Higher education is re-envisioning its offerings from the ground up to acclimate itself to the emerging demands of a digital workforce. Land-grant universities are building new colleges, HBCUs are racing to secure better funding and even liberal arts colleges are reviewing their general education curriculum.
These developments have thrust some higher education leaders to defend the place the humanities hold in the halls of our most prestigious institutions.
“No matter how much technology or machines integrate into our culture, we’re all human beings functioning with those machines,” says Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. “Whether one is studying to be a doctor or engineer, there is a person behind that specialization making choices and interpreting the world around them.”
Hooten Wilson will be hosting reading forums on classic texts for Pepperdine’s prospective students, parents, alumni and other community stakeholders. As a faculty member, she introduces students to timeless stories, philosophy and history from ancient Greek, Roman and Biblical literature, as well as enduring works from the medieval ages to contemporary culture. Despite Pepperdine adding a data science minor to its liberal arts undergraduate curriculum (bolstered by a $10 million grant in 2021), Hooten Wilson is looking to hire new faculty members to help expand the Great Books program due to strong enrollment this fall.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology last Friday, deans and chairs from Emory, Clemson, Texas Southern and other schools packed into the Historic Academy of Medicine Theatre to discuss redefining what engagement in the liberal arts means in the 21st century. Georgia Tech has been at the forefront of melding often siloed disciplines of the humanities, arts and social sciences with STEM.
“The future depends upon humanizing the STEM disciplines in a way that improves our quality of life and doesn’t just make things more efficient or effective,” says Paul Kohn, vice provost for enrollment management at Georgia Tech. “There is a quality component that needs to be sensitive to different people’s perspectives and cultural backgrounds, and the humanities bring those [considerations] into the fold. It improves our scholarship by adding those elements to the STEM fields: Our research is better and our graduates are more well-rounded.”
Higher ed must build common ground to better meld its humanities, arts and STEM fields, argues Linda Adler-Kassner, associate vice chancellor of teaching and learning at UC Santa Barbara. She spoke to her peers at the Georgia Tech event about the importance of understanding “threshold concepts,” which help students and faculty members identify beliefs held in their respective disciplines that may stifle their understanding of one another.
“On a typical day, undergraduate students cover a lot of ground … moving from one discipline to another, chemistry to history, sociology to philosophy and everything in between,” said Adler-Kassner. “[W]hen faculty name their threshold concepts, concepts that undergird ways of thinking and practicing within disciplines, they can start to address this challenge productively.”
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