the ongoing life of the institution.
  • How can this kind of work be sustained.
  • How can our institutional missions and the ideal of community outreach or engagement mesh?
  • Is there a way to make public humanities projects grow that aren’t simply bootstrapped?
  • How can you actually make things grow at all?
  • What does a solid program require in terms of administrative support and structure?
  • How can institutions see this work as important even when it is not efficient?
  • How to scale up.  How does that happen.
  • How can Faculty and Administrators better understand one another and work together?

I admit that as we were developing this list I was saying to myself “I really hope that Phil and Anne will be able to find someone who can come and answer these questions, because I sure as heck can’t”  I say that only partially in jest, because the truth is that institutionalization does not mean what it used to mean, especially in an era when higher ed institutions of our sort are themselves under constant threat and nowhere more than in the areas of the humanities and no where more than in the kinds of institutions supported by the CIC.  All of us are in a scramble to get one more student in the door so that they can keep our doors open.  To some degree “institutionalization” means you are at least welcome to stay in the scramble.  Uncomfortable, yes, but in an era where History and English and Philosophy and Religion and Language majors are being discontinued and de-institutionalized, it does mean that institutionalization is an ongoing and iterative process rather than something that is finally and for all time achieve. 

However, I’m going to start whacking a way at this a bit by telling you a bit of our story, not because we have come up with the absolutely best ways of doing these things or answering these question.  Rather, my primary claim today is that the most important aspect of institutionalization is story-telling.  This may be one area in which we have some distinct advantages because we are, most of us, story tellers of one sort or another.  I am fond of saying to my dean and provost colleagues that whatever we read in the best administrators’ handbooks, we aren’t really data-driven. Institutions are story-driven and data informed. Data in itself does not tell us what to value, aspire after, regret, champion, mourn, and envision. Our stories do that.  Thus, as you all well know, the stories you can tell about your projects are important. But perhaps even more important for the processes we call institutionalization are the stories you know and can tell effectively about your institutions.  Our project stories AND institutional stories, are the most valuable resources you can bring to the table.  

[What followed was an extemporaneous discussion of our primary nodes of public humanities work at Messiah University, which I defined as the following: The Digital Humanities Initiative; The Center for Public Humanities; Thriving Together: Congregations for Racial Justice.]

That’s a little of the story of our projects, but I think a little more important for our purposes here is the story of Messiah University as a whole. If I had to declare a rule one for institutionalizing your work,  it would be similar to the first rule of fundraising; that is make sure that your pitch is not about you or only about you but is about the person whose attention and affections (and resources) you are trying to win.  Too often in seeking the favor of our institutions or donors we end up like the date who spends the evening talking exclusively about himself, to the grief of his partner’s evening.  And we end up thinking that either we just need to get better at telling our story to the institution or else the institution just doesn’t get how valuable and important our story is.  Instead we need to realize that the most important thing we can do is hear and understand and value our institution’s story, and figure out how our story can possibly fit with what is, in the eyes of the institution, going to be a much larger and more important story.  What we are doing when we are asking to have our work “institutionalized” is that we are not asking for “resources”; we are asking that the story we care about can become a part of our institution’s story. Insofar as an institution is concerned, your program qua program is always only a small part of a much bigger and more complex story, and in its own mind it’s own is the much more important story.  This is true even if you are making great progress on solving world hunger, on understanding the cultural effects of climate change, or are developing plans for capturing the oral histories of Ukranian refugees.  No matter how big your story as an idea, insofar as it is as a program within your institution, the institution’s story is always going to be bigger and more important.  Figuring out how your story is or can become part of that story is fundamental.  

So, the first thing I’m going to say in that vein may seem somewhat over obvious, but know your mission, it is the foundation stone of your institution’s story and sense of self. Messiah University’s mission and identity statement makes the following claims

“Messiah University is a Christian university of the liberal and applied arts and sciences. The University is committed to an embracing evangelical spirit rooted in the Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan traditions of the Christian Church. Our mission is to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.”  

On the one hand, such mission and identity statements tend to be bland and even banal affairs, claiming to be original while pretty much saying what everyone else is saying in one way or another.  On the other hand, they are portals into your institution’s story and its meanings and values. They are teleological claims that the leaders of your institution take with an earnest seriousness.  Within institutions, each bland and seemingly innocuous statement carries a penumbra of interlocking meanings that are embodied in the various workings of your institution, including its planning and decision-making processes. Most institutions, and certainly effective institutions, attempt to find their own way through the thicket of troubles that is higher education by means of its guiding stories, metaphors, and rituals, most typically embodied at the highest order in a sense of mission and a sense of identity. 

For instance, Messiah is a University of the applied and liberal arts.  In the jargon of higher education, this indicates merely that we are a so-called “comprehensive institution,” with a balanced array of liberal arts and professional programs.  In our institutional history, however, it represents and affirms that we were not simply or only a liberal arts college but that we were interested in providing an education that makes a practical difference in the world. In one of my first conflicts with a University President as a young faculty member, I was chastised for comparing what we did to Dickinson College.  I was very firmly told that was not a good comparison and that form of a liberal arts college was not something we should aspire to, that we were more like places like Valparaiso another comprehensive institution, or perhaps we could aspire to be like Bucknell.  In our instance, the student’s ability to apply and use the education that they receive, most particularly in service to others, is a paramount value.  

This practical orientation is  reinforced by an identity that calls attention to our roots in the “Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan” traditions of the Christian faith.  This story of origins signals particular kinds of Christian allegiance with particular kinds of values. In our case, the rootedness in these traditions reinforces the preference for practice and the experiential that colors the entirety of our educational ethos.  Anabaptists and Pietists, and even to some degree Wesleyans, are notable for their emphasis on practice of the Christian faith rather than reflection on Christian faith.  Theological and philosophical traditions of learning and speculation springing from these traditions are notoriously thin when compared with the Catholic intellectual tradition or the robust emphasis on philosophy and theology and the other liberal arts springing from the Reformed churches. Nevertheless, these traditions of the Christian faith remain robust due to an undying commitment to values such as the practice of community life together, the pursuit of justice for and service to others, the personal experience of divine presence, and the pursuit of right living as a result of that experience.  These traditions ask less fewer questions such as “What is the world for?”  and more questions like “What can we do to make the world better?”  This, finally, is reflected in our mission statement that puts a premium on education to specific ends that, again, all have resonance with the idea of practical and fruitful forms living, and especially living together: service, leadership and reconciliation.    

