Are Arts Degrees Worth Saving?

The Arts and Humanities departments at most of our universities have been ideologically captured by Marxists. They teach nothing useful or true, and the degrees they grant are not worth the paper they are printed on. Some brave and determined souls may still manage to wring an education out of their time of enrollment, but it will largely be in spite of, not because of, their programs and professors. Are these departments worth saving, or should the whole institution of the post-secondary study of the arts, literature in particular, just be scrapped as not worth the taxpayer’s money? Couldn’t we just let people who want to read and talk about books go to the library and create a book club, as my interlocutor suggested in the comments on Liza Liebs’ recent post:

Think Twice Before Attacking the Department of Education

I am not American, so I have nothing to say on the value of the US Federal Department of Education. But as a possessor of two degrees in history, and as the son of a professor of English, I do have some thoughts on the value of arts degrees, on what has been lost in their corruption, and why they are worth saving and supporting.

But let’s start by acknowledging the problem. Arts degrees have always had low value as credentials. They don’t reliably indicate that a particular person with a particular degree is qualified to do a particular job. This means that there is little external pressure to discipline what they teach. In some ways, this is a good thing. We don’t want employers setting the curriculum for the arts. They are too short-sighted in their requirements. But this lack of credential value is probably what left the arts faculties vulnerable to a Marxist takeover, which has, in turn, robbed them of what little credentialing value they might have had, to the point that for many people an arts degree, particularly a recent one, is considered a negative credential, disqualifying rather than qualifying.

Let’s make some distinctions. There are three kinds of qualification that an education program can lead to: degrees, credentials, and licenses.

A license is the most formal of these. It grants you permission to practice a regulated profession. It is usually issued by a government body or a professional association closely monitored by the government and working closely with educational institutions to govern instruction and evaluation methods. Licenses are regulated because mistakes in the regulated profession can cost people their lives, their health, or their property. Becoming licensed requires passing some pretty strictly defined tests as well as some period of closely supervised practice.

A credential is anything that is considered evidence of competence in an occupation. A license is a credential, but many less strict or formal criteria can be considered credentials as well. For instance, if you want a job as a technical writer in the medical device field, a degree in biology is often a required credential. There is no government regulation that says you have to have one, but it is something some employers will ask for because they think having that degree will make you better at the job of documenting medical devices.

A degree is really nothing more than a membership in a society of scholars. The reason it is called a degree is that such membership comes with degrees or ranks of membership, in which those of higher rank earn greater respect among their peers. I have a master’s degree in history, which is the second degree of membership in the society of historians. That used to mean something, though today, it is only the third degree, the PhD, that has any real significance. An MA is basically someone who failed or dropped out of a PhD program, which is exactly what I did.

A PhD in the arts is a credential, but only if you are applying for a job as a university teacher. When I was a hiring manager in technical communication, I would meet candidates from time to time who had PhDs. It always gave me pause. For one thing, there were a lot of academic writing habits they were going to have to unlearn before they could become a useful technical writer.

The technical communication profession, in which I spent most of my working life, is an interesting case study in degrees, credentials, and licenses. When engineering managers hire technical writers, they sometimes make a degree in English a credential, believing the English grads are taught to write. But in my experience of the profession, English grads did not do any better as technical writers than any other arts grad, in part because English degrees are not about writing but about reading, and any student who wrote essays regularly had as much writing experience as an English grad. Historians tended to be better because they had more developed research skills. One of the best I ever knew had a degree in theology.

Because technical writing is a well-paying job in a technical field that was available to people who (like me) didn’t have the math to be an engineer or a computer scientist, a number of universities decided to create degree programs in technical communication. But my experience was that having a degree in technical communication was no more predictive of success in the field than any other degree, and many people who took that degree did not remain in the field very long. Many of those I knew said that work in the field was nothing like what their university program had prepared them to expect.

However, the Society of Technical Communication, which long fancied itself to be a professional society on par with a medical or engineering society, decided that it wanted to create a licensing program for technical communication. After all, they argued, mistakes in manuals have caused accidents that killed people, so we should license technical writers the way we license engineers or pilots or doctors.

It was, to be frank, an attempt to keep the society itself relevant as the Web was robbing many such unregulated professional associations of their raison d’être. But neither governments nor employers showed any interest in the society’s attempt to create a licensing system, and most technical writers ignored it. Licenses are not something a profession creates to regulate itself; they are something that society demands they impose on themselves to protect other people. Mistakes in manuals just did not cause enough death and destruction for anyone to think the profession worth regulating. Nor was there much evidence that professional licensing would have reduced the number of such errors. Errors do still occur in regulated professions after all. The game was not worth the candle, and the Society for Technical Communication recently went bankrupt, having lost most of its membership to more agile and informal organizations like Write the Docs.

