I recently considered the fate of public intellectuals in the digital era, concluding that their evolution was closely tied to a number of societal shifts. One of these is the perceived, and oft discussed, crisis in the study of the humanities. Are the humanities still relevant? Do they matter, outside of a purely theoretical context and beyond the confines of the college classroom? These sorts of doubts are reflective of broader tendencies in the way we view our world, such as the rather primitive question of what qualities we consider essential for the workforce that allows society to function. In the knowledge economy, observers of the job market for college graduates and even seasoned professionals will have noticed a pattern emerging at the most basic level: where employers once sought well-rounded candidates with strong ethics and critical thinking skills, terms like “results-driven,” “entrepreneurial” and “quantitative” have now become commonplace in job descriptions. Not so frightening on their own, these words are part of a linguistic choice that reflects the competitive demands of the marketplace, and some of the resulting shortsighted choices that tend to underestimate the advantages of an education grounded in the humanities.
Society can easily understand the benefits of learning financial accounting, statistical software manipulation and business modeling, but is less comfortable with what it regards as the more intangible qualities cultivated by the humanities and, to some extent, the social sciences.
In an era of “lean” business and shareholder (or investor) accountability in the private sector—a drastic take on the longstanding quest for the maximization of worker productivity above all else—as well as funding cutbacks, shrinking budgets and increased competition on every level in the academic and nonprofit worlds, the latter have come to rethink how they function and perhaps even their very roles. This has led to a shift in operations, as well as new, sometimes improved recruitment procedures. Whereas hiring practices at nonprofit organizations have traditionally—and paradoxically—been held to lower standards than in the private sector, smart organizations are increasingly realizing they must invest in the best possible human capital: the effort to bolster a nonprofit’s mission-driven spending by lowering operational costs can only be taken so far, beyond which point it will in fact impede the breadth and quality of the very mission-related work that was being safeguarded. In what might seem like an unrelated or even contradictory trend, in higher education, elite colleges and universities are slowly realizing they must try to reform their sometimes unwieldy bureaucracies by streamlining and simplifying where possible. In recent decades, such efforts to be more business-like have led many to posit their students as “customers,” understandably making more than one academic shudder.
Despite the diverging spending patterns entailed by these tendencies, the result of such considerations has been a common rethinking of the qualities sought in workers across varying industries. Thanks to their enviable success and their role in defining the very world in which most organizations operate, start-ups and technology-enabled companies have emerged as the exemplar followed by many in their quest for better results and more efficient operations. This has not only transferred the values of money-making enterprises to nonprofit organizations, and elite colleges and universities, but has also created a system with a voracious appetite for concrete, immediate results—or a demonstrable high degree of projected success—that can be measured, quantified and reported. In Silicon Valley, this may involve a capacity for failure and quick iterations—though the narrow lens of achieving a competitive advantage is still usually the primary motivating force—but for many, if not most, other organizations, rapid success is the inspiration, no matter what claims are made to the contrary. Notwithstanding a few atypical market leaders like Google and Amazon, most organizations simply do not have the scale, the capacity, the mindset, or the budget to effectively invest in real failure that eventually reaps rewards. As a result, they tend to have learned only half the lesson of their successful models—to collect and try to leverage data—and are increasingly failing (and not in the intentional, experimental kind of way) on the second, which is a realization that thoughtful, adaptive thinking that values looking at the wider scope from a distance is just as necessary as quick and tangible results.
Even if market disruptions and other unpredictable factors are plentiful, companies that build products and services at least enjoy a semblance of straightforwardness in setting objectives that fill a need and serve to please their customers. In the case of mission-driven nonprofit organizations or institutions of higher learning, the path to success—and indeed the very definition of success—is difficult to delineate and almost perpetually open to debate. In adapting to a changing world and learning from other sectors, a tension is created between the need to experiment, adapt and innovate on the one hand, and consciously putting in motion certain strategic goals on the other. Great organizations and their leaders must embrace the uncertainty that comes from this duality by setting goals sufficiently broad to allow for many different paths of exploration. The fundamental qualities that allow for productively working in these sorts of grey areas, engaging in the synthetic and critical thinking necessary to ensuring an organization’s mission and long-term interests always underpin its activities, and the intellectual creativity necessary to devise unique ways of achieving given objectives, are very much those acquired through advanced studies in the humanities. So, while organizations rely on subject matter experts and employees with a knowledge of business, accounting and other specific areas that ensure day-to-day operations run smoothly, if they are serious about exploring long-term strategies that will set them apart from others, they also need thinkers whose ideas extend beyond the typical business frameworks. In other words, they would benefit from having some humanists in their ranks.
Image: Economist Intelligence Unit, Evolution of Work and the Worker