Defending the Humanities to Non-Majors

In October of 2010 Prof. Alan Liu (U.C. Santa Barbara) liked a post of mine sent to a Digital Humanities listserve and asked me for permission to publish it on 4Humanities, his website devoted to advocating for the study of the humanities. He titled it “An Instructor’s Ground-Level Defense of the Humanities to Students.” The post describes in brief what I describe in more length elsewhere — that education is not only vocational training. But in doing so I introduce my “Consider the Cow” lecture. Read on…

Published by James Rovira

Dr. James Rovira is higher education professional with twenty years experience in the field in teaching, administration, and advising roles. He is also an interdisciplinary scholar and writer whose works include fiction, poetry, and scholarship exploring the intersections of literature and philosophy, literature and psychology, literary theory, and music and literature.. His books include Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism (Routledge, 2023); David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Writing for College and Beyond (a first-year composition textbook (Lulu 2019)); Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (Lexington Books 2019); Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books, 2018); Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2010). See his website at jamesrovira.com for details. View more posts

4 thoughts on “Defending the Humanities to Non-Majors”

Thanks James for your sharing, I like what you said about ” Education is not only about vocational training”! It reminds me of an ancient Chinese analogy of ” trees in the forest “: the most useful (well-trained and skilled) tree get chopped down first for making tables, chairs, bookcases, etc. and the gnarliest one got left to live its full life. At the threat of forces from different angles, higher education seems to be loosing its direction. It tries to ease the tension of this pull by orienting to think its purpose is to produce skilled would be employees for the industrial world. I have been observing this with a great concern yet till after reading your article, and your ‘consider the cow’ lecture, I realise what it is that has concerned me about education! Thank you for your inspiration.

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