Now, this practical and service-oriented ethos is often a burr in the backside of our traditional humanities disciplines, as some of you can probably imagine  As an institution, we are not as robustly equipped as some sister liberal arts institutions to counter narratives of impracticality and uselessness in the humanities. Nevertheless, our stories have also been our doorway into a variety of valuable distinctives in our humanities programs, and most particularly for what we have been able to accomplish in public humanities forms of research. The justifications for our programs have relied significantly on the real-world difference such programs would make for our students and for the world at large.  While I have often found myself wishing that we had a more traditionally oriented liberal arts ethos on campus, I have mostly felt that it is part of my job to figure out how to create a humanities that works in this place and within this particular set of values, respecting and working with the culture and values of the world in which I have found myself, culture and values expressed at the highest level by a statement of mission and identity.

This attachment to mission happens at a fairly high and abstract level.  Practically speaking, I would also encourage to know your strategic plan well and know why it exists and what it is shooting for.  I will say that if there are things more bland and less unique than an institution’s mission statement they are probably an institution’s vision statement and strategic plan.  Nevertheless, as an internal ritual of storytelling and vision casting, strategic planning is more or less a road map.  This is who we are, this is what we would like to become.  If you are lucky, it might be that your particular project actually gets in on the ground floor and is central to the strategic plan.  This has never really happened for me. More likely, you are going to have to be nimble and plan on every four or five years to have to retell at least part of your story of what you are doing in terms of those large if somewhat bland statements of vision coming out of the strategic planning processes.  There is, frankly, not a VP in the country who is going to stand in front of their president and say “I know the strategic plan says we ought to be doing X, but I decided to do Y instead.”  Such a VP might (MIGHT!) say to the same president, “We’re working to fulfill Educational goal 3  of Theme 4 in our strategic plan that relates to engaging the public about our value to the region.  I’ve got this interesting new public humanities project that I think it might be worth investing a few thousand dollars in and I’d like to ask the development office to write some grants to generate further support.”

In our case at Messiah University this kind of nimble shifting of gears and recasting of our story in terms of the strategic planning process has happened on multiple occasions.

[What followed at this point was an extended extemporaneous discussion of the ways in which we’ve connected public humanities work of various sort to important strategic initiative at the University, if not gaining large sums of money then at least riding the coattails of a general momentum in particular directions.  I also briefly discussed the ways we had made use of various kind of policies at the institution to the benefit of our programming, and finally how we had invested in people to achieve some of these ends.  I concluded with the following  reflection on taking stock of oneself and what it meant to want to have one’s own story institutionalized.]

When I sat down to zoom with Phil Katz and Ann Valk a few weeks ago to discuss what I might talk about, my section in the draft program that Phil shared in our call was named “institutionalizing public humanities”.  I admit I read that word “institutionalizing” with a sudden clutch in my gut and catch in my throat.  Somewhere in my alligator brain I heard a voice say “EEWW, who would want to be institutionalized?”  It does not take much thinking to realize that the institutional man or woman is not usually the one that gets the romantic lead in books and movies.  From Huck Finn to Animal House to Invisible Man, to Girl Interrupted, to Shawshank Redemption, institutions, their operations and their representatives are taken to signal the loss of freedom, loss of creativity, loss of passion, loss, indeed, of identity.   In our subconscious we assume that institutions mean restraint, the loss of something more real and vibrant and visionary and alive than what we would really be able to do if given the time, opportunity and resources, and especially if we were left to our own devices.  Sometimes, lurking unacknowledged beneath the question that asks how our important projects can become institutionalized or become an institutional priority lies the unstated question “How can I get the resources to do what I want to do and be left alone to do it in the way I think it ought to be done.”

My disappointingly short answer to that is “You Can’t.”  Part of institutionalizing our passions is a long-term negotiation, not just with our institutions, but with ourselves and our own stories,  practices, and desires.  Institutionalizing what we do is in part figuring out how our stories practices, and passions must be altered in order to be meshed with the stories and practices and ambitions of these things we call institutions.  One of the hardest things about institutionalizing your work, is coming to embrace the fact that it is no longer really your story, or at least not solely your story.   At least part of my discussion today implies that one part of the process of institutionalization is coming to term with the fact that our individual dreams will not be realized through institutions, at least not as we had dreamed them.  But our dreams of various sorts will be realized and sustained as we give them up, at least in part, to our institutions, our community partners, our students, and many, many others on the way to  something we call a public humanities project.  That something  that results will not be what we originally imagined, but, perhaps, in the end, more than we could have asked or hoped for.

Crowdsourcing My Seminar on The Crisis of Legitimacy in Higher Education

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CampusI’ve foolishly agreed to take on a teaching assignment in the spring semester, but am thrilled at the prospect of teaching a senior honors seminar to our honors program students here at Messiah College. The course is titled: “College, what is it good for?:  Messiah College and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Higher Education.”

I’ve decided to stick my pinkie toe in the crowdsourcing waters just to see what students, faculty, and administrators might make of the course or do with it if they had their way.  So I’d be very interested in any readers of this now nearly moribund blog taking a crack at the course google doc that you can connect with here.  (I’m so uncertain as to what I’m doing that you should please leave me a comment if you find it impossible to get to my google doc).  I’m not going entirely commando with the crowdsourcing idea, sin I’ve obviously created a moderately fleshed out skeleton on the google.doc that I think I would like to pursue.

On the other hand, I’m interested in how students in the course, professors, other administrators, persons outside the academy, might view such a course.  What issues would be taken up, what readings would be required, what case studies should we consider, what assignments would really work??  Etcetera etcetera.  I’m especially interested in ideas about how to make the “gamification” part of the class work effectively.  So I’m open to anything, retaining the right pick and choose what I think are the best ideas to form the course in the end.

The basic description of the course is as follows, with the longer version of my vision of the course available on the google doc.

Students in this class will have an opportunity to reflect on their education at Messiah College in the broader context of higher education as it exists in the United States today.  Especially, we will examine the widespread doubts and concerns about higher education in the United States.  In the United States, social discourse no longer takes a college education to be an obvious and unquestioned social good.  Critics contend that college costs too much, contributes to inequality, relies on old-fashioned technology, does not guarantee students good jobs, undermines patriotism (or religious faith) and in the end does not teach students very much.  Several central questions will focus our seminar, including but not limited to the following:

  • What is the purpose of a college education?
  • How is college represented in American culture, and why?
  • Does a college education contribute to inequality in the United States?
  • Why does a college education cost so much?
  • Do new forms of information technology and educational delivery signal the end of the traditional residential liberal arts college?
  • Do Christian Colleges have unique answers to the problems facing higher education?
  • How does or should Messiah College respond effectively to the crisis of legitimacy in higher education?

