THE GREAT BOOKS DEBATE: PRACTICAL SKILLS OR TRADITIONAL CONTENT IN THE HUMANITIES?


D TONY CARDOZA, PhD PROFESSOR OF HISTORY


PAUL JAY, PhD PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH


The Devil’s etails


in the


the University of Illinois at Chicago, co-wrote “The Fear of Being Useful” in response to that viewpoint. The article argues that the humanities do, in fact, provide a practical toolkit—sharpened analytical and communications skills, for example—as college students leave campus and enter the working world. Jay and Graff further argue that many outside of


I Read Jay and Graff’s article at insidehighered.com. 18 LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO


academia do value the humanities, as studies show that a large percentage of people running Fortune 500 companies are liberal arts graduates. Perhaps the real problem, they state, is that those who teach


n a slowly recovering economy, in which the national unemployment rate currently hovers around 8 percent, what good are the humanities? What good does The Iliad do you when you’re applying for a job at Google? In an article they published in January, Paul Jay, PhD, and Gerald Graff, PhD, thusly summed up what they call “the conventional wisdom on the current crisis of the humanities:” “In an age when a higher education is increasingly about moving quickly through a curriculum stream- lined to prepare students for a job, the humanities have no practical utility.”


Jay, professor of English at Loyola, and Graff, of


the humanities are reluctant to focus on their practi- cal or vocational applications, preferring to teach the canon for its own intrinsic value. Jay and Graff call for a greater embrace of the vocational potential of studying the humanities—to overcome “the fear of being useful.” But what does that really mean for students?


What does a well-rounded and useful humanities curriculum look like? We asked Dr. Jay and Anthony Cardoza, PhD, of Loyola’s history department, to dis- cuss some of the issues raised in “The Fear of Being Useful.” Here is their exchange.


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