Is the Study of Humanities Relevant?

John Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, takes as his theme the creation of the angels, man, the fall of mankind from grace, and mankind’s subsequent redemption by Jesus Christ. Milton attempts in his opening stanza to “justify the ways of God to man.” This poem, written in the seven year period from 1658 – 1665, attempts to explain the nature of evil in the world; man’s place in the cosmology of God, angels and demons; and to explain the nature of the Trinity and Jesus’ crucifixion and Resurrection. Admittedly, Milton’s task is enormous, but he manages to achieve his goals in noteworthy fashion, producing the finest epic poem in the English language in the process.

What then, can we say of Milton’s goal of “justifying the ways of God to man?’ I believe that this sentiment, the understanding of man’s place in the cosmos, is at the heart of the study of the humanities; of what it means to be human. Certainly, the theme of understanding man’s place in the cosmos is not unique to Milton; it is, in fact, at the heart of every great piece of western literature ever written. From the earliest beginnings in myth, literature has been concerned with the relationship of man to his surroundings.

But a larger question remains; what is the purpose of a study of the humanities? Why should people of the twenty-first century study humanities?

In tracing the literature, and to a limited extent, art of western man from the Greeks to our present day, we can see several themes emerge.

1. Man is concerned with his relation to God and other spiritual entities.
2. Man is concerned with his place in the cosmos; how he fits in with scientific or empirically known things.
3. Man is concerned with his relationship to other men; how and why he fits in with his fellow creatures.

It is by studying humanities that man can begin to answer these questions. Notice the wording to the statement: we are attempting to answer a question; ultimate answers cannot be found.

But what do we say to the man of business; to the man who wants answers; the man who devotes his life to the “getting and spending;” to the man to whom literature is a waste of time? How do we justify “the ways of God to man?”

The answer to this question is not easy or simple, but perhaps we can start by defining what is meant today by an education, and by providing a brief history of technical education, as opposed to a liberal education. According to the most recent census of the United States conducted in the year 2000, and updated in 2002, 84% of all adults over the age of twenty-five have graduated from high school. According to the same census data, 27% of adults over the age of twenty-five have obtained a bachelor’s degree. Approximately 9% of the population had a graduate degree or higher. Closely linked to the attainment of a bachelor’s degree or higher is the prospect of enhanced earnings. On average a person completing high school is expected to earn $1.2 million over the course of his or her lifetime; people who earn a bachelor’s degree will earn $2.1 million over their lifetime; while the holder of a doctoral degree can be expected to earn $3.4 million over the lifetime. Lawyers, doctor and dentists are expected to earn $4.4 million during their lifetime. (1)

The link between educational attainment and wage earning ability is of course, not new. Yet, the increasing emphasis on “practical” or applied learning which has accelerated over the past thirty to forty years, is in fact, quite different from the curriculum which was practiced since the rise of humanism mentioned earlier in the paper. The rise of technical or applied learning can be directly linked to the growth of the modern corporation, and the need for qualified individuals to act as workers and managers within the corporation.

The provision of a set of capabilities, geared toward the vocational aspects of life which required specialized knowledge (i.e. “division of labor”), has led to a mind-set that knowledge should be directed toward a particular set of capabilities which are pragmatic, and quantifiable, and that the development of other abilities is somewhat superfluous.

The emphasis on the “quantifiable” led to a notion that management is science, and less an “art.” The definition of management science is akin to that of the Social Sciences, that is, a “soft” science, as opposed to one of the “harder” sciences, such as physics or chemistry. A number of management theories have been propounded which attempt to demonstrate the “science” behind the tasks of running a company.

The relatively new degree of MBA (Master of Business Administration) was developed in the early to mid twentieth century to provide a formal program to train new managers in the “science” of business management. The typical MBA curriculum of graduate studies is comprised of a core series of quantitative classes, a series of case studies of actual work experiences, and degree specialization in the fields of marketing, human resources, finance, operations or logistics. These classes are all geared toward providing a series of competencies in a general business environment, and depending on the school, are more or less quantitative in nature.