If you don’t have any time for a google doc and would just like to leave some suggestions in the comments to the post, that’s great too.

Passion, Identity, and the Faculty in the Humanities: Reflections on Anna Neumann

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A half a life time ago now, I was living in Amsterdam working on a short term mission in the red light district.  Sunday evenings it was fairly typical for those of us on the staff at The Shelter to attend a gathering at a community run by Youth With a Mission.  The director, Bill Hallam, a converted hippie who had formerly trekked the drug trail between Amsterdam and India, was talking about how to find your direction and purpose in life, something a lot of people drifting through Amsterdam were in need of, myself included.  He asked us what one thing really got us excited, really made us jump out of our skins, so to speak.  After a little hesitation and with some embarrassment, I raised my hand and said that more than anything, I loved discovering new ideas, learning new things, having sudden aha! moments where my thinking and reading came together in to some new insight.  I recounted how, as an undergraduate, I would read in the library and suddenly be seized with excitement at some new illumination, some new connection that I hadn’t thought of before.  I would be so excited, I would be shaking and have to get up and walk around the library, shaking my fists in the air and whispering “Yes! Yes! Yes!” under my breath.

Most people in the meeting laughed.  To his everlasting credit, Bill Hallam did not.  He said, “Well, maybe that is a clue that you are called to read, and to learn, and to think.  And the church should find a way to support you in that.”  I took him up on it.

I thought about this lesson again reading Anna Neumann’s essay in Change, “Protecting the Passion of Scholars in Times of Change.  I’ve been doing some reading about motivation and change as I work on revising an essay originally presented at a conference in Richmond on Humanities and the Professions, as well as trying to do some preparation for a panel at the Lilly Fellows administrators conference.  Broadly speaking, Neumann makes the case that passion for their subject matter is a driving force in faculty motivation and in faculty pursuit of excellence.

“The scholars I interviewed, all one to five years post-tenure, chose the academic career out of a deep desire to understand the subjects of study that beckoned to them through the rigors of graduate training, the challenges and insecurities of the pre-tenure years, the “big test” of the tenure review, and often post-tenure workloads and campus cultures that did not support the scholarly learning that meant a great deal to them intellectually and personally.”

She cites some faculty having the kinds of physical reactions I had and still have to the joy of engaging their work, and how this can be a near-mystical, or at least deeply creative experience.

“I’m not so sure how common this is, but when things are going well, what happens is first of all, it affects me physically, not just intellectually. My body kicks into a higher gear. I shake, and I can’t stop moving. I barely sleep as it is, and I sleep even less.

“Although it might sound like it’s distracting, it’s not. It’s wonderful, it really is. My students say that I’m talking to the muses. I start channeling things. I start spewing forth conjectures or mathematical ideas without really knowing where they’re coming from. Obviously your subconscious is doing the information-processing when you’re in this agitated state, giving you the results of it while hiding the reasoning. And so then you have to go back and reconstruct where it came from and then try to use it. It’s like you’re not creating it—it’s being revealed to you.”

For Neumann, this kind of engagement is deeply threatened by changes in higher education, though she doesn’t precisely go in to why she believes that is the case.  According to Neumann, this passion for discipline is the singular and defining characteristic of higher education and has to be protected, as she puts it “at all costs.”

This is a hard thing to disagree with, and its not that I do.  I think Neumann is intuitively right that impediments to change among faculty are much more complicated and emotionally nuanced than we administrators usually give them credit for.  Faculty resistance to change in higher education is less about recalcitrance or smugness, and more about emotional investment and identity, about honoring a way of being in the world rather than a means of clinging stubbornly to certain ways of doing.  Every faculty member I know of is in some sense a convert, one who chose to become something rather than someone who delivers certain outcomes, a distinction between being and doing that it crucial to remember.

However, it does seem to me that Neumann has a fairly abstract notion of passion in general and scholarly passion in particular, one that exists in a kind of static and romanticized limbo.  On her reading, scholarly passion is somewhat Titanic-like, with the scholar and his/her subject matter stationed at the prow of the ship sailing rapturously into the future, in this case unprotected.  The tragedy in such a view of passion is that it comes to an end, or that it changes.  If Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslett had not hit the literal iceberg they would have had hit others more metaphorical, and their passions would have changed, adjusted to changing circumstances, matured, etcetera.  If it had not so adapted and changed, it would have died.

Passions like everything else have histories and contexts, and are enabled by certain kinds of material grounds.  We like to say love conquers all, but its well know that financial stress and economic hardship are among the leading causes of stress and hardship in relationships.  And our original passions are made possible by circumstances of chance or class or gender, a mixture of social convention, resistance to convention, and the drive for self-making that consumes late adolescents and young adults launching into a vocation.  We should not be surprised if the ardent passions we had as adolescents and young adults are reshaped and changed and have to find new ways to be or must express themselves in new ways in times of change as well.

So I don’t much like the language of “protection” that Neumann employs, at least not to the degree that it seems to imply “preserve”;  a little too much of the whiff of the museum or mausoleum.  If that is the goal, I don’t know if it is reachable, because higher ed has changed dramatically already, and is likely to change even more by almost every report that we can envision that responsibly tries to envision the future.

However, it does seem to me that  we need to recognize that faculty engagement with a subject matter in a discipline, is a very different matter than selling a car.  It is, as Neumann suggest, much more like the personal investment in a work of art.  Faculty identities as human beings are deeply connected to their fields and their historical ways of understanding them;  their passion is not like a passion for chocolate cake or for Ferraris.  Their passions for a subject matter are an expression of the self, a way of being in the world, that is, in fact, like a religious faith, something that has come at great cost, and has been rewarded with a certain kind of being.

It seems to me that as we begin to address the wrenching changes that are upon us in higher education, it is important to keep this fact in mind, and work together with faculty on issues of identity at least as much as we work with them on issues or policy or program.  Especially, administrators need to be engaged with faculty in the process of narrativizing relationships between what higher education has been and what it is or may be becoming.

