About six weeks ago, Megan McArdle had a post at the Daily Beast asking "What's the use of a PhD?"I've been troubled by her conclusions, especially this, "From the outside, a humanities PhD does not seem likely to ever be a career-enhancing move, for the simple reason that a PhD is a lengthy apprenticeship designed to teach you the skills needed to do exactly one thing: be a professor."
It is again time for my Renaissance and Reformation class, and my reconnection with the theoretical basis of my work as a humanist. The humanists did not want to prepare students for the cloistered ivory tower. The humanists advocated an active life of engagement in the politics of the city and in business. It was the educational rivals, the scholastics, who saw the purpose of education as a narrow pursuit towards law, medicine, or the queen of the sciences - theology. The humanists argued that we should study man's history and literature to understand how to live - how to live an active life. Even the humanists wary of politics (Petrarch and Erasmus, just to name two) were still engaged in the central pursuit of the Renaissance, the rebooting of western civilization, no small matter.
How is it then, that further study of the humanities has become an essentially scholastic enterprise? It appears to be the case that the university is dominated by modern scholastics, and that even our core subjects are run by scholastics for scholastic purposes, not to ask how we should live an active life in our community, but rather to ask questions of interest to no one other than fellow academics. For humanists, history is not a subject, it is the subject. Everything has a history, and history can organize any subject meaningfully. The history of the humanists tended to focus on the lives of great men. It did this so it could examine the consequences of human action, and to then ask moral questions about their actions. If we understand something about the nature of causation and the moral significance of our choices, if we understand this well enough to write and speak persuasively among our peers and in our institutions, we are ready to go out into the world.
Such a modern humanist would understand classical republics, the British constitutional and political history, and American constitutional and political history. They would be prepared to undertake the role of an active citizen. Such a modern humanist would be able to assemble the history of their firm and their industry, so they could argue from evidence of success and failure when a proposed course of action was presented. They could quote the founder and other figures who established the culture of the firm, understand the mission of the business, and had a bigger vision of their role than a job description.
Florence was a town of business. It had a woolens industry and was the center of banking, thanks to a Papal monopoly. It was not a university town, like Bologna, Modena, or Padua.
Among the many institutions that need to be rebooted, the humanities certainly appears to be near the top of the list.