Google: MORE HUMANITIES PLEASE!

Google did a big study to see what teams worked well and which ones didn't.

Turns out, STEM skills (by which they mean Technology and Engineering, not basic science or abstract math) are the LEAST important for success. Here's the post:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

Those traits sound more like what one gains as an English or theater major than as a programmer. Could it be that top Google employees were succeeding despite their technical training, not because of it? After bringing in anthropologists and ethnographers to dive even deeper into the data, the company enlarged its previous hiring practices to include humanities majors, artists, and even the MBAs that, initially, Brin and Page viewed with disdain.

Project Aristotle, a study released by Google this past spring, further supports the importance of soft skills even in high-tech environments. Project Aristotle analyzes data on inventive and productive teams. Google takes pride in its A-teams, assembled with top scientists, each with the most specialized knowledge and able to throw down one cutting-edge idea after another. Its data analysis revealed, however, that the company’s most important and productive new ideas come from B-teams comprised of employees who don’t always have to be the smartest people in the room.

Or, maybe the "best scientists" are necessarily equivalent to "smartest."

More on this to come.

Humanities and Work

On the myth of the "English major Starbucks barista." From 2016, but in my feed last night and I missed this the first time around.

What are we to make of this new old joke about the English major? Why did barista replace fast food worker? The fact is that English majors are not particularly likely to end up as baristas or as workers in the food service industry in general. Plenty of data is available to disprove this idea, so what does its persistence mean? The English major barista is a myth in the sense of being untrue. It is also a myth in the deeper sense of that word: a story that a culture tells itself to explain wishes or fears. In this case, fears.

I think about this with history a lot, too. We know that historians in fact go on to do great work in myriad fields and generally feel pretty good about their history majors. But no one believes it coming into my office as a student. Their parents, moreover, don't believe it either. And data (SEE THIS WONDERFUL DATA) isn't persuading the story.

In my scholarly work, I often turn back to the anthropological definition of a myth as a "story with a purpose or function." The function of the barista myth is:

[it] reflects negative attitudes about the English major itself rather than the realities of an English major’s likely employment. Since coffeehouses are places for reading, writing and talking, spending time in a coffeehouse is a lot like spending time in the study of English. Naturally enough, English majors like to hang out in them. STEM majors have their labs; English majors have their Starbucks. The joke about the English major barista implies, however, that unlike the science done in a lab, the study of English, whether pursued in coffeehouse or classroom, is without value. What better punishment for wasting this time than being sentenced to work at a coffeehouse rather than enjoying its pleasures, serving those who presumably chose some more valuable and lucrative major?

More on this to come.

Study Humanities: Save the World (At St. Olaf)

HELLO @StOlaf we have so much to talk about tomorrow! #UmYahYah pic.twitter.com/nYeCAeCHOp

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) November 2, 2017

I'm looking forward to going back to Northfield today. I spent a year and a half there while writing my dissertation, a difficult and glorious time in my life. I struggled. I thrived. I wrote. I taught. I had brilliant encounters with students. I had challenging ones where I just didn't know what to do.

Life is no less fraught now than then and I'm no more sure of myself, but at least I have a body of work to remind me what I think I think.

Image description: A picture of the world with the title STUDY HUMANITIES: Save the World over the globe. To the left is this text. "Over the past five years, David Perry has transformed from a mild mannered medieval history professor to a widely-published critic of police violence, anti-disability discrimination, racist appropriation of history, gun violence, and the literal future of the human race. His secret? A liberal arts and sciences education. In this lecture, Perry will use his own experiences to illustrate the power of the humanities to help us confront the most pressing issues of the day." In the upper left, it says the place and time (CAD 305, Nov 2, 5:00)

So yes, St. Olaf, we have a lot to talk about.

Study Humanities; Get a Job

In Pacific Standard, Noah Berlatsky and Ilana Gershon wrote a great piece about how humanities supports you getting a job!

The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search. The humanities teach students to understand the different rules and expectations that govern different genres, to examine social cues and rituals, to think about the audience for and reception of different kinds of communications. In short, they teach students how to apply for the kinds of jobs students will be looking for after college.

This is a good piece. I have made similar arguments and will continue to do so, both as a writer and as an advisor in history.