Change does not mean loss exclusively.  It means transformation, which is the continuation of our disciplinary selves in to new and sometimes strange circumstances.  Often, in the midst of change, the story of higher education is told as if we were last years model, a clunker that has to be cast aside for newer and more adaptive.  This is a fundamentally offensive approach to the good and important human work that colleges and universities and their professors have done for centuries in many different forms since the founding of the first universities.  A story about the humanities–my own area as an administrator–has to engage with and value the ideals of humanistic study as it has been received, and articulate a relationship between those ideals and our changed circumstances, whether those circumstances are focused on closer engagement with career preparation, doing humanistic study in a digital framework, unbundling the degree, pursuing competency based education, or recasting the relationship between the humanities and the sciences.

This story need not be defensive, tragic, or apocalyptic as it is so often cast by both the defenders and the dismissers of the humanities.  It need not be the closing of a book or the dissolution of our scholarly passions.  It can be the next chapter of a book. The meaning and purpose of where we are going next is made clearer by our engagement with where we have been.

What is a liberal art: Elizabeth Stone on the vocation vs. vocational in higher education

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This summer I’m working sporadically on what I hope will turn in to a paper on Critical Vocationalism for the NEMLA session that I hope will be draw some substantial proposals for next year’s conference in Harrisburg. Trying to get my brain around exactly what Gerald Graff and Paul Jay might mean by Critical Vocationalism since they leave the term underdefined in their own advocacy for the idea as a new defense for the humanities and the liberal art. To that end I read Elizabeth Stone’s essay on the conflict between vocation and vocationalism published a few years back in the Chronicle. I’m struck by the fact of how we seem to be stuck in a holding pattern, with nothing really advancing or changing in our discourse about the liberal arts in general and the humanities specifically, with the possible exception that we must now lament that the rate of debt our students are carrying has more than doubled in a decade.

Stone’s essay does point out some dimensions of the problem that I do think are important to keep trying to talk about. For instance, she points out that we are not just having an enrollment crisis in the liberal arts, we are having a crisis of definition. What are the liberal arts and why are they that instead of something else. For Stone:

<blockquote>So, platonically speaking, I don’t really know what a liberal art is (although I know it’s not auto mechanics), because there seems to be no single characteristic — old, new, theoretical, vocational, quantitative, qualitative, a matter of content, a matter of perspective — common to all liberal arts.

In practice, then, a liberal art is a little like obscenity. We faculty members know it when we see it, even if we can’t quite define it. But there isn’t anything approaching consensus. Because I’m a parent — of one son with a new B.A. and another who’s now a freshman at a liberal-arts college — I’ve seen more than my share of college catalogs over the past half-dozen years. All of them assert the value of the liberal arts, but at some colleges that includes computer science, industrial design, physical education, and even engineering.

If you are a pragmatist, as I tend to be in my weaker moments, this could strike you as merely a self-serving argumentative move. Since “liberal arts” tends to be defined differently in different periods of history and even in different institutional contexts, they must not really be anything at all. In my own College the Humanities–traditional and sometimes sole remaining bastion of the liberal arts–are defined to include not only Philosophy, History, and English (uncontroversial), but also Religion (unconventional but still uncontroversial), Biblical studies and Film production ( a number of raised eyebrows) and programs like Public Relations, Christian Ministries, and Chinese Business and Spanish Business (pandemonium). The Platonist suggests that if there is no essence that unites these disparate fields then there is no there there, no thing that we can call the liberal arts as opposed to any other thing.

I’m not really interested in answering this question, though I will say I am more interested in Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances than in Plato’s forms. What Stone makes clear is that in the absence of any defining essence, the liberal arts largely define themselves by what they are against or what they are not–a version of Aquinas’s theological via negativa for defining God only by saying what God is not, just as most of us build our identities by aversion to our evil others. That evil other for the liberal arts is usually vocationalism. Over and against our money grubbing brethren interested in mere vocationalism we posit the higher order values of vocation, of calling, of transcendent value, or at least of critical thinking.

The problem with this according to Stone is that we don’t have to probe very deeply beneath the skin of what we call the liberal arts to discover an always already fallen vocationalism in who we are and what we do.

<blockquote>Since it’s people like me who are often seen fretting that the liberal arts are being waylaid by the thugs of Mammon, I think it’s time that people like me acknowledged our own dirty little secret. I’ll go first and admit that I, for one, have an unseemly number of vocational courses in my undergraduate past, and the reason is that those courses were directly related to a job I had my eye on: I was a teenage English major, in training to be an English professor.

Stone’s suggestion here strikes me as having two different meanings. First many of our liberal arts disciplines have had vocational ends in some sense, even if that sense was never fully articulated and endlessly deferred. Aquinas’s notion that the liberal arts are things studied for their own sake nevertheless raises the question of why something studied for its own sake should be a required course of study in a society or a seminary. We must admit that the study of most disciplines of the liberal arts have been and were specifically conceived of as appropriate training for young men in order to prepare them for positions of leadership. To be sure, the “higher order” issues of character and spiritual formation have always been around, but young men were explicitly required to pursue studies in these fields in order to prepare for something, specifically to occupy adult roles of leadership as the elites of particular Western Societies. Moreover, some liberal arts as we now conceive of them were not even designed for Elites. My own discipline of English was understood and came in to the academy in England first and foremost as an appropriate course of study in what would have been the equivalent of British community colleges, educational schools for the working classes and for women, even while English was looked down upon by the more cultured classes. So we turn our face away from vocationalism almost like those afraid to recognize their kinship with the adulterated masses.

Also, it seems to me that Stone is suggesting that we ought to recognize that we have increasingly organized our liberal arts curricula around professional (and so vocational) ideals. We have tended for the past few decades to imagine undergraduate education at its best as preparing students for potential graduate study, and have valued most those students who looked just like us, could talk just like us, and wanted to prepare to be just like us. We have accepted a vocational model of education common to the research universities and the professional schools and baptized it in the name of the liberal arts. This fact is why so much of the discussion of a crisis in the humanities is preoccupied with a crisis of graduate students not getting jobs. That is actually a symptom of a much larger crisis that we cannot fully imagine a larger social purpose that doesn’t rely on our self-replication.

What, I wonder, would an education in the liberal arts look like that took it as its explicit task to better prepare students for participation as informed citizens AND as informed workers outside the world of academe. In other words, an education that took as its explicit purpose to produce workers who were not like and do not aspire to be like us. This might be a baseline for critical vocationalism

Patrick J. Deneen on the WalMart-ification of Higher Education

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Patrick Deneen at the Chronicle Review has a persuasive case to make that the educational and economic thrust of higher education is toward bigger is better, and that mass produced standardization is being preferred over local educational cultures, with the result that “local cultures”–i.e. smaller mid-range colleges of almost every ilk, are being squeezed out of the educational system in the same way that family farms have been squeezed out by Monsanto and the local hardware store has been squeezed out by Home Depot.

