By JENNIFER LEVITZ and DOUGLAS BELKIN [Wall Street Journal] – The humanities division at Harvard University, for centuries a standard-bearer of American letters, is attracting fewer undergraduates amid concerns about the degree’s value in a rapidly changing job market.
A university report being released Thursday suggests the division aggressively market itself to freshmen and sophomores, create a broader interdisciplinary framework to retain students and build an internship network to establish the value of the degree in the workforce.
This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities. The division needs to show “what it is our work does so they don’t think we’re just living up in the clouds all the time.”
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The report noted that Harvard’s humanities division had in some ways cut itself off from the job market—training students to be academics rather than “truly educated citizens” of the broader society.
“Those of us committed to criticism and critique might recognize a kernel of truth in conservative fears about the left-leaning academy,” according to the report [p.42]. “Among the ways we sometimes alienate students from the humanities is the impression they get that some ideas are unspeakable in our classrooms.”
Continued at The Wall Street Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.