The result of this training is that we have generated more and more MBA graduates over the past several years, with the average salaries of these graduates rising accordingly. According to the U.S. census bureau, 116,475 students graduated with an MBA in 2000 – 2001. (2)

In his book, The Leader, industrial psychologist Michael Macoby, drives home the point that today’s educational system stresses work-related, rather than humanistic studies:
Educational institutions justify curricula in terms of preparing people first for successful careers and only secondarily for life outside of work. The work place may be improved by workers with better schooling, but education will change only because it is no longer adaptive to what goes on at work. (3)

While we are producing an increasing number of MBA graduates, there appears to be a growing disparity between the knowledge imparted by these programs, and the leadership exhibited by the graduates of these programs. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, in their book Leaders, make the case that there is a gap between the MBA curricula and the graduates who lead modern corporations.
. . .Management education relies heavily, if not exclusively, on mechanistic, pseudorational “theories” of management and produces 60,000 new MBAs each year. The gap between management education and the reality of leadership at the workplace is disturbing, to say the least, and probably explains why the public seems to hold such a distorted (and negative) image of American business life.

But the image problem, though serious, is hardly the major problem. The major problem is that what management education does do moderately well is to train good journeymen/women managers; that is, the graduates acquire technical skills for solving problems. They are highly skilled problem solvers and staff experts. Problem solving, while not a trivial exercise is far from the creative and deeply human processes required of leadership. What’s needed is not management education, but leadership education. (4)

Thomas Teal, Senior Editor of the Harvard Business Review makes an even more compelling argument in his article “The Human Side of Management” that the human side of running a business, the side that deals with people, is often given short shrift in our educational institutions, and within most corporations themselves. Teal asserts that management requires something more than just a technical proficiency, it requires empathy and imagination.
Great management requires imagination. If a company’s vision and strategy are to differentiate its offerings and create competitive advantage, they must be original. Original has to mean unconventional, and it often means counterintuitive. Moreover, it takes ingenuity and wit to bring disparate people and elements together into a unified but uniquely original whole. There is even a name for this capacity. It’s called esemplastic imagination, and although it’s generally attributed to poets. . . (5)

Teal continues in his assessment of leadership in the corporation:
Another characteristic of great managers is integrity. All managers believe they behave with integrity, but in practice, many have trouble with the concept. Some think integrity is the same thing as secretiveness or blind loyalty. Others seem to believe it means consistency, even in a bad cause. Some confuse it with discretion and some with the opposite quality – bluntness – or with simply not telling lies. What integrity means in management is more ambitious and difficult than any of these. It means being responsible, of course, but it also means communicating clearly and consistently, being an honest broker, keeping promises, knowing oneself, and avoiding hidden agendas that hang other people out to dry. It comes very close to what we used to call honor, which in part means not telling lies to yourself. (6)

Finally, Teal talks of the kinds of managers that people in the workplace admire:
The managers people name with admiration are always the ones who delegate their authority, who make subordinates feel powerful and capable, and draw from them so much creativity and such a feeling of responsibility that their behavior changes forever. (7)

Surely, the thinking goes, even though business school trains managers to become technically proficient, if there are unmet educational requirements, corporations will act to correct them. Corporations, realizing that education is necessary, will endeavor to provide a quality education in their own self-interest. Unfortunately, this is not often the case, or where corporation recognize the need for better education, the methods proposed are often not what is needed.

Consider the article written by Bernard Avishai, Associate Editor of The Harvard Business Review, “What is Business’s Social Compact,” evaluates the compact between a business and its managers and concludes that the educational system needs to be reformed, and that business needs to take the lead in this effort, as a form “enlightened self-interest.” His remedy for this situation is to model education on the principals of the corporation, and develop quality circles in education, a six-sigma approach, if you will. Educators will develop
. . .a whole new set of incentives and accountability measures that provide real rewards for school staff whose students make real progress. (8)

At the same time, schools will offer
. . .a new language of explanation for city school boards (thus for instance, students are “customers,” failing students are “defects”). (9)

Later in the same article, Mr. Avishai posits that schools should teach the “discipline of competition,” (10) which would, presumably, allow schools to be run more like corporations.

