Takin' It to the Streets

Well...um...not really.  No real revolutionaries here.  But I did have a lovely time giving a talk to various members of the ethics team on staff at the VA Hospital in Bath, NY yesterday.  It was nice to give an introduction to moral theory talk to a group of professionals that had already started to think about some of these thorny moral issues and how they relate to their lives.

And this raises a broader issue: how exactly can we, as academics in fields that often don't pay immediate professional dividends, communicate to a broader public that our fields are valuable despite the fact that they may not have immediate obvious cash value?  If what students learn in fields like philosophy, history, and sociology isn't as immediately applicable to their professional lives as the things that their friends in, say, nursing are learning, then what is the value of these fields?

This is a question that has implications outside the academy, of course, and it's a multi-faceted, complex issue, one to which I hope to devote a series of posts.  Here are a couple of quick points that I will elaborate on later:

1. It's a historical question, tied to the rise of university in the West: Even early American colleges were mainly devoted to training clergy, as Delbanco has recently shown in his interesting book College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be [Amazon].  This means that what early universities in Europe and the United States provided esoteric knowledge to an elite. 
2. But this elitist aim collides with the populist streak in American higher education: we believe that our institutions of higher learning should, at least in principle, be open to all to learn valuable, practical skills: not just lawyering but farming as well.
3. These two aims are obviously contradictory.  The populist aim remains, with all the talk about MOOCs and increased access.  But the elitist aim remains as well.  Academics are to provide cultural capital to all who want it, but what is this cultural capital good for?  
4. One increasingly popular way to think about what we humanists and social scientists provide is to think about it in terms of skills that employers want.  Paula M. Krebs' recent piece at Inside Higher Ed is a good example.  Here's the opening paragraph: 

With so much focus on higher education's obligations to job preparation, the humanities are perpetually playing defense, especially in public higher education. We academic defenders of the humanities generally take one of two lines: we argue that 1) our majors ARE work force preparation -- we develop strong analytical skills, good writing, problem-solving, etc., or 2) we have no need to justify what we teach because the value of the humanities, the study of what makes us human, is self-evident.

 Krebs argues that it's past time to think about the public mission of the humanities.  I think she's right.  

 But how?