“The decline in liberal-arts disciplines is happening because, on many campuses, no one has taken ownership of explaining them.”

That’s Scott Carlson and Ned Laff in The Chronicle of Higher Education on “The Hidden Utility of the Liberal Arts“.

The authors thoughtfully discuss some of the causes of this decline and its various aspects, and they try to diagnose why many efforts to bridge the “translation chasm” between, for example, “what students and their parents think a French degree leads to and what doors it could actually open up in the world,” seem to fail. Often, they say, when academics make the case for the liberal arts, they’re talking to themselves. And there’s often an inability to concretely explain to students how studying the liberal arts will lead to a satisfying career path.

Carlson and Laff conceptualize the “hidden utility of the liberal arts” mainly as hidden vocational utility. While I think higher education’s self-branding as a job training program has largely been a mistake, they nonetheless have some interesting suggestions about how to convey that utility. They discuss philosophy, but their more developed example concerns French. It takes more than just talking to students about the portability of the skills they’ll develop as French majors; it involves making institutional connections and being aware of real world developments and opportunities:

Given the focus of parents and students on getting a job and earning money after graduation, bridging the translation chasm has to start with the career possibilities—and they are out there, even for a French major in Ohio. It can start with a simple question: Who sells Ohio internationally? The state’s economic-development corporation, JobsOhio, runs a division devoted to the dozens of French companies in the state, which employ 24,000 people and have seen 50-percent growth in jobs over the past 10 years, generating more than $2.3 billion in trade between France and the Buckeye State. JobsOhio works closely with the Ohio chapter of the French-American Chamber of Commerce, which offers mentorship and accommodations to French entrepreneurs seeking to expand to the Midwest.

Or a French department could draw connections to the state’s social needs, highlighted in the recent election: In Springfield, Haitian immigrants had been subjected to bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches after Donald Trump, in a September presidential debate, falsely claimed they were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Many Haitians speak both of their country’s two official languages, French and Haitian Creole, which is derived from French.

Internationally, French consistently ranks as one of the world’s five most-useful languages, applicable far beyond France. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, has more French speakers than France itself—that’s just one African country on a demographically youthful continent poised to take a rising role in global business and culture in the 21st century.

Through simple outreach, a French department could make contact with the French business community and start to work out pipelines between French majors and experiential-learning opportunities, which would help students and their parents see the possibilities already present around them. Or, a college could show French majors how to employ their language skills to work with social-services and community-health agencies in communities like Springfield.

It would be interesting to see this kind of thinking applied to the undergraduate study of philosophy. If your department has been doing this kind of work, let’s hear about it.

Another strategy they recommend is to “invert an often-used solution to the translation chasm”:

Instead of setting up the humanities and social sciences in service to preprofessional and vocational programs, why aren’t the vocational courses more often in service to French, or philosophy, or history?

After all, the major is typically only about a quarter to a third of the credits required for an undergraduate degree. A student majoring in French, for example, would have plenty of room to add courses in web development, marketing, and accounting to build out a career in helping small businesses in Ohio sell their wares internationally. French could easily be combined with the pre-med sciences to pave a route either to medical school or to physician-assistant programs. Or French could be teamed up with courses in sports management to open up a variety of avenues in soccer, lacrosse, hockey, or other sports popular in French-speaking countries. What’s more, a student immersed in Francophone culture is more likely to appreciate French history, social mores, and trends, helping companies and organizations see the pitfalls and opportunities in ways that a management or health-sciences major might not.

Almost any liberal-arts program can embrace this broader perspective to connect students to viable career routes that also resonate with their personal and vocational interests

Is this a viable possibility for philosophy major programs at some schools? Is it a desirable one? Is any program doing something like this?

Discussion welcome.