Not How To Defend The Liberal Arts
A Quick Response to Lane Wallace

Over at Sullivan's digs, Lane Wallace articulates a defense of the liberal arts with which I largely disagree. She begins with the following, which describes an apparent challenge for the humanities:

A recent New York Times article noted that Humanities now account for only 8% of all college degrees, and that proponents are having to work harder than ever to justify the worth of a humanities, or liberal arts, course of study. The article quotes Anthony T. Kronman, a Yale law professor, as saying, reluctantly, that the essence of a humanities education may become "a great luxury that many cannot afford."

Wallace responds by saying that she didn't recognize the value of her degree at Brown, but while working in a cardboard box factory:

In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn't matter what I majored in. It didn't even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, "Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again." A piece of paper that was proof to any potential future employer that I could stick with a project and complete it successfully, even if parts of it weren't all that much fun. A piece of paper that said I had learned how to process an overload of information, prioritize, sort through it intelligently, and distill all that into a coherent end product ... all while coping with stress and deadlines without imploding.

But this doesn't give us a defense of the humanities, really. This is, if anything, a defense of getting a college degree, plus the claim that it doesn't matter what it's in. But though all college degrees may be good, some may be better than others, and this might leave the humanities still in need of a defense. After all, why major in English if you can major in physics instead? The value of the latter is beyond reproach...but what can we say in defense of the former?

Wallace gets much of the answer right (IMHO) when she says that you should study what you're passionate about...though she asserts this on the practical grounds that you'll do better if you like what you're studying. I'd rather say: study what you are passionate about because that's what college is for--but I won't really try to defend that position here. Your time at college is supposed to be a purely (or at least largely) intellectual endeavor...sometimes it's the only purely intellectual endeavor in which people engage in their entire lives. But it's less and less an intellectual endeavor and more and more a vocational one...leaving many people with no purely or perhaps even largely intellectual undertakings anywhere in their lives. The businessification and vocationalization of the university may be a very serious error indeed...but that's a bigger topic for a longer essay.

Back to the point about majors: it does matter what you study. It matters very much.

There is all the difference in the world between/among majors. Of course there are smart people and rigorous classes in every discipline, and their opposites in every one. And I think students should take this into account when choosing a major. By all means, study what you're passionate about...but don't turn a blind eye to the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen subject.

These numbers tell you some very important things about how challenging majors tend to be, and how well you can expect them to hone your mind if you take up their study.

I used to teach the LSAT, and I can attest to the fact that it is (despite what test-prep services will tell you) a beautifully-constructed test, and not a bad measure of reasoning abilities. If you really are torn between, say, majoring in education and majoring in math, you ought to take into account the fact that education majors average 8.7 percentage points below the mean on the LSAT while math majors average 12.8 percentage points above the mean. And if you're trying to choose between, say, econ and sociology or philosophy and management, you also ought to think about these scores (and about the corresponding GRE and GMAT scores). (Of course we're not sure which way the causal arrow goes here...but the smart guess seems to be that some majors both attract smarter students and are better at sharpening students' minds.)

It is no secret in academia that there are enormous differences among the disciplines. To the extent that you are interested in honing your mind, there are certain disciplines to favor and certain ones to be wary of. If you're passionate about one of the less-challenging disciplines, you should go into it recognizing that you will have to work harder for roughly the same intellectual results that you might gain from, say, chemistry.

Again: your major matters.

But Wallace does suggest some specific reasons in favor of a humanities education:

In an increasingly global economy and world, more than just technical skill is required. Far more challenging is the ability to work with a multitude of viewpoints and cultures. And the liberal arts are particularly good at teaching how different arguments on the same point can be equally valid, depending on what presumptions or values you bring to the subject. The liberal arts canvas is painted not in reassuring black-and-white tones, but in maddening shades of gray.

What's the "right" solution to the conflict in Sudan? What was Shakespeare's most important work and why? Was John Locke right in his arguments about personal property? Get comfortable with the ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education, and you're far better equipped to face the ambiguities and differing viewpoints in a complex, global world. (The late David Foster Wallace expanded on this point in his acclaimed 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, which, if you missed it at the time, is worth taking the time to read.)

Here I think that Wallace points to one of the weaknesses of the humanities, not one of its strengths. Outside of philosophy and history, anyway, there seems to be entirely too much emphasis on ambiguities and shades of gray (the "scare quotes" around 'right' are almost mandatory there...). The triumph of postmodernism, cultural studies and the like has left many humanities disciplines swimming in a sea of murky thinking and knee-jerk relativism. Theoretically, learning to deal with ambiguity and unclarity could be a good thing...but currently in many of the humanities you're at least as likely to drown in it rather than learn to deal with it. Now (to point back toward an earlier point) the humanities in general seem to be a little bit better than average for honing the mind. So if you're passionate about one of them, there's nothing on that front to hold you back. You should, however, be wary of trendier, lit-crittier departments and boutique majors revolving around various types of oppression and Continental pseudo-sciences...but the more respectable bits of the humanities are plenty rigorous and respectable, and the bits that aren't floundering in the postmodernist/cultural studies swamp may very well teach you do deal with--and not drown in--ambiguity.

But, penultimately, do the humanities really face that much of a challenge? Perhaps one thing to remember here is that few people ever decdicated themselves to the humanities. A higher percentage of college students used to do so, but a smaller percentage of the populace went to college. We've pushed for a system in which more people attend university...but most of the students coming in don't really have many overtly intellectual goals; they want to party when they're there and they want to make money when they get out. So it's no surprise that they mostly gravitate toward the business major--a fairly undemanding major that won't interfere too much with their drinking schedules, and that seems to be directly connected to making money after graduation. (Surveys show that of the three major types of reasons for going to college--(1) vocational, (2) social and (3) intellectual--that's how they are ranked in order of importance by incoming freshmen). So perhaps it's true that a humanities major is a luxury...or at least rare...and perhaps it's always been so. Maybe there's no real problem here at all.

Though, perhaps what the humanities should emphasize is that--in terms of training students' minds and helping them to acquire actual skills--students would be better off studying virtually any of the humanities than they would studying business. Perhaps the real luxuries are the less-demanding business majors. It may very well be that a history major and a business minor will leave you better-prepared for a non-mediocre career in business than a buisness major and a history minor...or, God forbid, a marketing major and a management minor.