Among the Liberal Arts disciplines, there's a persistent distrust (or is it intimidation?) of the business community. Certainly, this is in many ways well-founded--for example, aggressive technology-transfer policies have been shown to actually be hampering the progress of broader scientific and technological research.
But perhaps, with the shift to a Creativity-based Economy over the past decade or so, the business community is finally searching for students who best exemplify a Liberal Arts education. Of course, this depends on the industry in question. Some industries will have more of a need for students with superior communications and critical thinking skills, than others. But overall, there is a general sentiment that the most innovative and creative organizations will necessarily become the most successful.
My personal experience is in the field of Tech, which is in desparate need of skilled workers with multidisciplinary backgrounds. And this is exactly the realm of a traditional Liberal Arts education....with a twist.
For example, the rise of social networking sites like Gather, WebBiographies, MySpace, etc., in addition to juggernauts like Google, Yahoo!, etc. have spawned a second (more even-handed/mature) tech boom. One of the distinguishing features of the second boom (I'll refer to this as Boom 2.0, as it's largely a product of the rise of Web 2.0) is that these sites are about people first, and technology second.
The level of expertise it takes to create and manage a system like the one we use on Gather is positively amazing, but first and foremost, it is a system about/for people.
Therefore, the best employees that are working for these sites also have a knowledge of psychology, marketing and communications, graphic design, etc. IN ADDITION to their technical expertise as a programmer, database manager, etc. And vice versa--the content generation team must also have a basic knowledge of what is both possible, and practical, from the programmers' and information managers', etc. ends.
Boom 2.0 is a Renaissance that is demanding men and women whose knowledge is more suited to a "Renaissance Man." And this also applies to other industries. Corporate R&D spending is, and always has been, high--but today, the focus on creative approaches isn't limited to the R&D lab. Throughout the economy, we need specialists, but specialists with interdisciplinary backgrounds, who can approach problems from diverse perspectives.
I'd like to propose that those of us who teach in the Liberal Arts likewise follow suit. We ought to educate ourselves about what employers are seeking, so that we can better educate our students. In scholarship, there has been a push toward interdisciplinarity, and what's called "hybridity" within one's field. For example, today's scholar of Modernist Literature is encouraged to address the broader cultural context of a work, such as how developments in Physics (Einstein's Relativity) may have influenced the aesthetic structure of art and literature, such as the Cantos of Ezra Pound.
Perhaps we should also approach our field itself in a broader cultural context. For instance, we can work on issues like "How can the skills and methods by which scholars of literature approach a text--and discover new uses, perspectives, etc.--be applied OUTSIDE the discipline?" These very skills are what the business community is crying out for, and what Boom 2.0 requires.
They need what we can give--original approaches to common problems. If only we would do a better job of opening a dialogue between the business and Arts communities, we might never have to deal with questions like "What are you going to do with an English major? Teach?" ever again.
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Comments: 8
Until the late 1960s, 4 out of 5 corporate executives had a liberal arts degree. It was this liberal tradition that made the great centers of learning. (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, William and Mary) It was not unusual for a person to get a B.A. and then get and engineering degree. Now it is the technical degree with an M.B.A. that gets the great jobs.
The Ph.D. used to be a degree in the philosophy of science and humanities. Now we don't train Ph.D.s this way . Now it is a degree in deeply learned and narrow disciplinarity.
The organization of modern universities is based on tribal disciplinarities.
I was almost thrown out of a conference at a major university for expressing this thought. The conference was about multi-disciplinarity.
They said that I had disrespected their academic traditions. I said, "I hope so."
Reid
By the way, I didn't know that the proportion of execs with LA backgrounds was THAT high. Interesting that the decline in interdisciplinarity among execs has progressed in tandem with the decline of American "dominance" in many industries since the 60s. And how it had continued until the present economic shift (from a product-based to a creative-based economy) was acknowledged and embraced.
I think that rather than making a set of standards for each industry, we should try to instill in students the ability to learn easily, effeciently, and joyfully.
We are, perhaps, victims of our own marketing. For a number of years, higher education has marketed itself as the way to a better job. Getting a college degree leads to a better job. Well students are now entering looking for a direct link to that job. English doesn't look like a direct link to much beyond teaching or writing. What looks like a job are degrees with 'pre' in their title -med, -law, etc.
The tenure system doesn't support the idea of interdisciplinarity all that well either. Not publishing in your own field's narrow publications may mean you miss out on tenure. Seven years later you've been brainwashed. Even in my dissertation, I'm being told not to do a interdisciplinary, scholarly piece, but rather an applied research project because it could limit my chances for getting highered in an education department.
I feel your pain, John... Interdisciplinarity is where the world is headed--and what the business community is screaming for. Academe is in need of a serious wake-up call.