To summarize the thinking of the “man of action,” the study of management science is the basis for establishing educational norms for the modern day, produces talented and serious students in the form of MBA graduates, and should be relied upon to set curricula for college and post graduate studies.

In fact, this practice has continued apace for the past thirty or so years. So, how are we to judge results, which is the canon of the “man of action?” Within the past ten years, we have witnessed the largest financial frauds ever perpetrated in history in the form of World Com, Adelphi Communications, Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco Industries, all led by eminent business school graduates. In each case, the people who were charged with leading the companies failed to provide real leadership, and the people who worked for them turned a blind eye to the problems that plagued these companies.

How could these scandals happen; where was the oversight that was developed to prevent the fraud from occurring? In their book, The Smartest Guys in The Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind point to a culture that was populated with MBAs who were so busy setting grand strategy that they did not focus on day-to-day operations. Similarly, they set-up compensation schemes that encouraged inflated results, and then did not set-up reporting systems to adequately monitor the results. Finally, the culture at Enron was one of “bigger is better” and exaggeration, which started at the highest levels in the company, and worked downward to every level of the company. (11) When fraudulent results were suspected, people did not act to correct them; since the fraud was endemic; correcting abuses would lead to the death of the “golden goose.”

This picture of corporate excess, greed and self-serving was not unique to Enron; in fact, it was repeated to greater or lesser extent, at all of the companies noted previously. How then, can we say that the practice of “management science” works and that corporation should be entrusted to set school curricula?

In answer to this question, let us go back to the opening premise of this paper- is the study of humanities relevant? Or more to the point is the study or humanities relevant in an age where the principal driver of societal change is the modern corporation? To both questions, the answer is emphatically – Yes!

We cannot ignore that for better or worse, the corporation as an organizational construct is here to stay. A corporation is the most efficient way to organize large groups of people toward a single goal, and to raise the large sums of capital needed to ensure the financial wherewithal to achieve those goals. But a corporation is a construct, not a person, and people are needed to set goals for educational curricula and excellence. Corporations are guided by “enlightened self interest:” people are sometimes guided by altruism, charity and compassion, all of which are needed to establish effective educational standards.

It is time to stop churning out hundreds of thousands of technically proficient “doers,” and instead concentrate on a series of programs that will teach people to think, and then to do. The ancients, in teaching their future statesmen, recruited the brightest minds they could find to entrust the development of their young. Philip of Macedon, in searching for a teacher for his son Alexander, recruited the finest mind of his time, Aristotle. Did Alexander learn to tote numbers, account for taxes, and perform statistical analysis? No, he learned what it meant to be a man – Aristotle taught him about character. (I’m not sure if in his conquests he applied all these principles, but Plutarch in his life of Alexander calls him a noble man who was fair and merciful to those he conquered). Similarly, Marcus Aurelius’ teacher was the stoic Epictetus, and Erasmus taught the son of James IV of Scotland, and the sons of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Great Britain.

We must take a lesson from the ancients: it is important to trust the teaching of our young people to the brightest minds of our time. Certainly, today’s business leaders yield wealth and power greater than that known in ancient times, yet we teach them how to “cipher” and not how to develop character. The development of character was the primary attribute of a liberal education until the middle of the twentieth century, when we did an about-face and began to emphasize the vocational aspects of teaching to the detriment of the liberal arts.

Let us turn once again to Michael Macoby, and his work The Leader, to understand his notions on the educational requirements of a leader.
What is most lacking for the education of leaders in our culture is education in the humanities, first of all in clear writing and speaking, but also in religion, ethical philosophy, depth psychology, and history.

