The Humanities, Philanthropy, and the Good Life
+ + + +I recently finished reading Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It, and as the director of a significant nonprofit project that is dependent on donor generosity for its very survival, I felt every bit of it in my bones. Schiller argues (among other things) that one of the things that went wrong with philanthropy as we know it, especially in the United States, is the ways that philanthropy has become an alibi for capitalism, picking up the slack for public funding in ways that encourage oligarchic hoarding and tax evasion, and that deepen the conviction that basic needs are a private rather than a public responsibility. And as numerous other authors have argued, expecting capitalism to provide the means of solving the problems created by capitalism is a pipe dream at best.
+Beyond that, however, Schiller's arguments throughout the book led me to start puzzling through some of the problems that have recently been getting under my skin in my day job. I've been working over the last two years to help support an arts and humanities college in a large public research university at what feels like the worst possible moment for our fields and institutions. We've been under attack for a long time -- from the very beginning even, if you ask Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon -- but things have recently taken several particularly dire turns, as programs and departments and colleges around the country are being shut down. Some of those closures are being forced for nakedly ideological reasons, but others are taking a more utilitarian approach to the same end, and its those issues that most surfaced for me as I read The Price of Humanity, and in particular Schiller's unpacking of so-called "Effective Altruism."
+The Effective Altruist mode of understanding the "good" served by philanthropy relies on quantifiable metrics focusing on, for instance, the numbers of lives saved in selecting causes to be supported. This appears at first a noble notion (who wouldn't want to save lives?) but one that calculates the "value" of those lives in terms of their future productivity. A life saved is not saved for the pleasure of the one who lives it, or the people and communities they touch, but rather for their economic value, for their potential contributions to the capitalist production, extraction, and funneling of wealth into the hands of what coincidentally turns out to be the donor class.
+What I want us to take a look at is the degree to which higher education, its leaders, its benefactors, and even its publics have knowingly or unknowingly gotten interpellated into this mode of thinking about the work we do on campus and the students we do it for. Our students have long since been redirected away from understanding themselves as anything like academic citizens -- full members in a shared community of learning -- into becoming consumers of of a commercial product designed to deliver an individual benefit. As I've argued elsewhere, given the shift in the funding model for higher education from the public to individual students and families, and given the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that those students and families are required to pay for that benefit, it's little surprise that the consumer exchange involved in higher education prompts so many of them to seek a degree program that will deliver as high a return on investment as possible. As a result, academic majors that claim, by their name or their industry connections, to provide a lucrative career path have grown in recent years, while those with less obviously utilitarian purposes have come to be seen as luxuries, and have accordingly shrunk.
+And now we find ourselves at a moment at which some of the benefactors of higher education -- I'm looking at you, state legislatures -- are taking it upon themselves to determine what a reasonable salary expectation for a college graduate should be, and to eliminate those departments and programs that by their calculations do not immediately provide that return on investment.
+There's something deeply sinister in this turn of events, and it's not just the extraordinary short-sightedness of looking at earnings in a first job out of college as evidence of the value of the learning done on campus. As the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Humanities Indicators project has demonstrated, humanities majors may earn less after graduation than their counterparts in STEM fields, but the gap narrows with work experience. They have also demonstrated that only 5.2% of terminal humanities bachelors' degree holders were unemployed in 2021, as compared with 4.3% of all terminal bachelors' degree holders, as well as that those terminal humanities bachelors' degree holders had a median annual income of $64,000, not that far below the median income of all terminal bachelors' degree holders, which was $72,000.
+But the defensive posture that makes it necessary to quote those studies points to the deeper and more troubling assumption that the sole indicator of higher education's value is the productive potential of students as they leave campus and head out into industry. Our students, in other words, have been reduced to the economic output of the campus machinery. As Schiller notes, "[t]he utilitarianism of Effective Altruism has infected even legacy institutions, leading their decision-makers to prioritize visible numbers over holistic interventions" (Schiller 74). This utilitarianism is everywhere in higher education today, not just in how we value our faculty (whose careers are forever measured by quantified assessments of productivity) but now, increasingly in our students, whose earning potential outstrips every other reason for their presence on campus. Colleges and universities have accepted to their detriment a role in which they are primarily providers of economic impact, at both the level of the individual student's career path and at the level of community development. If we are able to focus on supporting students in developing lives worth living or supporting communities in becoming places worth living in -- lives and places filled with creativity, intellectual engagement, and care for one another and the world -- it is only in secondary, and increasingly marginal ways. Instead, along with the Effective Altruists, "we quantify and price human life based on productivity and labor" (Schiller 59), and we quantify and price learning based on its immediate economic benefits.
+"Our best models for philanthropy," Schiller argues, "are people who take advantage of its non-utilitarian possibilities and turn them against capitalism, not be redistributing its spoils but by rejecting its definition for what makes human beings valuable" (152). Redistributing cash is important -- don't mistake Schiller's point -- but it does little to support the redistribution of power. And higher education has been so completely subsumed in the flows of capital that today what makes not only education but students themselves valuable is their future productivity rather than their capacity for thought, creativity, and care.
+Thinking with Schiller has helped me understand a bit of my ambivalence about the increasing push for "career readiness" programs in the humanities. I believe in the power of these programs to help students recognize that it is possible for them to make a good living even if they graduate with a degree in English, or Philosophy, or Art History -- a necessary concession to capitalist reality that I don't want to dismiss. The world we live in demands that we demonstrate our value in monetary terms. But at the same time I want to be sure that our answers to the question "what can you do with a humanities degree" do not stop with the utilitarian. Because yes, you can in fact do all manner of productive things with a humanities degree, precisely because it teaches you not just how to function in a corporate role but how to learn whatever you need to know wherever you find yourself. But even more than that, it teaches you about the full richness of human flourishing, about what makes life worth living.
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