As the dean of humanities in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, Jeffrey Cohen knows better than most the value of humanities training.
How it helps prepare students for a variety of careers.
How it teaches students to have empathy and to be good listeners.
How it gives students a worldview that helps them connect with others.
Whether a student is interested in medicine, tech, big business — really, anything — Cohen said, humanities training will help them excel at their jobs.
Question: Why do you believe a humanities degree will help students as they embark on their careers, no matter the field they’re in?
Answer: It’s funny. These days students think that if they get a certain degree, they’ll get a job. The heavens will open and all will be clear, and all will work out. In fact, most students have to prepare themselves for a job market they don’t even know. In some ways, there’s no use training yourself for a specific job. What you really want is a wide training that prepares you to be ready to go for whatever comes down the line.
I was thinking about this recently with the number of jobs in (artificial intelligence). These were not even a possibility a few years ago, but many of our humanities majors fit seamlessly in to the AI field because they’re ready to go because of their deep training in language and because their wide interdisciplinary training made it so that jobs that didn’t exist when they got their degrees were there for them.
Q: Is that what people maybe don’t understand, that a humanities degree can lead you down so many different career paths?
A: When I was a kid, I used to think that you had to choose a job and then work your entire life towards it. I think what happens is you think there is one job out there and you’ll spend your life at that job. That isn’t true. In fact, most people these days should plan on between eight and 12 different jobs, and those different jobs are their career. So, really, the question to ask is what kind of training can make it so that I’m capable of going from job to job and well equipped with skills.
I think humanities are really well situated to enable anyone to get the skills they need for a shifting career landscape.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because among the things that we emphasize in the humanities are things like how to write well, how to present well, how to make good arguments, how to do good research, how to be a good collaborator, how to be a visionary, how to think of the world at its best and move toward that, and how to live a good life.
I think that's a question we don't ask enough, right? We focus so much on how to live a life where we have enough resources. How do we live a really good and satisfying life? Well, philosophers have answers to those kinds of questions.
Q: Can you give a couple of examples of how humanities training has helped people in their careers?
A: One of my favorite students is Phillip Pipkins. Phillip came here not knowing what to do. He was a first-generation student raised by a single mom. Phillip found in film and media studies, which is one of our humanities disciplines, a way of thinking about framing stories and being able to ask questions and explore the world. He’s gone through a series of careers. Most recently, he is a venture capitalist. If you ask Phillip, what is it about your humanities training that allowed you to succeed, he would say it’s the ability to tell a story. He can tell a compelling story and get people to buy into the ventures that he needs them to buy into.
Another person I think about a lot is Amanda Ventura. Amanda is now a public affairs manager at Waymo. There were no robot-driven cars when she was an English major. But she was well equipped to move into a company that needed somebody who could use the skills that she learned as an English major, put them into practice and really thrive in a competitive world.
Q: Can you explain how humanities training could help someone entering, say, the medical field?
A: One of the pillars of the new ASU medical school is a grounding in humanities, and humanities faculty are helping to build the curriculum for future doctors who will also be engineers. Why do they need humanities? Being able to connect with people is a humanities-based skill.
The other thing I’ll say is that humanities is built on expanding your world. Someone who studies the humanities does serious work in the study of a culture that isn’t your own. You’ll learn a language that isn’t the language you grew up with. Your horizons will broaden as a result.
Q: Why do you think there’s a perception that a humanities degree isn’t worth what it once was?
A: I think at this moment, we’ve made a grave mistake, which is to think that students need to study in a discipline that’s aligned with one job. There’s a way in which humanities are old-fashioned. They come from the past and they teach us to regard deeply everything that humans have done and dreamt for centuries. To be in touch with the ways in which we’ve been the same cultures and species, and the ways in which we’ve differed. I think that opens up the mind and makes things possible.
Another important humanities skill is world-building. By world-building, what we really mean is being able to imagine the world differently configured than the one that we seem to receive. And to think about a more just version of that world, a world where more things are possible for more people.
Q: It sounds like no matter what you study in terms of a degree, there’s value in humanities training because it makes you a more well-rounded person.
A: It’s important to have this knowledge. No matter what you’re studying, whether it’s engineering or biological science or sociology, you name it, you will gain something by coming into a humanities class. In fact, you’ll find a community. I’ll even predict that you’ll have a class that you will remember the rest of your life.