Colleges and universities are like the once-ubiquitous department stores in every city—Filene’s in Boston, G. Fox in Hartford, Woodward & Lothrop in Washington—which, while enjoying distinct locations and histories, became increasingly similar. When consumers grew to value uniformity over a local market culture, those local stores were susceptible to the challenge from a truly universal competitor that could offer the same wares, produced cheaply, at low, low prices. Those stores are all now out of business. MOOCs are the Wal-Mart of higher education.

Perhaps most interesting in Deneen’s anlysis is his general sense that faculty are complicit in this process. MOOCs are the logical out come of an educational system that produces faculty interested in narrowly conceived academic specialities and with more allegiance to their disciplines than to the institutions and local cultures that support their existence.

Deneen mostly predicts that the Walmartification of higher education will continue unabated. Smaller institutions that simply try to replicate the standard model of education will inevitably be destroyed by an economy of scale. However, Daneen finds hope in the possible revival of local “artisinal” educational models that emphasize the uniqueness of a local institution in its immediate geographical setting.

Think of Providence or Belmont Abbey among Roman Catholic institutions, or St. Olaf or Baylor among Protestant ones—all rightly anticipating that nondescript and indistinguishable institutions will be easy victims of the logic of standardization. This artisanal direction requires hiring faculty who expressly share a commitment to the institutional mission and attracting students who seek a distinctive education. Consider Hillsdale College, with its traditionalist emphasis on core curriculum and Western civilization, and a growing number of institutions that combine a liberal-arts education with some training in “trades” or manual labor, such as Deep Springs College, in California. (Try to teach baling hay via MOOC.)

I think there’s something to this. I’m not sure I agree with the example of Baylor, but I do agree that institutions–or programs within larger institutions–that have a strong shared distinctive quality or cultural identity that can be communicated effectively are going to be more likely players in the future than those that try a version of me-tooism. There will always be a larger and cheaper version of what you are offering, and so playing that game is likely to mean you are inevitably swallowed by the sharks you swim with.

Nevertheless, Deneen doesn’t give much guidance for how smaller institutions might get there. Distinctive “artisanal” educational cultures can’t be built up overnight through a PR department. They usually develop over decades. In addition to the schools that Daneen mentions (Side note but I’m interested in how many of them are religious schools), I think of places like Warren Wilson College with their integration of work and standard academics, or Bennington College with its work terms and open curriculum, or EverGreen State College with its emphasis on an integrated environmentalism in an open curriculum. These were all places my son applied to for College and I think he applied precisely because they had this “artisinal” educational outlook that resisted a standardized model of education. (He will attend Bennington in 2014 after a gap year). All of these places struggle, but they might have a fighting chance of enduring precisely because they choose to be different and distinctive rather than struggling to be distinguished amongst the mass that are offering more or less the same thing.

But these places and others like them didn’t develop their “family farm” versions of higher education at the drop of the hat. It’s unclear how a local educational culture develops where one doesn’t exist. How do they begin? How are they imagined? Why do they endure? How can you get one? Any ideas?

Humanities For Humanities Sake?

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In a recent Inside Higher Ed post, Scott Jasick discussed Going Global, and international higher education conference in Dubai.  According to Jasick, whose post is title “Humanities Besieged, Worldwide,”  the plight of the humanities is not that much different anywhere else in the world than it is in the United States.  Indeed it may possibly be worse elsewhere since in the United States the importance of the humanities is sustained in some fashion through its predominant place in core liberal arts curricula, a tradition not common to other forms of education in the world but de rigueur in the United States. Jasick quotes Jo Beall from the British Council.

Beall described going to university websites in Britain and finding the humanities “positioned in very functional or utilitarian terms.” She found many references to how students gain from taking humanities courses “because it will help them do well in science and technology.” In other cases, departments describe how much employers value the “transferable skills” that one picks up in humanities courses.

While not disagreeing that the humanities can help in those ways, Beall noted that many scholars are “very uncomfortable with this marketing of the humanities” and lament that it is no longer possible to argue for the value of “art for art’s sake.” Instead, the humanities end up “as co-dependent” to other programs, she said.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/07/educators-consider-struggles-humanities-worldwide#ixzz2N3bmjfg1
Inside Higher Ed

I do think this gets an important conundrum that Humanities scholars face.  Rooted in a tradition that emphasizes learning for its own sake, we have never grown comfortable with a discourse of usefulness.  But is this a legacy of the liberal arts, or is it a legacy of romanticism in its idealistic but finally inadequate protest against the economic systems in which it was embedded and by which it was sustained.  The liberal arts were never envisioned in antiquity as being anti-utilitarian in a ontological sense.  Study was always to some purpose and their functions were quite explicit in giving the “free” or “liberal” person equipment for living appropriate to his (usually his) station in life.  Similarly, in later periods what has come to be known as the humanities served similar useful purposes as usefulness was determined by the various cultures in which they were existing;  useful for growing closer to God, for instance, or preparing for ministry, or for some other functioning with in the clerisy

It seems fruitless to me to continue a romantic protest against economic systems and economic gain per se from within the systems that sustain us since the humanities as an institutional entity will simply disappear if that is all we can say about them.  We act in bad faith with our students if we ask them to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and then rule out the question of whether they will be able to pay off their loans once they graduate.

Administration in the Wilderness: Academic and spiritual leadership

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I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the role of spirituality in professional life, and especially in the life of an administrator.  Because I work at a faith-based institution, it might seem natural to assume that we talk a lot about the spiritual aspects of what it means to be an organizational leader, a department chair or dean, or that we are regularly conducting conversations about the role faith plays in how we organize our lives together.  In fact, like any other organization or institution of higher education it is extremely easy to be caught up in the grinding day to day, to be focused on how I’m going to get the next e-mail (or 100 e-mails, no lie) answered, or fret about how late I am to the next meeting or whether I have too many priorities for my school or too few and whether they are the right ones and whether I have any budget to have any priorities at all.