That said, it's still accepting the premise that the value in what we do is about capitalism. I'm not sure, long term, that's going to work.

Humanities and Trump

In Catapult, Kristen Cardozo writes about the written word in the Age of Trump.

Some might say that studying the humanities in the twenty-first century was already a questionable choice before 2016 brought with it the vivid sight of a dystopian future running headlong to embrace us. The future is STEM, we were told. To major in English, many said, was to look backward, probably with unforgivable nostalgia, to a time when the written word was tangible, metal and ink warping paper. A man on the train, upon learning that I study Victorian literature, once told me, “No one has the attention span for that anymore. No one reads.”

But this is untrue. We read all the time. I read for grad school, and the rest of the time I’m reading on Twitter, or seeing texts on my phone, or devouring takes hot, cool, and tepid. Most people I know are similarly engaged with the written word, all day, every day. The STEM-dominated future we were promised is an open maw that needs content—words—and words, in turn, need interpretation and study. Words are only of use when they can be understood.

I've written about our era as both hyperlexic and hyperscribal, dominated by the written word in speed and quantities unthinkable at any other moment in human history.

So we better learn to work with text, huh? Study humanities. Save the world.

As always, READ THE WHOLE THING. Especially at the end where Cardozo talks about the use of passive voice and abstract verbs by SS officers describing murdering Jews.

Humanities Majors GET JOBS!

So part of my new job at the University of Minnesota is to convince students - and their families - that they can major in History and still be gainfully employed.

The good news is that it's true, they can. Even the Harvard Business Review says so.

According to three new books, the answer is “Quite a lot.” From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.

We know this. But it's good to have more narratives.

Sheep/Sheepdog/Wolf - Cop Metaphors and the Humanities

Charles Huth, a Captain in the Kansas City PD, has written an outstanding essay taking apart two metaphors commonly employed by police trainers: The "warrior" and the "sheep/sheepdog/wolf" metaphor. Not only is he on point when it comes to the analysis itself and what it says about modern policing, but I was also struck that he's essentially performing an act of language criticism here. He's performing the humanities.

Here's some examples, but seriously, read the whole thing:

In the past several years, it has become popular in police training circles for trainers to use metaphors to characterize law enforcement’s relationship with the public. Among the most popular of these is the "sheep/sheepdog" allegory. Trainers who favor this sort of framing explain that many members of the public are like sheep that operate in constant fear of predators, while law enforcement officers serve as the sheepdogs that protect the hapless sheep from the wolves (criminals) that stalk them. While this type of contrasting might seem harmless, it actually objectifies both the police and the public they are sworn to serve in ways that undermine police effectiveness and helpfulness.

A sheepdog’s job is to ensure the integrity of a herd. When the herd gets out of line, the sheepdog drives them by growling and nipping at their heels. The sheepdog adopts a posture characteristic of a predator—like a wolf, for example. This transformation puts the sheep in a perpetual state of fear of being singled out and attacked, thus providing an extrinsic motivation for them to fall in line. Sheep are afraid of sheepdogs just as they are afraid of wolves. They don't trust them and only comply because they are motivated by fear of consequence. Sheep aren’t equipped to fight their antagonists, so a growling sheepdog may not invite escalated dangers amongst the sheep. Not so with people, however. Among those being growled at are people who are capable of resisting. The sheep/sheepdog allegory completely misses how growling sheepdogs can motivate and escalate resistance.

And then there's Huth's conclusion:

Law enforcement in a democracy is at its best with an ethos where officers see themselves as an integral part and reflection of the best nature of the society they serve, not as a morally superior caste set above that society.

So there are two points I want to make. One is that the analysis itself is expert and thoughtful. When we create these divides - which honestly even the Guardian metaphor (which I prefer to Warrior) perpetuates - there are all kinds of consequences. Language matters and so many of the messages being sold (literally, there's good money in being a police trainer/motivational speaker) to law enforcement heighten both their sense of being under siege and the divide between police/policed. We need to push the other way, and I'm so glad people like Huth (and others - big fan of the Chicagoland Virtus Group) are doing that work.

