For a moment, best-selling novelist Julia Alvarez sounded abashed. She was being interviewed by National Public Radio’s Scott Simon on April 4, 2020, about her new novel, Afterlife.
“I’ve got to say this, too, Scott, it feels kind of weird to be talking about my novel, and somehow promoting it, at a time like this,” she explained. “I feel like it just doesn’t quite feel right, because, you know, it’s not business as usual.”
“But you know,” Simon responded, “reading your novel this week gave me great pleasure. I think there’s no reason for you to feel that there’s something unusual in this. You’ve created a splendid work of art that can give comfort to people now, and I’m glad you can talk about it. I think people need to hear that, too.”
This brief exchange almost perfectly encapsulates the public insecurity many felt about discussing the value of the humanities in a moment of global medical calamity. To discuss fiction, poetry, painting and music under the shadow of mass death threatened to make discussants appear dilettantish at best, and insensitive snobs at worst.
But that perception did not match reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. We all read books, found new music to enjoy, watched TV and streaming movies, and communicated widely about how the humanities provided succor and catharsis during a time of enormous emotional stress. Our social media feeds and group texts throughout 2020 and 2021 were filled with recommendations to others about the movies, books and music we enjoyed.
But today, those conversations are largely forgotten. Public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic now revolves around public health decision-making, scientific arguments about vaccines and the origins of the virus, and other debatable propositions. Remembrance of what actually happened—that is, our daily habits and activities under lockdown—is rarely chronicled in detail. Everyone wants to move on.
Yet such intentional amnesia obscures the ways the humanities got us through those difficult months.
The truth is the humanities—that is, the use of creativity and imagination, in questioning the human condition—remained absolutely central to our collective survival. The evidence, though difficult to measure in quantitative metrics, exists in the atmospheric ways that humanities media continually provided relief and distraction when scientific answers were still unknown and we all felt threatened by an unknown future.
With the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic upon us, we are undoubtedly going to hear much about Operation Warp Speed, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other scientific and medical legacies.
We’ll hear much less about the humanities and the role they played.
The problem is we’re loath to label Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and other technological marvels as humanities media. Instead, we talk about how new technologies distract, mislead and misinform us. We do not remember how we reached for them in the search for comfort in a time of true existential crisis, and the vital role they played in social cohesion.
There’s been a lot written about the crisis in the humanities. There’s been far less written about the humanities during a crisis. And that’s a mistake, because as we move further past 2020–2021, we will all likely forget when the power and vitality of the creative arts helped keep us grounded, sane, curious and, if necessary, distracted.
The very invisibility today of what occurred then needs to be illuminated. Even at the time—as evidenced by Julia Alvarez’s reservations about talking about her novel—it seemed almost embarrassing to celebrate witty scenes from Broadway plays, to choreograph interpretative dances or jot down lines of poetic observation. Yet moments of sublime, thoughtful, philosophical and engaging artistry arose everywhere.
How many people today recall the brilliant daily updates provided by Dr. Craig Smith, the chief of surgery at Columbia University Irving Medical Center? Smith continually quoted Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot and others for inspiration in his daily updates. The Wall Street Journal labeled Smith “the pandemic’s most powerful writer” while noting the “elegant, almost poetic” prose of his daily dispatches. Smith often relied on poetry to express the inexpressible, and many Americans eagerly read his work—not just to be informed, but to also be comforted emotionally. Smith understood the enormity of the existential confrontation that faced every American in 2020, and so employed his knowledge of the humanities to help others comprehend the incomprehensible. His artistry as a writer provided an enormous public service.
That’s precisely what Scott Simon was telling Julia Alvarez. She had nothing to apologize for, and, in fact, her artistic achievement in an unprecedented era of doubt, anxiety and uncertainty was a gift that would be gratefully received and appreciated.
A major problem with the humanities is that so much of its success will always remain invisible to the audiences that consume it. We are primed to take for granted the artistic process, now that AI can mimic it. History videos and podcasts remain available anytime, and ebooks can be downloaded so easily. We can see the Mona Lisa at any moment. Many of the world’s greatest artworks, and the most beautiful song performances, can be found instantly. It’s a miracle unimaginable to earlier generations, but it also paradoxically devalues the time, effort and creativity that inspired such beauty.