The best modern managers are well educated in science and technology and perhaps law and ahistorical social sciences, such as economics. But they know little history and lack a sense of what human development means over time. They do not see that history is not an unbroken line of progress, but includes models of progressive social organization that appear, disappear, and need to be rediscovered. They are unaware that irrational rules and institutions were probably once rational solutions to a problem that no longer exists. They do not understand that the modern scientific method did not spring full-blown into the eighteenth-century mind, but is rooted in values of truth and free inquiry that have been defended by heroic individuals. Science could not have progressed without the courage of men like Galileo and Benjamin Franklin. To maintain and develop the scientific tradition, we must further develop our humanistic values to struggle against the superstition, fear, and distrust that mushroom in the darkness of uncertainty. (12)

The real shortcoming of the business education as it is currently structured is that it teaches a narrow set of proficiencies without providing a context in which to use these new talents. It is one thing to teach a set of statistical techniques, and quite another thing to be able to apply those techniques in a real-life setting.
Turning again to Macoby, we read that businessmen often lack the understanding to deal with people issues at work, because they have not been taught to understand problems in a larger context.
Elsa Porter and Pher Gyllenhammar (in their book, People at Work) emphasize their view that education for leadership should teach the ethical and humanistic tradition of religion, philosophy, and literature. Stan Lundine (mayor of Jamestown, NY from 1969 – 1976, and 3 time democratic congressman from New York) observed that in new factories, managers are unable to handle new responsibility because they are not prepared by an education in the humanities. Once they give up mechanical control, their understanding of people and ability to articulate principles of moral conduct fails them. He says

The problem is not lack of modern psychological insight, but a lack of the deeper sense of the humanities and the struggle to realize human values through the centuries. We have engineers who are technical experts, but who don’t really understand people. On the deeper scientific issues, you can’t trust science to solve the problems. These are ethical issues. We have gone beyond the simple scientific fix for anything.”

. . .The study of the Bible, comparative religion, ethical philosophy and psychology, and great literature leads one to explore the inner life, particularly the struggle to develop the human heart against ignorance, convention, injustice, disappointment, betrayal, and irrational passion. Such an education prepares one to grapple with his fear, envy, pride and self-deception. It raises questions about the nature of human destructiveness and the legitimate use of force. Without it, a would-be leader tends to confuse his or her own character with human nature, guts with courage, worldly success with integrity, the thrill of winning with happiness. (73)

Perhaps, then, we have come to the essence of why a study of the humanities is relevant today: it provides a mirror to the soul, a touchstone for man to understand his place in the world and in society at large. It provides a context to the seemingly unrelated events that happen each day; it provides us with the comfort that we are not alone when asked to do difficult or unasked-for actions. It allows us to relate to other human beings, even if we are forced, through circumstance, to perform actions which may be unpleasant for both parties. The study of the humanities provides us with an historical perspective that is lacking in merely toting numbers, or analyzing trends.

The study of humanities can counteract that feeling of isolationism, of unreality, and dis-connectedness that seems so rampart in our society. It can counteract the feelings of hopelessness and despair that have crept into our lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It can also serve as a bridge to the great minds that have preceded us, so that we can open a Shakespearean play, or a Dickens’ novel, and understand their times and concerns and gather insights into how they reacted when faced with similar problems. We can converse with the great men and women of the past, and allow us to put our concerns and cares, which are real and troublesome, into the context of the larger scope of history, and in small measure draw comfort from the fact that we are not really alone, after all. Finally, the study of the humanities allows us to understand “the ways of God,” when dealing with our fellow man.

(1) Roberts, Sam, Who We Are Now, (Henry Holt & Company, 2004)p. 199-201
(2) CMBA website, http://www.certifiedmba.com
(3) Macoby, Michael, The Leader, (Simon and Schuster, 1981), p. 17.
(4) Bennis, Warren and Nanus, Burt, Leaders, (Harper & Row, 1985), p. 219-220.
(5) Teal, Thomas, “The Human Side of Management,” Harvard Business Review, November/December, 1996, p. 37.
(6) Ibid, p. 37.
(7) Ibid, p. 39.
(8) Avishai, Bernardi, “What is Business’s Social Compact?” Harvard Business Review, January/February, 1994, p. 46.
(9) Ibid, p. 46.
(10) Ibid, p. 47.
(11) McLean, Bethany and Elkind, Peter, The Smartest Guys in The Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, (Portfolio, 2004).
(12) Macoby Michael, The Leader, (Simon and Schuster, 1981), p 231.
(13) Ibid, p. 231-232.