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"It seems to me that when pundits deride the humanities as irrelevant, it's because we aren't, and that poses a threat. Yes, studies in the humanities do raise uncomfortable questions, like when Susan Reverby, a women's studies professor at Wellesley, documented a series of horrific unethical medical experiments that the U.S. Government performed on Guatemalan prisoners in the 1940s. They do make you change your textbooks. They challenge firmly held beliefs about culture, and offer evidence to back it up. People who want humanities research to be "timeless" do not believe that it can or should be timely. They are wrong."

"So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities "

"In other words, economies today lack the spirit of innovation. Labour markets do not need only more technical expertise; they require an increasing number of soft skills, like the ability to think imaginatively, develop creative solutions to complex challenges and adapt to changing circumstances and new constraints."

"That's what happens to the majority of undergraduate projects in the humanities. Heroic research is undertaken, and the student suffers mightily during the writing process. But after being submitted for a grade, the results of all that work are filed away, never to be read again. (Of course, the same could be said of most dissertations and many academic monographs.) It's as if we've entered the print revolution while most of us are still illuminating manuscripts. What are we doing all this work for-one might ask-if not to make some kind of impact on the world? And why should anyone continue to pay for it?"

"We need an educational structure that takes instability and unpredictability as its starting point, its fundamental assumption. If a university is not made up of stable, enduring structures arranged linearly or hierarchically-schools, departments, majors, minors-but rather is made up of components that can be used or deployed according to demand and need, then invention instead of convention becomes the governing institutional dynamic."

"What do employers really want from college grads? "