Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece this morning on how to advise students who major in history written by a history professor and a retired IBM executive.  Here is an excerpt.

A sense of urgency can be felt around the hallways of liberal-arts departments: We have less money, fewer students, and more pressure to justify what we do. The future of the humanities seems uncertain, and a future without the humanities seems frightening yet all too imaginable in the face of political attacks and program cuts.

History faculty members share the sense of impending doom: “It’s the end of history,” an essayist recently warned in The New York Times, “and the consequences will be significant.” We’ve responded by updating curricula, jazzing up our course titles (from “Medieval History” to “Knights and Monsters”), and teaching about the historical aspects of present-day concerns such as technology, the environment, or social equity. Likewise, for more than a decade, we’ve had energetic conversations about how to better prepare our doctoral students for nonacademic career options.

But have we done enough to help majors and graduate students grasp the full range of career options available to them with a history degree? Clearly not. As historians whose careers and focus have bridged the gap between higher education and the business world (one of us was an IBM executive and the other hosts a podcast on the practical uses of history, especially in business and tech), we suggest three steps that academics and administrators could take to build the case. More specifically, these steps would help students find fulfilling careers in the kind of well-paying domains — business and tech — that rarely feature prominently in our history-career conversations.

The article goes on to make three broad recommendations.  The article goes into detail on each recommendation.

Step 1: Identify and spotlight your discipline’s “superpowers.”

Step 2: Get more tactical in linking your students to good jobs.

Step 3: Be open to the value of “practical” history.

History as a professional discipline developed in response to the Enlightenment’s call to arms for a systematic exploration of the universe. But it flourished under the aegis of 19th-century nation states that relied on historians to consolidate ideas about nations and peoples in order to justify their power. We need not sympathize with all premises of 19th-century historiography to appreciate the fact that state building helped our discipline to evolve, to make an impact on such areas as international diplomacy, and to become central to the liberal-arts curriculum.

Today, businesses are increasingly expected to be socially responsible, and many of them are improving people’s lives. They might be our natural partners in the effort to revive interest in history and the humanities.

As a political science major and a history minor,  I was fortunate enough to develop an administrative and technology-based career.  Our colleagues in the liberal arts need to become creative in advising their majors.  The information in this article is most helpful

Tony

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