Teaching History in 2025
I don't (just) teach "skills"
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
A liberal arts education promises that everything you could know about the world can be valuable, meaningful, and important.The connections you make in your history or English class help you better understand everything else in the world, even if after graduation you’re headed for a biotech career. Broad learning expands your horizons, and makes you a better worker, citizen, etc. That’s why universities push general education requirements, and why employers are increasingly interested in liberal arts and humanities majors. Right?
I am told many employers are hiring more history majors, and of course I’m happy for my students. But if the purpose of a history major is just a higher chance at working in finance, that’s not really meeting the liberal arts promise. Since well before I was an undergraduate, there’s been a movement to push humanities education as “skills”-- here’s an article on an initiative at Georgia Tech in which “applied humanities” help “build essential job skills like communication, collaboration, and deep critical thinking.” It’s true that our courses help do this. But that’s not an argument for a proper research university.
The “skills” approach allows for and in fact encourages key problems plaguing higher education. First among these is the decoupling of research and teaching. Traditionally, academia was based around experts doing both: the best person to learn from is a leading expert in the field, and universities can advance both students’ knowledge and our collective knowledge of the world by making sure experts have the resources to do research.
But the skills approach leaves little reason for any of this. Do you need an expert in medieval pottery or 18th-century maritime labor to teach collaboration? And if you do, do you need to pay them enough and give them enough time to do research and keep advancing the field? I can probably construct an argument, but even I wouldn’t find it convincing. If our only purpose is job skills, we don’t need academia as we know it.
Another problem is breadth. Why does a university need History and American Studies and English if they all teach “job skills”? Universities benefit from interdisciplinary research and organic connections– speaking to a colleague in the hall, collaborating on a new speaker series. Another reason public institutions especially should offer every subject they can is because otherwise those subjects are available only to the rich. Everyone should be able to learn Ancient Greek or Renaissance sculpture. Not just the rich.
Students can be a partial check on this. They love humanities courses– our enrollments actually help subsidize science and engineering departments. But students often cannot afford to make major life decisions based upon what they love. And their consumer decisions to go to university X or university Y don’t exert direct, precise, or powerful enough pressure to keep university administrators from cutting departments, or state legislators from underfunding their institutions.
The skills approach dramatically worsens the subordination of universities and public knowledge to markets and private profit. There are things we can know that aren’t profitable, for anyone, or that are less profitable than other things. Universities are where we conduct the fundamental research that moves science forward, and inquire into our past to better understand who we are. They cannot properly do this and, at the same time, be the place you go to pay for job training that benefits your future employer.
The most painful part of all of this for me– besides my own personal career woes, which almost every academic has now anyway– is what it means for students. Teaching college students in 2025 feels like offering false hope. Look at all these beautiful things you can learn! With resources and time you won’t have. Look at all this knowledge! Which you can’t add to any more. Look at all these beliefs! Which you can have in a book club, but won’t have a meaningful ability to vote for. Look at all this science! Which your employer might not value, even if you took this class precisely because you were told it was in-demand, leaving you in debt and without a job. Honest parents might have to tell their kids: you can be anything you want to be, as long as the market says it’s valuable. I teach students about all of this– how we got here, what it means– and I like to think that helps us imagine, together, a better world. But for now it just means knowing exactly what sucks about the present.
The crushing weight of the economy presses down upon every university interaction. Students regularly choose majors because their parents insist they need to, not because they want to. And those parents might actually be right. In a competitive world of markets, where every economic outcome is decided by a combination of ruthless competition, existing advantages (wealth, networking), and luck, there is little slack left over for research, for learning, for curiosity, for choice. I’m genuinely excited to return to the classroom next week. The classroom can be a new beginning for students. But too often, university coursework can seem (or be) a stepping stone, an obstacle, or even a dead end.
Today’s university feels mournful. Senior faculty who have spent decades advancing our knowledge of our cultures, our bodies, and our universe retire with no replacement. Fewer and fewer institutions hire in many fields, and even disciplines broadly recognized as important, like biology, are slashed by the federal government. Associate professors try not to burn out as more and more administrative burdens are pushed onto them. Early career faculty scramble from temporary job to temporary job, praying the next move will be the last. Students try to predict and meet the shifting whims of employers years in advance, in order to protect themselves from rising housing costs and economic recession.
I’ve written about market structures and their corrosive effects on society plenty enough in this newsletter– this is what that feels like in action. It’s worse elsewhere, in plenty of other ways. K-12 educators are constantly being asked to do more with less. So are many corporate workers. Market competition turns all of us against each other, and makes every interaction instrumental: you are hustling or you are falling behind. Are you tired yet? I’m tired. My students will probably be tired.
If everything is a means to an end, there are no ends. The solution is easy to understand and unimaginably difficult to achieve. At some point we have to decide that some things matter intrinsically. Learning about the American Revolution or the Han Empire is important because it is important– not because it helps you build essential job skills. If employers want job training, they should pay for it. Not us, not the government, and not students. Universities should not have to beg for scraps– they should be refuges from competition, not another arena.
This might sound like something impossible to sell to the public– why should the tweed-wearing classicists with big mansions and summers off (as we are often imagined, wrongly) get to be free of the rat race? But the very universality of that demand is also, I think, how we can get it. Everyone could use a world that’s easier, looser, more forgiving– more free. This is the same pitch behind universal healthcare, a federal job guarantee, and a robust welfare state. Universities can’t be the only place we pursue that. They are, however, one good place to start.