So, after four – or like five and a half – years of meandering studies in the humanities, you’ve finally checked out of the University with a BA. Now on the job hunt, your parents’ favorite platitude about the unemployability of a humanities grad is something that begins to sink in as a matter of practical reality. Though you might still find Socratic fun in pestering others with questions about Truth and Justice, it’s clear that our labor market is even less favorable to savvy in these matters than the Athenian market of Socrates' day.
I’d like to add my two cents here to the discussion about tackling the employment challenges facing humanities studies, to this end offering a brief outline of a mandatory course I think should be taken up across humanities programs. A number of studies have appeared in recent years highlighting just how much one’s attractiveness may count towards one's chances of professional success. In general, these studies find that hiring practices are, like, super biased in favor of the good-looking, who on average move more readily into higher status and better-paid positions. Though this may trouble our meritocratic views of job distribution, it isn't necessarily bad news for humanities students, having as they typically do a relatively astute sense of style. What I wanna advocate here is that the humanities make it an objective to develop this sort of acumen in students, so that they might enter the labor market with at least one competitive advantage over their more skilled unigrad peers. Students would be taught to use and adorn their natural looks to the most flattering effect through hairstyling, outfitting, accessorizing, and the like. Curriculum could be divided between study of the world of glamour and fashion, and business and workplace dress codes so that students learn to appear sophisticated and sexy within the dictates of professionalism.
It’s argued sometimes that humanist education enriches our moral character through improving our capacity for stuff like empathy, critical self-examination, et al. Of course ‘skills’ of this noble variety lack more than remote marketability, indeed may undermine prospects in a labor market where ruthless competitiveness is a pervasive norm. For grads of the humanities, a gainful career in the arts and cultural sector, where too many end up, is only getting harder to manage; more and more the dominant ‘creative’ players in this world are the MBAs and entertainment lawyers, whose regard for producing intelligent and tasteful culture stands in inverse proportion to their interest in accumulating profit. But if there’s one thing that humanities students have going for them professionally speaking, it’s their keen sense of style. My suggestion that a course designed to cultivate this skill be made mandatory across humanities programs rests on the view that such a reform, radical though it may be, would nevertheless accord with the most popular theory of the humanities today, namely postmodernism. This theory teaches that meaning and knowledge are only artificial constructs, and to judge the 'truth' of discourse for its aesthetic qualities, rhetorical force, and power over the minds of others. In spite the anti-corporate tendency of postmodernism, this emphasis has helped prime humanities students for future careers as dispensers of illusions in marketing and public relations, where the more prosperous among them end up, as well as prepare them psychologically for the aesthetic favoritism common to hiring practices. Here’s hoping and advocating that this theory serve greater practical ends through the implementation of the course we've outlined, helping humanities students look fabulous and stay afloat in our increasingly technocratic occupational system.
