Ready for the Future
Prospects are bright for adaptable, innovative students of the liberal arts and sciences
For Stan Sclaroff, there is no debating the value of a liberal arts and sciences education: It’s built to survive. “There’s this sense of continual reinvention,” says the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. “Whatever the future may bring, you’re ready for it.”
CAS boasts 84 majors, ranging from astronomy to philosophy and computer science to comparative literature. No matter what they have studied, CAS alumni are equipped to enter a plethora of professions, and studies have shown their skills are desirable. A 2019 Harvard Business Review article, “Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees,” citing a study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, highlighted that “employers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success.”
“An arts and sciences education emphasizes skills that matter a lot in this world: being able to convey your ideas thoughtfully and clearly, being able to understand different ways of knowing and doing, relating the present to the past and learning from it and then being able to work toward the future,” says Sclaroff. “It’s ideal. It’s multipurpose. It offers agility.”
Today’s liberal arts and sciences curriculum differs from yesterday’s and the curriculum of tomorrow will be different yet again, reshaped to the needs of a future society. Faculty members spoke with arts&sciences about the value—and the future—of the liberal arts and sciences education.
Malika Jeffries-EL
Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
If we have learned anything from the previous 50 years, it is to expect the unexpected. Thus, we must consider that today’s students need to be prepared to solve tomorrow’s problems. As a scientist, I learned fundamental chemistry that was decades, and even centuries, old. Nonetheless, it provided me with the skills to develop novel materials that were not even imagined by the early chemist.
As a graduate of a liberal arts institution [Wellesley College], I fully appreciate the benefits of developing a broad knowledge base before specializing in one major. Exposure to fields like history, literature, language, sociology, and political science is useful in helping students shape their views.
A liberal arts education provides the foundation for thought and creativity needed to tackle new issues. Many of the current grand challenges in society will require scholars to work in an interdisciplinary fashion to solve them. Beyond technical fields, humanists and social scientists are also needed to help scientists develop technology that society will utilize. The world is becoming more complicated and more connected—we need liberal arts education now more than ever.
Saida Grundy
Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and Director of Admissions
In sociology we understand higher education as an inequality issue. Not only does higher education have to meet the challenges of access in terms of who can get a college education in this country, but increasingly our field is studying how higher education itself creates inequalities in terms of wealth and income disparities. For example, Black students are no more likely to be gainfully employed than a white person with a high school diploma, and they are amongst the racial groups of students who incur the largest and longest-held debt from the cost of their education.
A liberal arts education is like software that can be updated and adapted.
When I think about liberal arts education, I am thinking about what helps to close these gaps. The labor economy is shifting. Globalization and automation have left us with a bifurcated labor market, where human beings either dominate the service sector—which exploits low-income people of color—and what we might call ‘knowledge workers,’ or management-sector workers, whose labor cannot yet be replaced by AI. Our students are going to be changing careers several times in their lives. Training them for a vocation is planned obsoletion—it puts them out of business when that line of work goes out of business. A liberal arts education is like software that can be updated and adapted. It allows them to create their own jobs and value.
Anthony Petro
Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The most frequent comments I hear in my Religion, Health, and Medicine class start with ‘I never thought about that.’ For instance, ‘I never thought about how a patient’s religion might impact the medical care they want.’ Or ‘I never thought about how some hospitals have religious affiliations that shape what procedures doctors will or will not perform.’
Even if you do not think much about religion, it still shapes the lives of the people in your community and even your own life. Too often, we take a narrow view of ‘what matters,’ but the liberal arts help expand the horizons of our ethical, historical, and cultural imaginations. Religion matters to a lot of people. So does gender. And neither falls simply into one partisan camp or another.
If you want to understand politics or culture, in the past or in the future, you need to learn something about how religions—themselves internally diverse and ever changing—shape our world. They give hope and incite violence; they inform debates over gender and sexuality but also battles over climate change, immigration, and healthcare. And not always in the ways we assume. The liberal arts help us to understand this larger picture.
Arianne Chernock
Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences
Speaking to the New York Times recently, Columbia University history professor George Chauncey summed up the power of studying the past: ‘Debates over who should be included in history are really often about who do we think should be included in American society today? Who should be respected in American society today?’
Chauncey—who helped pioneer the field of queer history—spoke from his experiences working in a once controversial subfield. But his point illuminates the larger value of studying history, and of pursuing a liberal arts education more generally. One thing we’ve learned over the past few difficult years is that how we think about and represent the past has consequences.
It would be impossible for our students to engage in meaningful conversations about race, class, gender, politics, or the environment without having some understanding of their complex histories, and of how different historical actors helped shape them. Recognizing that our world has been made, not found, moreover, can be an empowering act. Ideas and institutions are not fixed, but rather there to be made and remade and remade again.
Suchi Gopal
Professor of Earth and Environment
We are at a defining moment in human history where we are confronted with climate change, posing challenges in sustaining the Earth’s natural environment while at the same time impacting the well-being of the burgeoning human population.
Over the last decade, Earth and environment departments have heeded this clarion call. They are increasingly providing a broad, integrated education that includes humanities and social and natural sciences. Several programs also focus on providing scientific skills and knowledge of specific subject matter (energy, climate, conservation) valued in the job market.
The rise of data science involves monitoring and integrated analysis of the Earth and environment. Field and laboratory skills give a better understanding of our planet. For example, locating offshore wind requires an understanding of the ocean biodiversity, commercial fisheries, societal interests, and other factors.
Liberal arts education in Earth and environment is providing the skills needed to tackle climate change, sustainability, globalization, environmental justice, disaster risk reduction, sustainability, and topics of societal needs in this changing world.
James Uden
Professor and Chair of Classical Studies
Last year, we ran a series of events called Careers after Classics in which alumni returned to our department to chat with current students. Some reflections by an alumnus, now an attorney working in construction defect litigation, really stuck with me.
Classics, he said, had taught him a variety of different things. First, reading and writing about Homer and Virgil taught him to construct a convincing argument. It also gave him a taste for reading difficult things. Once you’ve struggled your way through Thucydides’ Greek, he quipped, legal contracts are a breeze.
Most importantly, classics had trained him to see complex issues from multiple perspectives. After all, studying the past exercises the imagination. You may think you have little in common with someone living in a very different era, who speaks a different language, who has different values—and yet, in order to understand them, you have to think in their shoes. The humanities teach us the imaginative skills required to be more understanding, persuasive, and ultimately, humane.
It was impossible for Romans to conceptualize the future without also looking to the past. That’s why Janus—their god of beginnings, and also of war and peace—had two faces. The study of Greece and Rome continues to captivate an ever more diverse range of students, while reckoning with its own appropriation by elitist and racist forces throughout its history. It also continues to highlight the insights and achievements of the generations who found so much of value in the philosophy, art, and literature of the ancient world—who looked, like Janus, to the past in order to understand the future.