In the last two years, we at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation have created 80 new positions reserved for Ph.D.'s in the humanities -- half of them jobs at corporations and nonprofit groups and half of them two-year postdocs at universities and colleges.
The point is not hurrah for us. Rather, if universities would take on this model, each could achieve 10 times what we have done by way of illustration. Engaging alumni groups and regional businesses, cultural institutions and foundations, every university could create hundreds of meaningful jobs for its doctoral graduates in the humanities.
Here at the foundation, we'll keep pushing but we also want to try for a double handoff -- to the universities and, through The Chronicle, directly to doctoral graduates. Certain advertised positions will be marked as especially apt leadership opportunities for humanities doctoral graduates. And in this column we -- and those graduates who have applied their learning in especially creative ways -- will try to open up the world to you. The column will be concrete and practical, hopefully a life-changer. But the notion of the "Humanities at Work" is also a paradigm-changer; and in this first column, we want to provide something of a credo.
If disciplines like history and English were sovereign countries, they would be in the longest and worst depression in the annals of the West. Thirty years of unemployment, and underemployment, for Ph.D. graduates has created a culture of defeatism.
It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to be this way now. A false image prevails of a closed economy. The conviction that the only fit use of higher learning in the humanities is via an academic position has incarcerated its believers in a prison of low resources and sour disappointment. It's past time for this folly to end. The year of full employment is upon us if we will have it.
Imagine yourself a new Ph.D. in the humanities. In several months, if you are the norm, you may receive a single offer of a part-time lectureship at a college with limited resources in a part of the country not to your liking. Or, if you wish to challenge yourself to interpret your abilities more creatively and act more boldly, you can have that offer along with job offers for full-time employment with leadership potential and double or triple the salary at A.T. Kearney, Microsoft, Merck, or the National Park Service.
Now, at that stage in my own life, I might well have chosen the part-time lectureship, for I was on fire to teach and write in an academic setting. But at least, armed with the broader perspective, I would have known that this was my own choice, not a last resort forced upon me because I could do nothing else with all of my training. And that sense of freedom makes all the difference, spiritual and economic.
Humanists need to understand their capacities. It is ridiculous, a lie, for this talented group of Ph.D.'s to imagine themselves unemployable. They were highly selected in the first place, the best and brightest of undergraduates in these fields. They can teach wonderfully, and teaching takes place everywhere, not only in college classrooms. They have proved themselves capable of extremely complex analysis and research, and they have brought a huge project to term at a relatively early age. They are smart, expert communicators who are finishers. Who would not want to hire such a person rather than the 10,000th business major?
Some of the 80 Ph.D.'s in our humanities fellowship program will go on to enrich academe. Others will choose the world at large. Our culture will benefit greatly from both. The foundation's Humanities at Work initiative isn't only or even centrally about jobs. It concerns the influence of the disciplines. As I've said repeatedly, if there is no one at the table expert in the arts, history, religion, or philosophy in any conversation resulting in a major social decision, this is a disastrously incomplete conversation doomed to reach a thin-ice decision.
I can imagine two major objections to our approach. The first is from those who say the Ph.D. is designed exclusively to produce scholars in academe. If that were the case, we would need to practice doctoral birth control immediately. But can't our nation of 280 million afford 5,000 doctoral graduates each year in these fields? Can't it profit somehow from their existence? I used to think that my role as an instructor of graduate students was to produce the next generation of scholar-teachers. I now believe that my role is to produce the next generation of intellectual leaders, some of whom will become college teachers.
The second major objection has to do with the role of the intellectual as a critic of culture. The intellectual must stand apart, at a remove from Main Street, in order to offer a critique. This is a serious function, but it has its limits, and those limits were hilariously expressed by the journalist Joe Queenan when he replied to the right-wing charge that the left dominates the universities. In his 1992 book, The Imperial Caddy: The Rise of Dan Quayle and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else (Hyperion), here's how he described the existing deal between the left and the right:
"Leftist intellectuals with hare-brained Marxist ideas get to control Stanford, MIT, Yale, and the American Studies department at the University of Vermont. In return, the Right gets IBM, Honeywell, Disney World and the New York Stock Exchange. Leftist academics get to try out their stupid ideas on impressionable youths between 17 and 21 who don't have any money or power. The Right gets to try out its ideas on North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa, most of which take MasterCard. The Left gets Harvard, Oberlin, Twyla Tharp's dance company, and Madison, Wis. The Right gets NASDAQ, Boeing, General Motors, Apple, McDonnell Douglas, Washington, DC, Citicorp, Texas, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Japan, and outer space."
Why settle for critiquing a society of someone else's making? I don't want to critique reality; I want to help constitute it.
We constitute reality by relocating the place of the disciplines to the world at large. We have mistaken a self-regarding aloofness for the occasional autonomies required by basic research. We have studied power obsessively but feared its exercise.
That's all over. At recent meetings of humanities scholars, I've been able, remarkably for me, to sit silently while others made the case, each in his or her own way, for a grand public reemergence of the humanities disciplines.
Now, on a mundane plane, we must take the institutional steps required to make the new dynamism between the disciplines and the social realms functional. Most universities have career offices that are devoted almost exclusively to undergraduates. Only a few -- like the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and the University of California at Los Angeles -- have specific career services for doctoral graduates, and nowhere yet are the linkages between these services and the academic programs complete.
It is utterly unreasonable to expect the typical professor of Asian studies to have a working knowledge of career opportunities at AT&T or the Los Angeles Times, but the job-placement officer typically assigned to each graduate program might at least learn how to have access to such information. A good illustration is a remarkable program in intellectual entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin, where students and professors eagerly engage in serious discussion of the application of knowledge.
Mindful that if it is going to happen, it has to happen at the universities and in the trade organizations, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation is attempting in the next stage of the Humanities at Work project to bring together career offices and academic programs in a liaison to open the economy by locating the full range of applications of learning in these fields. If we can achieve this, then the 2002-3 academic year indeed can become the year of full employment.
Learning for its own sake, a high value, becomes a silly idea if it does not rest on an assumption of humane usefulness. We do well to recall Sartre's title, The Responsibilities of the Intellectual. We do still better to heed Bourdieu's warning against "paper revolutionism," which can "mistake revolutions in the order of words, or text, for revolution in the order of things, to mistake verbal sparring at academic conferences for interventions in the affairs of the city." The Humanities at Work is a call for us to lead with our words, our learning, to the city of events.