All of which is to say that degrees don’t always make good credentials, and that makes assessing the social utility of a degree difficult. Many recent graduates clutching their bachelor’s degree in victimhood and whinging are discovering that their degrees are a credential for absolutely nothing and a negative credential for many positions. But it is not because their degrees have no educational value that they make poor credentials; even the degrees of older generations (and of some current graduates) that have actual educational value have little direct or specific credentialling value.

So why bother funding such degree programs at all?

Here it is worth a little detour into the one thing I still remember from my other degree, my Bachelor’s in Education: educational assessment. In other words, creating tests. There are two qualities a good test should have: validity and reliability. Validity is the extent to which a test measures the thing it is supposed to measure. Reliability is the extent to which a test gives the same result consistently.

Consider a math test, for example. You could write a test that asked students to correctly solve equations. This test has very clear pass/fail criteria. The answers are unambiguous, so it is likely to be highly reliable. People with a given level of math proficiency will probably get the same scores as each other, and the same score if given the same test again.

The problem with this is that the point of teaching math is not simply to enable people to solve equations. That’s not very helpful unless they learn which type of equation to use to solve a real-world problem. If that's what you are trying to measure, your equations-solving test, though highly reliable, is not very valid. Students who can solve all the equation types may not have a clue how to apply them to real-world problems.

This is why a lot of math tests include word problems. To solve a word problem, the student can’t just solve an equation, they have to figure out which equation to use, then plug in the values correctly, and then solve the equation. This is a much more valid test. But it is also much less reliable. Students may not understand the word problems, and so may fail not because of poor math skills but because of poor reading comprehension (or because the problem is badly written due to the math teacher having poor composition skills).

Creating tests that are both valid and reliable is incredibly difficult. For instance, multiple-choice questions are more reliable but tend to be less valid. Essay questions may be more valid for many subjects, but they are less reliable since they may be marked differently by different people, and their grading may be influenced by the answers the examiner has just read. If your B+ essay question answer is read after a couple of D- answers, you may look like an A by comparison. If it is read after a couple of A+ answers, yours may look like a C by comparison. If the examiner is feeling ill, or is having a fight with his wife, or his dog just died, all these things may affect his mood and therefore the grades he gives.

Some things are easier to test for than others. Testing for mathematical ability, for instance, is easier than testing for historical knowledge, which is easier to test for than the quality of mind that one develops through the reading of great literature.

When I applied for my MA in history, there was a language requirement for the degree. It didn’t have anything to do with the subject matter of the degree. It was simply that all MA candidates had to demonstrate proficiency in a second language. I can’t learn languages. I don’t know why, but I can’t. In Canada, the default second language for English speakers is French, and I had learned that the French exam for the MA required fluent knowledge of the language, which I was never going to possess. However, the exams in the classical language were much less strict. So I spent the summer in the library desperately swotting up Latin.

When I arrived at the university, they gave me a sample of the previous year’s Latin test, which was a page of Livy to translate. I could not make head nor tail of it, and I went into the Latin exam expecting that this was going to be where my academic career came to a screeching halt. But I got lucky. The passage for that year’s exam was from Caesar, a much more straightforward writer than Livy, and he was describing an event I actually knew about from history. And so, I was able to make out just enough of it to scrape by and qualify for my MA program (in which I had no need of Latin whatsoever). That test was not, by any reasonable measure, either valid or reliable. It was not valid because it did not measure my ability to do the research required for my MA. It was not reliable because it produced different results based on the passage chosen and the accident of the candidate having knowledge of the subject described in the chosen passage.

It would be two more years before my academic career would finally come to a screeching halt as I dropped out of my PhD program. Looking back, I wonder if it would have saved me two wasted years if I had been set a passage from Livy on that test and been booted out of my MA program. On the other hand, my MA is in the history of technology. Did it teach me something valuable for my technical communication career? Did it make a difference with hiring managers when my resume came up in the pile? I will never know.

Here’s the kicker, though. In my experience, having a degree in any particular field, including in technical communication itself, was not any more or less predictive of having success in technical communication than any other degree. Nor was having a PhD predictive of any greater success than having a BA. But having a degree, no matter in what field, was predictive of greater success than not having a degree at all.

Here’s the point. No test of capability or knowledge is perfectly valid and perfectly consistent. Testing is easier in some fields than in others, largely because knowledge in those fields is more granular and more measurable. But this does not make those fields more important or more useful, though it does to a certain extent correlate with how measurable their usefulness is. But again, the fact that the usefulness of a field is hard to measure does not mean that that field is not useful.