But second, from a higher ed perspective, why aren't we as humanities professors locating and celebrating writing and thinking like this? Shouldn't humanities centers at major universities be inviting Huth in to talk metaphors with English professors? Shouldn't the MLA, AHA, CAA be tracking not how many of their majors become famous people, but how many become cops, doctors, soldiers? Maybe they do? Is there a room for this kind of pragmatic (and admittedly political) writing in the classroom? It shows both that the skills of the humanities expert matter, but also that such skills emerge far outside our disciplines and classes.

And let me be clear - I'm not saying, gosh, how surprising! I'm saying there are a lot of folks out there who are smart readers and smart critics, and only some of them have formal humanities credentials. But those of us who DO have such credentials should find and promote this kind of work.

A good cop is, among many things, savvy about how to interpret complex situations, savvy about language.

Captain America: Humanities Major

From The Mary Sue, Alysa Auriemma has a lovely essay about Captain America (in the context of the comic "Civil War") and a new masculinity. After opening paragraphs on toxic masculinity and patriarchy, she writes:

Captain America not only navigates masculinity, but he completely subverts and ultimately rejects our contemporary conceptions of what it means to be a man, thereby creating a new kind of masculinity that demands self-inquiry, emotional empathy, and innate goodness. It’s not enough to just say Cap is an example of non-toxic masculinity, because what Cap does is redefine the binary of maleness. He’s not just an emblem for what not to be; he’s a roadmap of masculine possibility. 

It's a good essay and you should read it. But here's my favorite part [My emphasis]:

Steve, The Art Student

Many of the male, human Avengers specialize in math and sciences: Tony Stark is a brilliant electric engineer, and Bruce Banner holds a doctorate in nuclear physics. But prior to getting transformed into Captain America, Steve Rogers was an art student who was really into comics and illustration and was planning on getting fine arts degree. This focus on the humanities correlates to Steve already subverting our expectations. We think of Captain America as this beefcake who represents the best of us. Perhaps the “best of us” doesn’t have to always focus on STEM (although the push for more women and girls to get involved and recognized for their work in math and science disciplines is welcome), but on the ways in which we can discuss, theorize, and imagine the world, as well, through arts education. This major literally illustrates Steve’s optimism and hope and points out a reason why Steve would volunteer for Operation Rebirth in the first place. He sees the world how it could be, which leads him to ultimately transform into Captain America.

That's right. Steve Rogers, whose path to heroism came from being good, is a humanities major.

Also he's my son's favorite (Image Descriptions: Three pictures of my son in various poses, wearing a Captain America shirt and Captain America swimsuit).

 

Medievalists in Public! (Writing about the Humanities)

Yesterday at The Conversation, Cecilia Gaposhkin, a medieval historian at Dartmouth, wrote a piece arguing that STEM are not distinct or in competition with the liberal arts. They are the same thing.

The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”

First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts...

Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously.

Gaposhkin concludes with a discussion of the specific ways in which a liberal arts education is necessary for an engineer or doctor to truly thrive.

Today, at Inside Higher Education, Paul Sturtevant, who works for the Smithsonian and runs The Public Medievalist, makes a similar argument about how to promote our worth in the public square:

There is a different unifying principle for most non-STEM disciplines -- among them English, history, politics and civics, languages and literatures, education, the arts, philosophy, psychology and sociology -- which I call the human disciplines. All of the subjects within human disciplines are fundamentally interested in people and with subjectivity. Our disciplines not only illustrate esoteric questions of the meaning and purpose of life but are also uniquely well suited to explore questions of how to live and work with other people. In practical terms, if the job requires being able to work with and understand people -- particularly those different from yourself -- these degrees can, and should, make you better suited for it. They promote empathy, and require students to regard problems, and people, with complexity and the understanding that no single answer is right.

These kinds of jobs exist in all walks of life and include CEOs, kindergarten teachers, judges, advertisers, curators, coaches, social workers and many others. They form the linchpin of our society. They not only drive our economy but also make our country a better place to live by having good, well-trained people doing these jobs.

In my heart, I fear that making instrumental arguments about the humanities is a losing game. If we try to play the "gets you a better job" - even if it's true, which it is! - we're going to lose the rhetorical fight to defend the humanities. People - from Barack Obama to the random parent who comes looking at my college - just don't believe it. 