While we expect our faculty to be able to understand and articulate a cognitive relationship between faith and their disciplines, and while we have learning objectives for students that are related to character and Christian life, and while I think our educational program does a pretty good job or reaching these expectations, we don’t often pause to think about what role spirituality might have in the mundane business of meeting or cutting budgets, organizing and running meetings, setting policy, formulating workloads, and the like.  In the busy context of the day to day its very easy to imagine that spirituality is something I need, but it’s something that I get mostly after work, gassing up, so to speak, in the morning or the evening for the long road ahead where there aren’t many gas stations on the horizon.

I’ve come to doubt this. And I’m a bit bemused that I’ve come to doubt this even more seriously since my experience at the Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, Harvard having some time since lost its reputation as a bastion of the faith or faiths.

But as I discussed in my last post, I was surprised at how much of the MLE experience focused on how leaders needed to practice forms of self-care and seek to be more fully human and humane in what can easily become an inhumane job.  Beyond this,  some of that attention was on what could only be called spiritual care, spiritual care of the self to be sure, but also the spiritual care of others.  Lee Bolman, in his concluding sentences of what I found to be three outstanding two hour sessions, declared that “administrative work is God’s work.”  My caps :-).  This could only mean, to my ears, that administrative work necessarily entailed spiritual attention and spiritual work and that, whether they wanted to be or not, administrative leaders are spiritual leaders and ought to recognize and embrace and take that role seriously in thinking out who they want to be and how they imagine the work of their department, school, or institution.

I think this must have meant many different things to every person in the room at the MLE. For it to have any useful meaning to the diversity of religious and spiritual experience represented in the room and in higher education generally, Bolman’s understanding of spirituality was capacious enough to cover about everything from those of use who were Christians in a traditional sense of embracing the Apostle’s Creed to a more generic and Tillichian sense of having an Ultimate Concern that centers one’s being and sense of self in the world, however secular or divine that Ultimate Concern might be.

Regardless,  it focused me in a new way that I had and have some kind of spiritual responsibility for the health of my institution and the people in it, and that I needed to be sure my own spiritual house was in some state of repair.  Moreover, it meant to me that I have to figure out ways that spirituality is something that imbues what I do as an administrator and how I understand the issues that I and others in my school or facing, and to encourage a spiritual sense in our life together, rather than assuming we should mostly draw our spiritual life from elsewhere and deplete it during the days (and too many nights) of administrative and educational labor.

I’m still, to be frank, not exactly sure what this looks like.  One small step I’ve taken is that I’ve renewed my practice of the Daily Office for Individuals and Families found in the Book of Common Prayer, my home tradition now being among that ragtag group, the Episcopalians.  The Daily Office happens throughout the day and requires only a few minutes of prayer, meditation, and reading, leaving me almost guilt-free about the time I am taking away from the latest policy memo or the letter of evaluation I should be writing.

It’s a small thing, but the pause that it entails refocused my mind and heart, and reminds me simultaneously that email is a small thing, but that even the small things we do need to be of God.  A Buddhist colleague at another institution once told me that Buddhists believed attentive states of awareness could and should be achieved in the most mundane of settings, even in the produce aisle of the grocery store.  If that’s true, it may be possible, strange as it seems to say it, to experience and live out one’s sense of spiritual vitality in the midst of a department meeting or in the reading of a policy memo.

I am not sure, right now, where else to go with this.  To be sure, I think this kind of spiritual attentiveness is not something an administrator could mandate in others, however much it could be encouraged.  That, in itself, could become destructive and oppressive.  However, I’m increasingly convinced that in the crises that are facing higher education, and that so many of us are feeling in our workaday lives, that we actually need more of this kind of thing and not less.

Along these lines, I concluded our school meeting with a meditation on Psalm 81, the evening Psalm in today’s lectionary, a privilege afforded me in my location at a faith-based institution:

Sing aloud to God our strength
shout for joy to the God of Jacob.
Raise a song, sound the tambourine,
the sweet lyre with the harp.
Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
at the full moon, on our festal day.
For it is a statute for Israel,
an ordinance of the God of Jacob.
He made it a decree in Joseph,
when he went out over the land of Egypt.

I found this passage unusually helpful today.  The people of Israel in this poem of are told to worship, not because they felt good, not because their budgets were flush, and not because they had everything that they wanted.  Indeed, quite the opposite, they are told to worship as they leave the land of Egypt….and set out in to the wilderness for forty years as the story goes, subsisting on manna, beset by enemies, and lost to uncertainty, until most of them had died in the desert.  (I also especially like this passage because although my reading of the daily office has waxed and waned over the years, and more often waned than waxed, my spiritual life has been sustained by singing and my very deep conviction with St. Francis that he who sings prays twice.)  Although the commandment to worship in the midst of difficulty seems perverse, it rings true to my sense that in the midst of difficulty, we are sustained and healed when we understand those difficulties in relation to and connection with a reality larger than ourselves.  In pausing to remember that there is no thing beyond the care of the Creator, we are sustained in the effort to care for one another.

As I say, I think we may need more of this in higher education and not less, whatever the framework of our own spirituality may be. Along with our depleted budgets, we need to be wary of our depleted spirits, since the greatest policies and the most well-conceived programs will only live as fully as the people who live in to them.

On being human: Lessons from Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Higher Education

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In a specific sense I am an unabashed advocate of what has come to be called the applied humanities, roughly and broadly speaking the effort to connect the study of the humanities to identifiable and practical social goods.  For me, in addition it includes the effort to develop humanities programs that take seriously that we are responsible (at least in significant part) for preparing our students for productive lives after college, preparation that I think really should be embedded within humanities curricula, advising, cocurricular programming, and the general ethos and rhetoric that we use to inculcate in our students what it means to be a humanist.

In several respects this conviction lies at the root of my advocacy for both digital humanities programs and for career planning and programming for liberal arts students, as different as these two areas seem to be on the surface.  I have little room left any more for the idea that “real learning” or intellectual work pulls up its skirts to avoid the taint of the marketplace or the hurly-burly of political arenas and that we demonstrate the transcendent value of what we do over and above professional programs by repeatedly demonstrating our irrelevance.  Far from diminishing the humanities, an insistence that what we do has direct and indirect, obvious and not so obvious connections to social value enhances the humanities.  It’s not just a selling point to a doubting public.  As I said yesterday, the only good idea is the idea that can be implemented.  We ought to be proud of the fact that we can show directly how our students succeed in life, how they apply the things they’ve learned, how they find practical ways of making meaningful connections between their academic study and the world of work.

At the same time, I will admit that some versions of this argument leave me cold.  It risks saying that the only thing that is really valuable about the humanities is what is practically relevant to the marketplace. I greet this effort to make Wordsworth a useful version of a management seminar with a queasy stomach.

