Burned at the Stake: How Do We Determine the Value of the Humanities?

E(i)ditorial — November 2015

If you’re the kind of person who reads Eidolon — or the internet in general — you’re probably aware that the humanities are on life support, or dead, or a zombie. In fact, you’re probably sick of reading essays about how the humanities are in crisis. Don’t blame the humanists for that outpouring— working through difficult conceptual problems via essay is what we do best. And there’s little doubt that we do, in fact, have a problem. Shrinking enrollments in humanities classes and undergrad majors have led to fewer positions, a grim job market, even axed departments.

Nobody seems to see the value in a humanities degree anymore, and make no mistake — determinations of value are a crucial underlying cause of this crisis. When students have to pay astronomical tuition and leave college burdened with crushing student loan debt, it’s in their best interest to look at their degree as a value proposition. And the most valuable degrees, we’re told, fall into two categories: those that have clear career prospects, like marketing, and those that have been deemed objectively valuable, especially those in STEM fields.

There are a number of problems with that logic, but there are just as many problems with the argumentative strategies humanities supporters have used to attempt to justify their own existence. At its heart, this is an issue about how we define what value means and then assign it to different kinds of intellectual work. Or, to put it differently, what’s at stake in studying the humanities, or any other discipline?

The biggest flaw in the many recent defenses of the humanities, from my perspective, is that they fail to call into question the terms of the debate. STEM graduates make more money than humanities graduates? Well, a humanities degree still has a good ROI, and no matter what Marco Rubio thinks, philosophers typically make more money than welders. Science leads to valuable research that can improve people’s lives? Well, so do the humanities.

These responses ignore the nature of the problem. According to a recent PEW study, undergrads with Classics degrees typically earn $38K as a starting salary and $76K after 15 years. An undergrad with an engineering degree in computer science will earn $58K out of college, rising to about $100K in 15 years. That’s a significant difference — about $300K over 15 years. But the humanities student is still going to make enough money over the course of their career to justify the cost of their degree.

Furthermore, even the comparatively better-off computer scientist could take well over a decade to pay off their student loan debt. As I write this, the collegedebt.com ticker is at $1.367 trillion. Student debt is a problem that needs to be solved. Who will be doing that solving? Probably a group of people who studied the social sciences in college, including economics and public policy. The social sciences aren’t the humanities, but they aren’t really regarded as STEM disciplines, either.

And that hypothetical computer programmer in the previous paragraph? I used a gender neutral ‘they’ to describe them, but probabilistically speaking, that person will be male. Maybe he’ll go seek a job in Silicon Valley, where, as the saying goes, “engineers are king.” I live in Palo Alto, and almost every member of my family works in tech, so I know there’s a lot of amazing innovation and opportunity out here. I also know that Silicon Valley is a place that overwhelmingly excludes women and minorities and uses the rhetoric of meritocracy while defining “merit” as being a young white male. That rhetoric is begging to be analyzed, deconstructed, and — hopefully — shifted. A background in the humanities isn’t a requirement for deconstructing rhetoric, but it certainly helps.

And therein lies the value of the humanities. A definition of value that’s determined only financially will never really explain why the humanities are important. But that very process of determining what’s important is where humanists excel. The best thinkpieces about the value of the humanities, in a way, justify their own existence by showing the importance of good writing, structural analysis, and argumentation. We can take the words that have been thrown at us — ‘irrelevant’, ‘useless’, ‘impractical’ — and turn their meanings on their heads. Our ability to theorize is our greatest asset.

Of course, that’s also where many of us falter. When I was a graduate student, I saw that many of us struggled to explain the value even of our individual projects, let alone our broader goals. Last month I wrote about how few essays have really good opening sentences, but while many papers begin with platitudes, their last few paragraphs can be even more concerning. That’s where the scholar usually tries to construct what’s “at stake” in their work. It’s often a ham-handed, post hoc attempt to justify the piece of scholarship the reader has just gotten through. That reader is usually also a scholar in the same field, and most readers outside the field — if they could even manage to reach the end of the article! — wouldn’t find the author’s assessment of what’s at stake very compelling.

When I was writing my dissertation, one of my advisors constantly hounded me about the value of my work. Every time I sent her something, she’d ask me, “What’s at stake here?” For graduate students, I think those are four of the most frightening words in the English language (along with “how’s that chapter coming?” and “are you almost finished?” and “how’s the job market?”)

Faced with the task of justifying our work’s existence, students tend to lean either towards the excessively specific (“My dissertation reconsiders the relationship between Euripides and Aristophanes in the period between 425 BCE and 405 BCE”) and the grandiose (“I will revolutionize our understanding of artistic collaboration”). Learning how to say what’s at stake in a compelling way is a skill that takes practice. But it’s one humanists have to master if we want to turn the tide of rhetoric describing our work as “useless.”

I don’t know if, or how, declining enrollment can be fixed. Thinkpieces probably won’t do the trick, at least not alone. And perhaps I’m not even qualified to talk about it, because I’m not part of an academic department and I haven’t seen the decline. If anything, as part of the Paideia Institute, I’ve seen astronomical growth. Every year, more and more undergraduates take part in the Institute’s programming to find a meaningful educational experience. But that’s why figuring out what’s meaningful is such an essential task.

This month, Eidolon published seven articles:

Michael Goyette used the dysfunctional relationship between Hercules and his lethal weapons to advocate for better gun control in Do Arrows Kill People or Does Hercules Kill People?
John Byron Kuhner analyzed the fraudulent classical references in Bob Dylan’s memoir in Tangled Up In Thucydides
Dan-el Padilla Peralta compared anti-immigrant sentiment in Ancient Rome and the Age of Donald Trump in a pair of articles, Barbarians Inside the Gate Part 1 & Part 2
Angele Rosenberg explored the grooming of body hair as a site of masculine self-definition in Emanscapation: Between the Public and the Pubic in Ancient Greece
Johanna Hanink reviewed Bryan Doerries’ Theater of War as a way of connecting the Ancient Greeks to American soldiers through shared traumatic experiences in Staging Greek Trauma
James Romm reviewed a new translation of Seneca’s letters and delved into the fascinating and paradoxical life of a the Stoic statesman in The Part-Time Stoic

These topics range from the deeply meaningful to the humorous and light. But if we’re not enjoying studying the humanities, maybe it really doesn’t have value.

Happy reading!

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Read more of her work here.