But it is true. People who learn a set of technical skills without the critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and systematic analysis to expand those skills as circumstances change, are merely being trained for yesterday's job. I'm so pleased to see two colleagues making that case in public.

Policy and Poetry - David Brooks Misses the Point of his Love Story

David Brooks published a column this week that has circulated widely, including among my circle of liberal intellectuals and artists, and to much praise. It's really quite lovely. It celebrates the love of art - writing, music, images and more. It mourns for a lost world.

And it completely misses the point of how we got here - the reification of neoliberal values which Brooks, himself, supports so prominently. In a society dedicated to, as my brother puts it, "precarity" for all but the super wealthy, who can afford to choose poetry over profit?

Brooks tells a lovely story of Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akmatova and their night spent deep in language. He writes:

By midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room. She told him about her girlhood and marriage and her husband’s execution. She began to recite Byron’s “Don Juan” with such passion that Berlin turned his face to the window to hide his emotions. She began reciting some of her own poems, breaking down as she described how they had led the Soviets to execute one of her colleagues.

By 4 in the morning, they were talking about the greats. They agreed about Pushkin and Chekhov. Berlin liked the light intelligence of Turgenev, while Akhmatova preferred the dark intensity of Dostoyevsky.

Deeper and deeper they talked, baring their souls. Akhmatova confessed her loneliness, expressed her passions, spoke about literature and art. Berlin had to go to the bathroom but didn’t dare break the spell. They had read all the same things, knew what the other knew, understood each other’s longings. That night, Ignatieff writes, Berlin’s life “came as close as it ever did to the still perfection of art.” He finally pulled himself away and returned to his hotel. It was 11 a.m. He flung himself on the bed and exclaimed, “I am in love; I am in love.”

That's a lovely anecdote well described by a good writer. Here's the problem.

Today we live in a utilitarian moment. We’re surrounded by data and fast-flowing information. “Our reason has become an instrumental reason,” as Leon Wieseltier once put it, to be used to solve practical problems.

Nonsense. These things do not just "become." The world is filled with poets and artists, or would-be poets and artists. And the world of the first-half of the 20th-century was equally packed with utilitarian thinkers.

Then, after some digs at the evils of Stalinist Russia (no argument there), he finishes with the big point.

I’m old enough to remember when many people committed themselves to this sort of life and dreamed of this sort of communion — the whole Great Books/Big Ideas thing. I am not sure how many people believe in or aspire to this sort of a life today. I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.

O Society, he mourns, why have you given up your poetry? Why can't we sit in lonely rooms and fall in love with words? Well, we in the West are fortunate not to live in the terrible conditions suffered by Akmatova, but if there's a decline in people dedicating their lives to art, it's because of the policies advocated by Brooks.

What frustrates me is that if, in fact, a cultural shift has taken place, it hasn't just happened. Over the last half century there has been a widespread and sustained effort to de-legitimize intellectual life while stripping away the supports that could make that life possible.

Do you want more people to be like Berlin and Akmatova, Mr. Brooks? Support policies that make it possible for people to take risks. 

Three points: 

1. There's tons of great art. Part of what has happened is that a broader segment of society is more visible today, and lots of them are not so interested in art. Brooks watches reality TV while at the salad bar at Applebees and longs for a world in which only elites got the press. There's spectacular art, literature, poetry, music, etc. being created. Thanks to new media, much of it is vastly more accessible than it was during Berlin's day. Some of it is terrible. Much of it bizarre. But art is happening everywhere.

2. If it's Great Books that we want, and I love Great Books programs, fine. Let's support widely available humanities programs for anyone who wants it. Except that in today's society, such programs are increasingly unavailable to non-elites. Moreover, the centrists on the right and the left both routinely criticize humanities, emphasizing job training instead. Right-wing legislatures strip away funding from our great public universities and threaten to pull money if they read the wrong books. So Mr. Brooks, perhaps a column about what's going on with South Carolina?