It may sound like a nice day out in beautiful surroundings, but can walking around Lake District sites synonymous with Romantic poet William Wordsworth really offer business leaders and local entrepreneurs the crucial insights they need?

That is precisely the claim of Wordsworth expert Simon Bainbridge, professor of Romantic studies at Lancaster University, who believes the writer can be viewed as a “management guru” for the 21st century.

Since 2007, the scholar has taken students down into caves and out on canoes to the island on Grasmere once visited by Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and to places where many of the former’s greatest works were written, for what he called “practical exercises linked to the themes of Wordsworth’s poetry.”

Such walks, which also have been incorporated into development days for individual firms, are now being offered as a stand-alone option for local and social entrepreneurs at a rate of £175 ($274) a day.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/09/businesses-pay-british-professor-teach-them-about-wordsworth#ixzz236bQaECf 
Inside Higher Ed 

I do not find the insight here wrong so much as sad.  If the only reason we can get people to read Wordsworth is because he will enhance their management skills, we have somehow misplaced a priority, and misunderstood the role that being a manager ought to play in our lives and in the social and economic life of our society.  It is the apparent reduction of all things and all meaning to the marketplace that is to be objected to and which every educational institution worthy of the name ought to furiously resist, not the fact of marketplaces themselves.

I was lucky enough this summer to attend the Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education.  To be honest, I went thinking I was going to get all kinds of advice on things like how to organize projects, how to manage budgets, how to promote programs, how to supervise personnel.  There was some of that to be sure, but what struck me most was that the Institute, under the leadership of Bob Kegan, put a high, even principal, priority on the notion that managers have to first take care of who they are as human beings if they are to be the best people they can be for their colleagues and their institutions.  You have to know your own faults and weakness, your own strengths, your dreams, and you have to have the imagination and strength of mind and heart (and body) to learn to attend to the gifts, and faults and dreams and nightmares of others before or at least simultaneously with your own.  In other words, being a better manager is first and foremost about becoming a healthier, more humane, fuller human being.

The tendency of some applied humanities programs to show the relevance of poetry by showing that it has insights in to management techniques, or the relevance of philosophy because it will help you write a better project proposal, is to misplace causes and to turn the human work of another imagination (in this case Wordsworth) into an instrumental opportunity.  The reason for reading Wordsworth, first and foremost, is because Wordsworth is worth reading, and simultaneously because the encounter with Wordsworth will give you the opportunity to be a fuller, more imaginative, more thoughtful human being than you were before.

If you become that, you will have a chance to be a better manager.  But even if you don’t become a better manager, or if you lose your job because your company is overtaken by Bain capital or because students no longer choose to afford your pricey education, you will, nonetheless, be richer.

Revolution and Reformation in Higher Education: Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U

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It’s a sign of the fast changing times in higher education that I just finished reading Anya Kamenetz’s DIY U and it already feels just a little bit dated–not terribly so, since it is a kind of futurist fiction about higher education written in 2010–and I feel frustrated at the notion that great new ideas and books to consider are solving yesterdays problems by the time I get around to them.  The shelf life for this kind of thing seems to be about a year and 2010 seems like an eon ago in both publishing and in higher education.  This is too bad because I actually think there is some important ethical thinking about higher education going on in the book that gets obscured both by the speed of the author and the speed with which the educational times are leaving even this book behind.

A few examples: the term MOOC, all the rage since the new cooperative ventures of Harvard, MIT YAle, Stanford and others, is barely mentioned as such–there are a couple of notes about it, but the notion that Ivy League schools would start en-mass to give their educational content away for free isn’t given much attention in this book (indeed, institutions of higher education seem largely to be the problem rather than a part of innovative solutions in Kamenetz’s view).  Similarly, the recent scandals and shennanigans in the for-profit sector barely rate a mention in for Kamenetz, and yet their pervasiveness at the present moment casts an inespcapable pall over the idea that that the for-profits are the best or even a good way forward.  Kamenetz offers a few gestures of critique at the for-profit educational industry, but seems more enamored of the innovations they can offer.  I’m less sanguine about the creative destruction of capitalism when it comes to education, and that shades my own reception of the book.

Overall I liked this book a great deal, but I do think the rosy and largely uncritical view of the present suggests a few problems.  The book catalogues the florid variety of things going on in higher education, championing every change or possibility that’s out there on an equal plane without too much discrimination.  There are a few gestures here and there toward critical thinking about these new possibilities, but mostly things fall into the following rough equations:

Current higher education system = exclusionary + hierarchical + expensive + tradition centered = bad

Anything new = good (or at least potential good)

On some level this strikes me as a convert’s story.  Kamenetz went to Yale College, for goodness sake, not Kaplan University.  So it may be that she is a kind of Martin Luther, or at least his publicist.  One well imagines Kamenetz in the reformation glorifying every sect that came down the pike as good because it wasn’t the catholic church and was returning power to the people.  Or the believer who wakes one morning to realize she believes nothing that her parents church believes, and so is fascinated and wildly attracted to the notion that some people out there worship turnips.

Not sure if anyone actually worships turnips, but you get the point;  its difficult in the midst of a reformation to discriminate and figure out who is Martin Luther, Menno Simons, John Calvin, or William Tyndale, and who is just a the latest crackpot televangelist hocking his wares.  Moreover, it takes a lot of discrimination–and probably more distance than we can afford right now–to figure out which parts of Luther, Simons, Calvin and Tyndale were the things worth keeping and which were, well, more like the crackpot televangelists of their own day.  Are Phoenix, Kaplan, and other for profits really helping poorer students in a way that the bad and exclusive traditional university is not, or are they really fleecing most of them in the name of hope and prosperity–something a good many televangelists and other American Hucksters are well known for?

This book is not where we’ll get that kind of analysis and considered attention about what we really ought to do next, where we ought to put what weight and influence we have.  And I admit, to some degree that’s asking this book to be something it isn’t We need books like this that are more provocations and manifestos than reflective analyses.  We also have to have someone that writes the revolution from the inside with all the enthusiasms that entails.

But that means this is a fast book, subject to the strengths and weaknesses that speed provides, one weakness being a little bit of factual sloppiness and a penchant for hasty and oversimplified analysis that sells well to the journalistic ear.  For instance Kamenetz uses a recurrent metaphor of the higher educational institution being a church that the contemporary world increasingly doesn’t need, and she draws an analogy by saying that statistics show that church attendance has dropped from 40 to 25 percent.  The problem is that the article she cites actually says that regular church attendance has remained consistently at 25 percent for the past couple of decades and has declined only slightly since 1950.  Other studies peg that number at 40 percent.  No study I know of (I’m not an expert)–and certainly not the one that Kamenetz cites–suggests its dropped from 40 to 25 percent.

