"The Myth of the Useless Humanist" vs "Humanities myths, busted"

a letter to colleagues

Author

Jeffrey Cohen
August 16, 2025

Below you’ll find an expanded, somewhat fuller version of a note I sent yesterday to ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Humanities faculty and staff (all 668 of them!) My hope was to frame the start of the Fall 25 semester in affirmative terms despite our inescapably dire times, especially in higher education as institution after institution lets down their communities.

In the most recent edition of the newsletter Pasts Imperfect (8.14.25), Dr. Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, associate professor of Classical Studies at Duke University, offers some incisive thoughts on the deliberate shrinking of humanities programs at universities and colleges (many of them wealthy). She traces two deceptive narratives often deployed to justify such reductions: budgetary necessity in the face of financial challenge and disciplinary inutility to student career success. These are dreary, tiresome, and patently wrong approaches to framing the humanities. At their worst, arguments from austerity (bang for the buck) and usefulness (direct linkage of majors to specific professional careers) culminate in outcomes like West Virginia University eliminating their department of world languages entirely, thereby disallowing their students the pleasure and rewards of learning languages and cultures not their own (in the end, WVU preserved a few language study opportunities including Spanish and Chinese). Recent news stories suggest other universities are treading a path to narrowed futures.

screen capture from Eberly College, WVU, on diminished language access as “academic transformation”

As Ginsberg makes amply and eloquently clear, both these arguments aimed at reducing access to humanities study for students are false. Using UCLA as a test case, Robert Watson wrote in 2010 “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit,” observing that in general humanities programs more than earn the tuition that supports the salaries of their faculty and staff:

So, the answer to “Who’s going to pay the salary of the English department?” is that the English department at UCLA earns its own salary and more, through the fees paid by its students—profits that will only grow with the increase in student fees … Because that evidence runs up against the widespread myth that other units and departments subsidize the humanities, and up against such well-entrenched forces within the university, it is regularly ignored or even suppressed. In the 1990s, UCLA invested huge amounts of money setting up Responsibility Centered Management, an accounting system eventually used at many universities to evaluate all the real costs of different units and the revenue they actually produce. The goal was to make budgeting fair and transparent. However, according to administrators then prominently involved in the process, when the initial run of those intricate spreadsheets showed that the College of Letters and Science was the most efficient user and producer of money, and the health sciences were far less efficient, RCM was abandoned.

(Robert Watson)

Likewise, when it comes to humanities majors and careers, the myth of the unemployed major in English (or Philosophy or Religious Studies or Spanish or what have you) is easy to puncture through actual data:

We have long had data to debunk the idea that STEM degrees produce better job prospects. Recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York  show that those who major in philosophy, art history, or languages are less likely to face unemployment than majors in, for example, computer engineering, physics, chemistry, or computer science. Humanists also tend to be happier with their jobs. Want to talk salaries? While initially humanists may make less, in the long run humanities students keep pace with or outpace degree holders in so-called “professional” subjects where pay increases often flatten in the first decade of employment. A much lauded survey of 318 major US employers indicated overwhelmingly (93%) that field-specific knowledge was less important than broad humanistic competencies. A self-study done by Google showed that among the qualities defining Google’s top employees, STEM expertise was last. Another revealed that the company’s most important new ideas had come from “B-Teams” comprised of employees who have all those humanistic skills.

(Lauren Donovan Ginsberg)

Admittedly, universities and college faculty could be more vocal in making these facts known. I routinely teach a required career class for English majors called “Your Degree in the World.” The course — my all time favorite to teach — has the amazing outcome of students being less certain of what they will do post graduation but much happier to live in that uncertainty, so confident are they that they possess the agency to shape a multiplicity of satisfying futures for themselves. Integral to the success of this class is bringing alumni both young as well as seasoned back to speak with my sophomores and juniors: they will believe these graduates of their programs more than me, and I don’t blame them! There is something riveting about having an alumni speak about the relation between her work as an English major leading to her present employment at a company that designed and manages self driving cars. We’ve redesigned our humanities webpages to ensure that students know exactly what career possibilities they will have if they study what they love. We’ve integrated an internship coordinator into the Department of English and made internships mandatory for some our degrees (like the new trans-humanities BA in Culture, Technology and Environment). We’re fortunate to have a skilled and humane staff member in this position who assists students in capturing the skills they’ve learned on their resumes and connecting them to philanthropic funding we’ve been able to raise so that students can take unpaid internships without having to forego a wage deficit (we’re an access based, minority serving institution and most of our students need to work to be in school). We’ve been tracking the success of the internship program and so know that 92% of the hundreds of students who have passed through graduate with a job in hand.

I sometimes get poked fun at by my colleagues for my relentlessness on insisting that humanities majors get jobs — because (I will say it again) students who major in English, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, writing, languages are ready for a wide diversity of positions, not trained for a single one that may not exist when they graduate! But is the measure of success someone's starting salary or being well equipped to live a satisfying life? The mere accumulation of wealth seems to me far less important than one's ability to foster community, assert agency, possess a sense of one's place in the world (and of how very wide that the world is). Now is the time we need the humanities to flourish.

To that end, and in the hope of counter-example for some of our institutional peers, we recently updated the cross-ASU Humanities website to reflect that here we are strongly against narratives of austerity and inutility. The expansive new pages, we hope, convey that being at the forefront of humanities study is essential to a university with integrity; possibilities for studying with renowned humanities faculty ought to be multiplied not reduced; and humanities study provides everything our students need to build a rewarding career, a satisfying life and a better world. Here’s the new website, with a section entitled “Humanities myths, busted”:

Because of the hard work of the humanities faculty since we began an effort at rebranding and revitalizing our endeavors in 2018, the myths that Ginsberg cites have never been able to take root in ASU’s soil. I’m grateful for everything our faculty and staff have done to ensure that our community is valued by both the university administration and the Arizona Board of Regents. I also take it as a good omen that ASU possesses pan-university websites only for Humanities, Health, and Science: we’ve long been blazing a trail.  

If you are interested in these efforts, you’ll find a good article on this work to foreground humanities excellence across the university in this recent ASU News story:

I have also asked colleagues and friends to share this work across their networks. We need to offer counter-narratives to the diminishments that some of our sibling institutions are undertaking, and equip our colleagues elsewhere with evidence that the myths being deployed against our disciplines are not based in fact. Having just met this week with the Early Start cohort of our first year Humanities students this week, I can tell you that they are thrilled to be in our classes, overjoyed to be humanities majors, and loving the idea of spending the next four years studying Japanese; Film and Media Studies; Morality, Politics and Law (a popular philosophy concentration); Creative Writing; Literature; Writing, Rhetorics and Literacies; Spanish; Linguistics; History (to name a few of the majors I met). Spending time with them was a reminder yet again that when we cultivate learners like these, the future of the humanities must be bright.

A little footnote on budget models. The centralized tuition system described by Ginsberg is true in many institutions but does not obtain in that precise form at ASU, which tends to be more decentralized in order to incentivize entrepreneurship (innovation only works when a community’s efforts have direct and tangible resource rewards). I have no doubt that we are going to be fiscally tight in the years ahead across the university, including the humanities, for a variety of reasons obvious to anyone who reads the news. Yet we have also been through some very tough years in the past without reducing our ambitions and mission, and so I am confident that we will do so again, together.