For instance, it has been scientifically demonstrated that reading fiction changes how we see the world and therefore how we behave in all kinds of situations. And not only social situations:

However, imagination is not merely an indulgence; it is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows us to hypothesize, innovate, and problem-solve. Psychological studies have shown that individuals who regularly engage with fiction exhibit higher levels of empathy and social intelligence compared to those who primarily consume nonfiction. In a world increasingly characterized by division and misunderstanding, these skills are more crucial than ever.

So, reading fiction produces changes in the mind that are highly useful in multiple ways and can make us not only more sympathetic but more innovative as well. That is clearly a very useful thing.

But can we measure how much more sympathetic and inventive an English Lit graduate is compared to, say, someone with a degree in Biology? Clearly not. In fact, there are significant problems in the way English Lit students are evaluated, and the attempt to find something to test on can actually do great harm to English instruction. At times it degenerates into an exercise in finding racism or misogyny or homophobia in writers of the past, which is clearly neither valid nor reliable as a form of testing and is likely to ruin reading for students and therefore deprive them, and therefore society, of its benefits.

Nor is there any way to test aspiring writers to see if their books are more or less good at making people more sympathetic or innovative. Whatever criteria MFA programs use to evaluate their students, I am certain they are not trying to measure that, and it is clear that even if they were, there is no valid and reliable way to test for those things. These are matters that only posterity can judge.

Is it this difficulty in testing and credentialing that has led to the current corruption in the arts and in the faculties of arts and humanities? Are fields that are easier to measure less prone to corruption? To an extent, perhaps. But it is perfectly clear that corruption can enter credentialed and licensed professions. And it can enter their credentialing and licensing bodies themselves, and once there it can have a devastating impact on practitioners in those fields. We hear frequently these days about people being removed from their professions for failing to kiss Caesar’s ring. It was one such case that pulled JK Rowling into the current culture war, and Jordan Peterson’s persecution by the Ontario College of Psychologists is another prominent example.

The reason, perhaps, is that while it is easier in some fields than others to create valid and reliable tests, there is no field, even the most technical, in which it is possible to create tests that are completely valid and completely reliable. Thus every regulated field has multiple stages of licensing and multiple methods of evaluation. No matter how well candidates do on their format examinations, they also need recommendations and periods of supervised practice before they become fully licensed. And there is thus a door through which corrupting preference can enter into the granting and maintenance of credentials and licenses. Licenses can be revoked for malpractice, and malpractice can be construed in all kinds of corrupt ways, as is evidently the case in so many licensing boards today.

In short then, the lack of clear credentialing and licensing criteria for practitioners in the arts can make the arts and faculties of arts a little more vulnerable to corruption, but the existence of human judgment in even the most strictly regulated fields means that corruption can enter there too. A corrupt society will have corrupt institutions, and the fact that the corruption may start earlier in the humanities side of things is not a sign that technical fields are immune to it. Nor does it mean that properly functioning humanities faculties are less useful to society, and therefore less worth rescuing from corruption, than any other field.

More importantly, well-functioning humanities institutions help calibrate the mind to reality and fortify the character for action, and these are essential tools for combating corruption in a society. For this reason in particular, far from jetisoning the arts as the first act in the fight back against corruption in the universities, they should be the first faculties that we seek to reform, for if we can reform them, we can raise up a generation with the clarity of vision and stoutness of heart to recognize and fight back agains the corruption of the rest.

Why cultivate university-level programs in the arts rather than just letting people join book clubs? Because a good university program brings discipline and challenge to the study of the arts. It subjects your impressions and interpretations to criticism by members of the society of scholars that you seek to join. All of this serves to sharpen and discipline the mind in a way that would never occur in a book club or library. It introduces rigor into the process. Not, to be sure, the rigor of exacting measurement, but rather the rigor of vigorous debate and finding the courage to hold your own under the strain of contradiction, and the wisdom to change your mind when you are shown to be mistaken.

Because this is the virtue of the study of the arts. It is not that it turns out people fit for jobs in particular fields, though there are a number of fields where success is more probable for people with a degree, regardless of subject. It is that the study of the arts, properly conducted, produces people of compassion and imagination whose minds are calibrated to reality and whose characters are fortified for action. The existence of such people is hugely beneficial to society in all kinds of ways. Even if we can’t measure individuals or even programs very well, the value of the maintenance and encouragement of bodies of scholars in the arts is incalculable. It’s just that, well, it may take someone with an arts degree or two to recognize that value.