Debates about how to make the humanities more visible and relevant arise often. Some argue that the humanities should emphasize the analytics and metrics concerning job development and career preparation, or comparative salary growth over the course of a career. Others counsel the embrace of new avenues of promotion and marketing. But the first step needs to be simple recognition. We must make immediately clear—without obfuscatory language or elevated rhetoric—the impact of the humanities in the present and in the near past.
When the pandemic threatened the stability of the world, the answers people sought were primarily medical and scientific. But intertwined with anger and impatience in that moment was a yearning for meaning far more spiritual than empirical. As our regular routines of time and space became unsettled, and communication and interactivity more ambiguous, the need to explore the essence of what it means to be human naturally arose. People became creative, trying out new baking recipes, teaching themselves to play guitar or piano, or drawing sketches or drafting poetry. This was not simple escapism—it was engagement with our imaginations.
We also wondered about the future of humankind. We might not have called our ruminations, prayers, thoughtfulness, curiosity and questioning “philosophy,” but that’s what we were practicing. Those moments got many of us through when daily anxiety threatened existential desperation.
That the humanities sustained us through the pandemic is undeniable. The evidence is everywhere: We just need to see it, remember it and celebrate it. When a global primal moment of fear exploded—seemingly out of nowhere—to take control over our lives, it was fiction, movies, poetry, art, philosophy and music that moved us forward into the future. It was not solely the vaccines.
That’s history. And now it’s memory, too. The key question is whether humanities scholars understand these great achievements and will make them more widely known.
Michael J. Socolow is a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine and formerly served as director of U Maine’s McGillicuddy Humanities Center from 2020 to 2022.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Olivia Howe was hesitant at first to add French to her major in finance at the University of Arizona, fearing that it wouldn’t be very useful in the labor market.
Then her language skills helped her land a job at the multinational technology company Siemens, which will be waiting for her when she graduates this spring.
“The reason I got the job is because of my French. I didn’t see it as a practical choice, but now I do,” said Howe, who, to communicate with colleagues and clients, also plans to take up German. “The humanities taught me I could do it.”
The simple message that majoring in the humanities pays off is being pushed aggressively by this university and a handful of others; they hope to reverse decades of plummeting enrollment in subjects that teach skills employers say they need from graduates but aren’t getting.
The University of Arizona campus. The university is among a handful of higher education institutions taking steps to revive humanities enrollments. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs.
That’s an uncharacteristic role for humanities professors, who have tended to resist suggestions that it’s their role to ready students for the workforce.
But it’s become an existential one.
Nationwide, between 2012 and 2022 the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in the humanities — English, history, languages, literature, philosophy and related subjects — fell 24 percent, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It’s now below 200,000 for the first time in more than two decades.
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In response, universities and colleges nationwide have started eliminating humanities departments and laying off humanities faculty as policymakers, parents and administrators put a premium on highly specialized subjects they believe lead more directly to jobs.
Efforts to revitalize humanities enrollment are widely scattered, however, with surprisingly few examples like Arizona’s, and no guarantee of widespread success.
“What we are up against is the constant negative storytelling about how the humanities are useless,” said Alain-Philippe Durand, dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities and a professor of French.
Higher education has largely struggled to counteract this. Presidents and deans use vague arguments that the humanities impart knowledge and create citizens of the world, when what tuition-paying consumers want to know is what they’ll get for their money and how they’ll repay their student loan debt.
Alain-Philippe Durand is dean of humanities at the University of Arizona, where the number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities is up 76 percent since 2018. “What we are up against is the constant negative storytelling about how the humanities are useless,” he says. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
“When you tell them we are teaching the life of the mind, they laugh at you,” Durand said over lunch at the student center.
“You have people saying, ‘Do we really need this?’ ” he said. “It should be the opposite: ‘Hey, did you know that in the College of Humanities we teach some of the most in-demand skills in the job market?’ ”
Durand’s department went so far as to put that declaration on a billboard on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, conveniently near the campus of rival Arizona State University. “Humanities=Jobs,” it said, with the college’s web address. Durand keeps a model of it on a shelf in his office.