3. J.K. Rowling famously wrote at least some of Harry Potter on the dole. Now HP isn't great art, but it's a nice anecdote of the way that universal guaranteed income, a society with national healthcare, and other related policies that run counter to Brooks' politics, can enable people to choose to spend their lives in intellectual pursuits. In an era of austerity, lowering wages, and rising inequality - who can make that choice?

This is the frustration with Brooks. Sometimes, he hits on important cultural shifts and problems. He always, however, misdiagnoses the causes and the solutions.

The Conservative Arts

I haven't done as much writing about the humanities as I intended during the summer, as other topics moved to the fore. It was one of the sub-themes in my piece on public writing for the Chronicle.

Yesterday, a good friend of mine, a libertarian medieval historian, linked to the "Imaginative Conservative." There are essays here that I am pleased to see exist. Anti-intellectual forces exist on both the left and the right, but only on the right do we see such profound and public distrust of knowledge by party leaders (I cite Rick Santorum's comments on higher ed as exhibit A). I believe that only people from within a movement can operate significant persuasive force, so I'm glad conservatives are arguing for education, and are particularly arguing for the humanities. I read this essay, from November 2011, on Classical Education and the Founders with interest, just to see how the argument was made.

The author's bio is:

Dr. E. Christian Kopff teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Honors Program and as Director of the Center for Western Civilization. This essay was first presented as an address to the 35^th Annual Founder’s Day Breakfast of the Free Enterprise Institute (Houston TX Nov 3 2011).

I am assuming he is conservative, but I don't know. He talks about the way that classical educations builds good brains, good character, and has a long track record of producing great people.

A few quotes:

"Earlier generations had rejected calls to repudiate traditional classical Christian education, and America had enjoyed 200 years of prosperity, creativity, and freedom."

I wonder which Americans, exactly, found the 200 years peaceful and free? Also note how classical becomes Christian here.

"Classical Greek texts were still studied in the Eastern Roman Empire, what we call the Byzantine Empire, and in lands conquered by militant Islam, with important results for medicine and science."

I wonder if the Byzantines and Muslims ever wrote anything we should read here, or if we should just study classical Greek texts. The author is not, I think, advocating adding Ibn Khaldun (to pick a favorite of mine) to the canon.

"The goal of classical education and its two-fold canon of Great Books was the cultivation of religion, morality and knowledge, words joined in the Third Article of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” If we were to re-write the Northwest Ordinance today, we would begin the Third Article differently. “Science, technology and engineering, being necessary to human happiness, public schools taught by unionized education school graduates shall forever be mandated.” That’s more like it!"

This is sarcastic, just to be clear, running counter to the author's argument. Now I know unions are seen as the enemy for the right, and I don't want to get into that, but Kopff is totally derailing here.  He's just spent some thousand+ words arguing for other forces of causation behind the reification of science, but here he throws in unions, presumably because any piece on education has to trash unions as the problem.

Finally:

"People like Shakespeare and Michelangelo, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Jefferson and Adams, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Galileo and Newton, Linnaeus and Darwin."

I notice something similar about these people. In fact, it's the same thing that's true of every named individual mentioned in the piece, except Dinesh D'Souza, who he argues with, and perhaps folks like St. Augustine (and Jesus, who is present but unnamed).

I actually have no doubt that a focus on classical education would work. I often make that argument about Catholic education - it works ... when, I continue, placed into conversation with broader traditions. Reading a lot of dead white men in Latin and Greek is good for a mind's development, but perhaps if one is not a white male, might feel a bit dis-empowering after awhile. Perhaps that's the idea.


P.S. If you read, "Literature and the Foundations of the West,"  you'll find a different retired professor writing the following:

The courses they generate do not seek to transmit Western culture at its best, but rather to insult it, expose it, and – fancifully – destroy it. In the 1950s, widely thought to have been boring, we young professors competed with one another in a usually friendly contest to know as much as possible. The professors today who were formed by the sixties and do much to set the tone of the universities, compete in generic suffering. That is, they talk about themselves as much as possible, even if only as suffering witnesses to the presumed suffering of others. If you are a woman, black, or sexually unusual, the university is Valhalla. This really is pretty boring.

I've been working hard lately at articulating the usefulness of studying Western culture, and studying lots of it, as it's what I teach. I did not find good answers at the Imaginative Conservative.