Another annoying instance is a recurrent statement that administrators of higher education institutions are committed to maintaining the status quo.  This is spoken like someone who never actually talked to an administrator, or perhaps is only speaking about Yale College which for the most part really doesn’t need to change.  Nearly every administrator I know of or have talked to is thinking furiously, sometimes frantically, and sometimes creatively, about how our institutions can change to meet the challenges we face and better serve the public with our various educational missions.  Unless it is the case that Kamenetz is arguing that institutions are simply for the status quo because they are institutions and unwilling to pass quietly in to the night.  But this would jejune.  It sounds good to the anti-institutional American ear, but its doubtful policy for advances in higher education.

These kinds of issues individually are small, but collectively they are annoying and to someone who is involved in the institutional side of higher education and is informed about the issues, they are glaring.  What it might mean is that the book won’t get the kind of attention in higher education institutions that it deserves.

Which is too bad since I think the book ought to be required reading for administrators, if only to debate its urgency.  What the book lacks in critical discrimination it makes up for with passionate and detailed pronouncement–a good sermon can be good for the academic soul.  For one thing, it might help us realize that the way things have always been done isn’t even the way things are being done now for an increasingly larger and larger share of the population.  Just as churches change–however slowly–in the face of historical movements and transformations, higher education is and will be changing as well.  Many of the ideas detailed in Kamenetz’s book help us see the extent to which those changes are occurring and lend new urgency to the question of what those changes mean for us in higher education.  There’s even a good deal available that could help us to think about how to best reform our own practices to meet our current highest ideals, rather than seeing this as a war of good and evil over the minds of the next generation.

I was especially drawn to Kamenetz’s notion of a community of practice–something she drew from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger:

Such communities  are defined by shared engagement in a task and shared understanding of goals and means to reach them.  In the classic progression of a community of practice, an appentice presents herself to the community and takes on simple beginning tasks at the elbow of an expert.  Everyone is participating in real-world tasks, not academic exercises., so the learner’s actions have consequences right away.  This stage is known as “legitimate peripheral participation.’  As she progresses she continuosly reinforces her learning by teaching others as well.  In a community of practice it is understood that youare just as likely to learn from the mistakes of fellow beginners, or from people with just slightly more experience, as from wizened elders.  Virtual communities of practice are thriving on the internet, among bloggers, gamers, designers and programmers.  These groups have little choice but to teach each other–information technology has been changing so fast for the past few decades that traditional schools and curricula can’t keep up.”

This last, of course, if very true.  I think the question of time for learning and play in higher education is a big problem, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago.  But even given that, I’m struck by the ways what she describes seems characteristic of the practice already of Digital Humanists as I understand the basics of this particular practice. Something like theHomer Multitext project that includes students from first year Greek classes to fourth year Greek majors is one instance of this.

Beyond this, I am struck by the ethical impulses entailed here and in much of Kamenetz’s work.  She points out that the original meanings of words we associate with universities had to do with something like this notion of community–university and college pointing to the notion of guild or community, a gathering of like-minded people pursuing a common vocation.

This ethical impulse in Kamenetz’s work is what I find most attractive and most usable.  She connects her manifesto to the work of Paul Freire and other catholic priest/intellectuals who were deeply invested in the notion of universal active and engaged education for what my church growing up called “the least of these.”  This is a notion that faculty at my faith-based institution can root themselves in and catch a vision for, and one that I think many other public-minded intellectuals could embrace regardless of the particulars of their beliefs.

What would it mean for us to take advantage of the latest innovations in technology, not because it could take save the institution money and not because it could save faculty time, but what if we could imagine it as a way of taking what we have to those who have need of it?

What if the world were really our classroom, not just the 30 students in front of us who can afford (or not afford) to be there?

What difference would it make to our practice, our politics, our thinking, teaching, and scholarship?

Celebrating the liberal arts in the marketplace (cautiously)

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A new survey of 225 employers just out emphasizes the continuing value of the liberal arts in the employment market.

More interesting, at least for those of us who got some parental grief over our college choice, was the apparent love being shown for liberal arts majors. Thirty percent of surveyed employers said they were recruiting liberal arts types, second only to the 34 percent who said they were going after engineering and computer information systems majors. Trailing were finance and accounting majors, as only 18 percent of employers said they were recruiting targets.

“The No. 1 skill that employers are looking for are communication skills and liberal arts students who take classes in writing and speaking,” said Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding and an expert on Generation Y. “They need to become good communicators in order to graduate with a liberal arts degree. Companies are looking for soft skills over hard skills now because hard skills can be learned, while soft skills need to be developed.”

via Survey On Millennial Hiring Highlights Power Of Liberal Arts – Daily Brief – Portfolio.com.

I don’t particularly like the soft skills/hard skills dichotomy.  However, this fits my general sense, blogged on before, that the hysteria over liberal arts majors lack of employability is, well, hysteria.  Something manufactured by reporters needing something to talk about.

At the same time, I think the somewhat glib and easy tone of this particular article calls for some caution.  Digging in to the statistics provided even in the summary suggests that liberal arts majors need to be supplementing their education with concrete experiences and coursework that will provide a broad panoply of skills and abilities.  50% of employers, for instance, say they are looking for students who held leadership positions on campus, a stat before which even engineers and computer scientist but kneel in obeisance.  Similarly, nearly 69% say they are looking for coursework relevant to the position you are pursuing.  My general sense is you can sell you Shakespeare course to a lot of employers, but it might be helpful if you sold Shakespeare along side the website you built for the course or alongside the three courses you took in computer programming.

Generally speaking, then, I think these statistics confirm the ideas propounded by the Rethinking Success conference in suggesting that students really need to be developing themselves as T-shaped candidates for positions, broad and deep, with a variety of skills and experiences to draw on and some level of expertise that has been, preferably, demonstrated through experiences like internships or project-based creativity.

Speaking of Rethinking Success, the entire website is now up with all the relevant videos.  The session with Philip Gardner from Michigan State is embedded below.  It was Gardner who impressed me by his emphasis that students need to realize that they either need to be liberal arts students with technical skills or technical students with liberal arts skills if they are going to have a chance in the current job market.