The skills he’s talking about include how to communicate effectively, think critically, work in teams and be able to figure out a way to solve complex problems outside of a particular area of expertise. Employers say they want all of those but aren’t getting them from graduates who major in narrower fields.
Eight out of 10 executives and hiring managers say it’s very or somewhat important that students emerge from college with these kinds of skills, according to a survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Yet half said, in a separate survey by the Business-Higher Education Forum, that graduates are showing up without them, and that the problem is getting worse.
Along with Arizona, Virginia Tech is among a small group of universities taking steps to change the conversation about the humanities. A surprising number are technology-focused.
These include the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has also started drawing a connection between the humanities and good jobs at high pay. That has helped boost undergraduate and graduate enrollment in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts by 58 percent since 2019, to 1,884 students in 2023 — the most recent period for which the figure is available.
Before then, “we were doing almost nothing to explain the value of the humanities,” said Richard Utz, interim dean. That’s important at a technological institute, he said. “So we started to connect each and every thing we do with the values that these kinds of skills have for [students’] career preparation.”
A medievalist, Utz uses the example of assigning his students 15th-century Robin Hood ballads. “They read something that is entirely alien to them, that is in late medieval English, so they’re completely out of their comfort zone,” he said. Then they split into groups and consider the material from various perspectives. It makes them the kind of future workers “who are versatile enough to look at a situation from different points of view.”
To him, Utz said, “the future of the humanities is not being hermetically sealed off, as in, ‘You’re over there and we’re over here.’ It’s making clear that the skills of engineers and computer scientists increase if you include the arts, the humanities, the social sciences.”
That’s also the idea behind a program in French for medical professionals at Washington University in St. Louis, which recruits students who took French in high school but may not have continued. For some, it leads to studying in Nice and interning at a hospital there, an unusual opportunity for undergraduates.
“These students, when they come back to the United States, they are accepted in the best medical schools because their dossiers are at the top of the pile,” said Lionel Cuillé, a professor of French who spearheads the initiative. “Those pre-meds take French because it is a clear added value to their first major.”
The participants in the humanities-focused executive education program at Virginia Tech — in the first two years, they’ve come from Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Zillow and other companies — study history, philosophy, religion, classics, literature and the arts. They use these to consider questions about and qualities of leadership and see how what they learn can be applied to technology trends including data privacy and artificial intelligence.
University of Arizona humanities dean Alain-Philippe Durand keeps a model of a billboard in his office that the department put up on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, near the campus of rival Arizona State, to promote the practical benefits of the humanities.
“What I was observing around me in Silicon Valley and more generally was a world that was missing that story,” said Virginia Tech’s Jaitly, a former technology entrepreneur and founder of a venture capital firm whose own undergraduate degree was in history. “The superpowers of the future emanate from the humanities: introspection and imagination, storytelling and story-listening, critical thinking.”
He purposely picked “leadership” instead of “humanities” for the name of the program, he said. “To me, ‘leadership’ is a high-impact word to show and not tell the power of the humanities.”
With a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Emory University is helping faculty members redesign humanities courses to emphasize their relevance, said Barbara Krauthamer, dean of its College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re not denying the reality of career readiness, of real-world application and of the context of the world we live in now, which is increasingly technological and changing rapidly,” Krauthamer said.
Central Michigan University in the fall began to offer a bachelor’s degree modeled on the University of Arizona’s, in “public and applied liberal arts.” It was added after the number of incoming students there who listed their intended majors as English, humanities and foreign languages fell from 179 in 2019 to zero in 2022 and 2023, according to university figures.
That trend “has a lot to do with the fact that even at a regional public [university], you need to know how you’re going to pay the bills after you’re done,” said Christi Brookes, assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. “It’s a question we’ve ignored.”
The new degree connects humanities courses with the “applied fields” of entrepreneurship and environmental studies. Future combinations are planned with fashion and game design.
The traditional argument for the humanities, Brookes said, has been, “ ‘Well, it will make you a better citizen and person.’ But what was left out was, ‘What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?’ What we’re trying to do is say, ‘Here’s the connection.’ ”
Another way some universities are doing that is by showcasing the successes of former humanities students.
