[S1E15] Reunion Part 2

[S1E15] Reunion Part 2 https://urllie.com/2tl0nb

Lee Coffin:I love words. I read them, write them, speak them, play with them. I love a good pun. I'm intrigued by the origin of a word, the way words arrange themselves into ideas, sentences, stories, songs, slogans, podcasts. I keep a note on my phone that keeps track of new words I discover. The note is called Wordplay, and \"quinquennial\" is its most recent edition. If you're curious, it means every five years, kind of like a school reunion. So I'm a vocabulary collector, a wordsmith, a word nerd. I often think I should have studied linguistics, and I might have if that had been a major at my college, but I'm not sure it was even a class I could have taken.

Lee Coffin:That's really helpful, and I started with that question to both of you because as an admission officer, I'm very mindful of the need to translate academia to high school ears, you know A student moves through 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, and the word \"humanities\" may never have landed in a course description they take. They take English, and they take social studies, and they take languages, but perhaps they've never heard someone call those \"the humanities\". And I think that's part of the challenge of this topic we're engaged in too, is you know, when you say \"science,\" people get it. When you say \"engineering,\" people understand it. Humanities has a less direct journey through your ears to your understand. Does that sound right, Scott

Lee Coffin:Okay, so that's very helpful. For the three of you, so Charlotte, Scott, and Barbara, you're all humanists. You've all studied the humanities. Some of you teach it. Let's go back to high school, and I'd like each of you to share kind of with our listeners, were you focused on humanities as part of your college search in your respective high school moments, or did this come to you a bit more serendipitously when you were in college I'll start with Barbara.

Barbara Will:Yeah, sure. I'm actually the child of two professors of the humanities, so it wasn't a huge stretch for me. My father, who's still alive, is a classics professor and a literature professor, and my mother also was a classics professor, so I grew up in a very college-type environment. A lot of students were coming through the house all the time. My parents were very interested in teaching, and there were books everywhere, so it was not really hard for me to imagine going to college and studying the humanities, because I loved to read. I mean, I have to say, when you were introducing this podcast, Lee, I recognized myself immediately in what you said. I just love language. I love words. I like the origins of words. I like doing Wordle. I like crossword puzzles. I could spend a lot of time dissecting language, and I really just love doing that, so reading has always been a huge part of my life.

Charlotte Albright:Well, Barbara, I was an English major too, Bennington College class of 1972, and I also was a kid who was always being told to turn out the light, and go to bed, and stop reading. Then I would get the flashlight and go under the covers. And then, I have to say, all of my best teachers happened to be English teachers. I mean, I was diagramming sentences, and I still teach that to some of my students, and then I went to graduate school, because I hadn't really read enough, I felt, in undergraduate school, because I had spent a little time wonking around on the stage and taking parts, and not going to every single class every single day. But anyway, I ended up getting a PhD in literature, and while I was doing that, I needed to make some money, so I started freelance writing for The Boston Phoenix, and then ended up in public radio.

Lee Coffin:What I love about the three of your stories is that you followed your intellectual curiosity. You know, your love of books, and reading, and learning, and asking questions kind of guided you into parts of the curriculum that you might not have known a lot about. I think if you jump ahead of the admissions story into first-year advising, you know, when I've done that over the years, I often say to students, \"Be open to exploring. Don't just lock yourself into some narrow understanding of, 'Well, I'm good at this, so I'm going to study that,' because you don't know.\" I mean, like my linguistics example in the intro. You might not have ever heard of the discipline, because that wasn't a high school word, but the content of that is exactly what you'd like to study.

So part of what we're talking about is the humanities as this really rich part of the curriculum, and Barbara, I'm reminded of a comment you made one year at an open house, where you talked about the geography of Dartmouth College, and you said the academic departments that circle the Green are the arts, and humanities, and languages, and you said, you know, \"These classic components of the curriculum sit at the heart of our geography,\" and that really stuck with me as kind of a metaphor for the way the curriculum plays out around the campus. Can you talk a little bit about that

And that's all fine. It's just the history of a school like Dartmouth is very much embedded in the heart of the campus around the humanities, and I think it still is, because what the humanities teach you is a way of looking at the world, questioning the world, criticizing the world, and appreciating the world, and those skills are all things that students take into their other classes, whether they're studying engineering or Earth sciences, but these are like these fundamental intellectual skills that the humanities really, really focuses on in our small classes, and very, very close work with professors, which is a feature of humanities classes, and those skills are things that transfer into all parts of the rest of the campus. So the heart of the campus, I think, really is the humanities, and then as people develop other interests, they take those skills that they've learned in humanities classes into other parts of the campus.

Lee Coffin:Yes. You know, I've been a student of the liberal arts, a resident of the liberal arts, since 1981, and I've never left, and I 100% see this curriculum as the best training for a life of inquiry, and engagement, and being ready to interpret what comes next by having understood where we've been. You know, and I would describe myself as a humanities-positive dean. You know, and Barbara as the former dean of the arts and humanities at Dartmouth, I mean, we were administrative pals in championing the promotion of this part of the curriculum to prospective students and parents. So having said that, I wanted to bring some data into this, so I'll call it quantitative humanities for just a second.

In contrast, biology, computer science, engineering, and economics each, on their own, have more intended majors than the humanities combined, so I think it speaks to this conundrum that Charlotte was poking at, which is there's a lot of interest in STEM, broadly, and fields that are perceived as being pragmatic. I think that's where my dad would have landed when he was counseling me towards a major. So it's a conundrum, because while we are championing them, and we are celebrating them in the curriculum and in the admission process, the volume to date flows the other way, and I think that's part of the challenge, is how do we become kind of the evangelists for the humanities, if you will I mean, that would be religion example there, but like how do we tell this story in a way that gets prospective students and their parents to sit up and say, \"Yeah, that's me\"

Lee Coffin:Well, I think that's part of the misleading narrative in the Admissions Beat. You know, you've got Forbes and Hechinger writing about declines, when in fact the interest is still there. People are taking these classes, and loving them, and thriving in them, but maybe choosing a major outside of the humanities. It doesn't mean they're dismissing the humanities as an essential part of their curriculum. So I think it's how do you measure success Is it the number of majors or the number of people taking courses in these disciplines, that enrich the other parts of their curriculum And you're all nodding as I say that.

Scott Muir:Sure. It's called What Are You Going to Do With That, which is a familiar question for college students, and humanities majors in particular. It basically challenges all the biases that are often implied in that question, through stories of everyday folks who studied the humanities on their way to fulfilling careers. These stories are not unique. The data does not support the notion that humanities majors struggle to make ends meet. It shows them employed, making competitive salaries, satisfied with their careers. So these trends of decline aren't responding to things happening on the job market where humanities majors are struggling, and they're not responding to trends where the value of humanities skills on the job market are diminishing.

But what we've found is that showing people the data doesn't necessarily replace that false narrative with a more accurate understanding of how a humanities background provides a strong foundation for your career. The stories really help to illustrate that more clearly. Part of how they do that is that you get to hear folks who have applied these different humanities majors in a variety of career fields, but there's then the more particular stories about marrying humanities knowledge and skills with technological and scientific capacities, about humanities offering the perfect on-ramp to a legal career, about applying the passion for humanities through a career in museums, about the ability to navigate challenging issues in business, and finding creative solutions to problems. So there's a consistent message that if you trust yourself and focus your efforts where you feel yourself growing, and getting excited to do more, you're putting yourself in a great position for success wherever your path leads from there. 59ce067264

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