The liberal arts college at Georgia Tech serves up a litany of alumni success stories on its website. Arizona’s College of Humanities has produced a video of graduate testimonials; it features a senior counsel at Netflix, a principal investigator for the first NASA mission to return rock samples from an asteroid, the head of corporate strategy at the meal-delivery service Blue Apron, a diplomat, a Broadway actor and Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.
Judd Ruggill, head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. When parents see examples of humanities graduates in high-profile jobs, “you can see [them] visibly relaxing,” Ruggill says. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
When they see examples like these, “You can see the parents visibly relaxing,” said Judd Ruggill, head of Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities.
The video is part of a relentless recruiting effort here, which ranges from a pop-up “humanities cafe” on the campus mall where faculty and advisers mingle with prospective majors to a mandatory two-day recruitment workshop training graduate teaching assistants to pick out humanities prospects among the students in required general-education courses. “Talent-spotting,” the college calls it.
“I think they know we need that push,” said senior Liliana Quiroz, who added Italian to her anthropology major after being prodded by a faculty member. Even then, she said, “My parents didn’t quite understand the benefits. There wasn’t that understanding of the skill sets that represented.”
But when she got an internship in a marketing department, she realized her humanities experience made her “confident enough to figure it out as I went.” She used self-reliance she learned taking on the challenge of a new language, Quiroz said, and analytical skills she developed reading literature in the original Italian.
Howe, the University of Arizona French and business double major, may not have initially thought French would help her get a job. She simply liked it and wanted to improve her skills — something else that advocates of the humanities say is being lost as colleges keep dropping these programs.
“I definitely discovered ways that it helped me in my finance career later on, but at the outset it was my passion that drove me to French,” she said.
Fellow senior Peyton Broskoff combined business administration with applied humanities. She also took a humanities course for which she teamed up with other students to revitalize a community library. That taught her “intercultural competence — just being able to understand and work with people.” It will help her in a future job, she said. “If you can market to different people, that means you can sell more products.”
Arturo Padilla signed up for a joint program in religious studies for health professionals. The son of indigenous Mexican parents, he plans to use what he is learning to combine traditional wellness and healing with modern medical practices.
Maxwell Eller has gotten something simpler from his major in classics. “It helped my attention span in a world of YouTube and Instagram,” said the University of Arizona senior. “I felt my knowledge was pretty shallow. I wanted to wrestle with ambiguities.” And learning the grammatical structures of Latin and Greek helped him in his volunteer work teaching English to women in Afghanistan.
University of Arizona humanities dean Alain-Philippe Durand keeps a model of a billboard in his office that the department put up on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, near the campus of rival Arizona State, to promote the practical benefits of the humanities. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
While their incomes in the 10 years after graduation are below the median of all college graduates, students who go to liberal arts colleges, over the long term, earn a total of about $200,000 more according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
With little overhead, the humanities are also comparatively cheap to teach. Producing a credit hour in English or philosophy costs only a little more than half of what it costs to produce a credit hour in engineering, a study for the University of North Carolina System by Deloitte and the Burning Glass Institute found.
Still, humanities departments at public universities including Arizona’s are funded based on the number of students they enroll, making their recovery a matter of survival.
“At some point, we had to do something,” said Matt Mars, a professor in Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities. “If we think innovation is important, then we need to be innovative.”
It may take more than that. Some legislators who control the budgets of public universities and colleges have been skeptical of the value of humanities departments, especially those that house such subjects as gender and ethnic studies.
Some humanities faculty also bristle at the idea that their work is relevant only when combined with more career-oriented disciplines, said Durand, at the University of Arizona. “But you have to be aligned with your students,” he said.
Younger humanities faculty “get it,” Durand said. “They are willing to do interdepartmental collaboration. They know we can’t do things the way we always have.”
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This blog was kindly authored by Annamaria Carusi, Director at Interchange Research. Annamaria recently joined a HEPI/Taylor & Francis roundtable to discuss advancing translational research.
HEPI, together with Taylor & Francis, recently highlighted translational research’s importance in bridging scientific discovery and real-world applications. This is a much-needed part of higher education strategy, especially given Labour’s framing of its policies in terms of missions. If the government is inspired by Mariana Mazzucato’s conception of missions, it needs policies that will ensure the country fully benefits from the substantial investment made by the State into research and development. Finding better connections between knowledge production and application is a key way of doing this.
Often, the focus of attention in translational efforts is bounded within STEM subjects, with the idea of translation originating in the biomedical sciences, with the ‘bench to bedside’ approach. But the creative industries are just as central to the economic well-being of the country – and its people. This is recognised in the establishment of the government’s Creative Industries Taskforce, which had its first meeting in December 2024.
Addressing the tension between the potential of the arts and humanities and the financial pressures they are under is a priority for any policy to build bridges between higher education and real-world impacts. Pre-conceptions about different disciplines’ relation to real-world impacts feed these tensions. Here, I suggest three areas where shifting pre-conceptions would be helpful for better positioning of arts and humanities with respect to real-world impacts.
Secondly, pitting Arts and Humanities and STEM against each other is not only counterproductive, but also creates an obstacle to further benefits of the arts and humanities, beyond those we already see through the creative industries. The need for models of research where different disciplines complement each other is even greater in the mission framework that the Labour government has adopted for its policy.
Crucial for getting the best out of these collaborations – not just for the first goal of research, the peer-reviewed publication, but for those all-important social impacts – is that all disciplines involved should be viewed as equal partners. An anecdote from one of my (many) personal experiences of collaborating as a humanities scholar with scientists shows why: I was invited to be an Arts and Humanities representative in a synthetic biology network, a cross-disciplinary collaboration that, at the time, was required by funders. When I asked what that might entail, I was told: ‘Anything, so long as you don’t put obstacles in the way of our research.’ But maybe disruption sometimes is a useful part of research and innovation? Further, there was nothing in the funding structure of the network that equalised the collaboration or tried to work towards a genuine integration; ultimately all the partners were in a loose network and mostly everyone researched and published in their own pre-set disciplinary journals.
When collaborating across these domains, we must understand that the arts are not secondary vehicles for science and technology. They are not merely communicators of scientific ideas already worked out by the scientists; the humanities are not there only to bring their particular brand of empathy or analytical and critical thinking skills, but also for the substantive content and ideas they bring. As equal partners addressing complex societal challenges together, the outputs and innovations that make their way into society are more likely to be implementable, with fewer unthought-through consequences for society. Additionally, the recognised and incentivised outputs of a collaboration should be broad enough to accommodate research publications, data sets, and products (such as a drug, a device, a policy, or a piece of software) but also the very wide array of direct and indirect outputs of the creative sector.
Thirdly, we need to tackle perceptions about employability, beginning with those of students as they make their course and degree choices. The lower numbers of students choosing arts and humanities courses at university goes hand in hand with the lower numbers choosing these subjects for AS and A-levels. In the case of English A-levels, one of the contributing factors is that there is a clearer career pathway for STEM subjects. This is despite the fact that Arts and Humanities are no slouches regarding employment. In 2022, 620 000 workers were employed in the arts sector and a further 350 000 were self-employed. It is often proposed that couching the Arts and Humanities in terms of their employment or economic impacts diminishes their intrinsic value. The intrinsic/extrinsic binary is not helpful, especially when it serves to fuel the perceived differences between arts and humanities, and science and technology. All of these disciplines have intrinsic values: as a researcher who has followed scientists around their labs, I have seen first-hand that often what holds them there is their passion for their subject for its own sake.
The more Arts and Humanities are seen as only one side of a binary between ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ values, the more they become the precinct of an elite class, who go on to shape the arts sector in their image. Instead, what is needed is a concerted effort to change these perceptions and to show students that they can have both intrinsic and extrinsic values. Whichever model is used for bridging across higher education and real-world impact for the arts and humanities, be it translation or co-creation, should capture the complex relations between these two forms of value. The right forms of career support need to be co-designed with the whole sector and highlighted for prospective students. As we form strategies to realise more fully the direct and indirect benefits of arts and humanities, the economic survival of those practising them cannot be placed on a lower rung than those practising other disciplines.
