Like many of her classmates in UC Davis’ English doctoral program, Sonja Streuber is a teacher and a trainer of minds. She develops new ideas and publishes her work. The difference between her and many of her classmates is where she has been working – not at a university but at Agilent Technologies, a global hardware and software company with offices in Folsom.
After several years of stringing together part-time teaching jobs at local community colleges and universities, Streuber decided two years ago to find a place where she could use her research, writing and teaching skills – and make a decent living.
As a senior technical trainer, she helps develop new business processes. She writes training-course curricula and mentors junior colleagues. Her years of teaching experience at UC Davis, Streuber said, "was really the kicker" that got her the job. But despite her success, Streuber hasn’t discussed her career change with many people at the university. Most would not have understood her decision, she believes.
Streuber’s story is not unusual at UC Davis, students and faculty members say.
But that’s starting to change. With a mix of pragmatism and a true belief in the power of humanistic thinking to transform society, universities – including UC Davis – are seeking to better prepare humanities graduates to contribute to the workplace and the community. Their study of human history, culture, language and philosophy can be invaluable, say advocates.
So, led by the efforts of Elizabeth Langland, dean of humanities, arts and cultural studies, and faculty members Elizabeth Constable and Catherine Robson, UC Davis plans to develop a master’s degree in applied humanities.
The program hopes to serve students whose goals are to work in the private and nonprofit sectors. UC Santa Cruz is considering a similar master’s. Both would be among the first graduate programs with a specific focus on creating connections between humanities and the everyday world.
At UC Irvine, the Humanities Out There (HOT) program takes graduate and undergraduate students studying history, literature, philosophy and other humanities disciplines into six Santa Ana public schools to teach core lessons on subjects like citizenship, censorship and creative writing, integrating traditions from the past with current-day applications.
After seeing the impact of their knowledge on a fresh audience, "graduate students are a different type of scholar-citizen than they were in the beginning," said Julia Lupton, a professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine and the founding director of HOT.
Graduate students from the HOT program have gone on to change the focus of their studies and their career paths.
Humanities graduate students often are given one model of professional success by their mentors and peers: a tenured professorship at a major university.
Though students have acquired skills that would be useful in a business or nonprofit environment, they are not often given the tools or support to enter those non-academic fields, says Langland.
She foresees the program offering courses and internships to help students transfer their humanities perspectives to the public and workplace, helping people, for example, understand cultural conflicts brought to the fore by Sept. 11 or business ethics dilemmas like those faced by employees of Enron.
"Science has been our god in the 20th century, but these are problems that can’t be solved by science," Langland said. "We aren’t going to solve homeland security simply through specialized security devices. We need better understanding of diverse cultures."
Job market, biases help drive need
An applied humanities program not only benefits the business world by providing a source of expertise; it benefits humanities graduates by better preparing them for work in industry and by making them more marketable.
Giving impetus to the program is a dwindling job market for tenured humanities professorial positions. Robson – who worked at London’s National Portrait Gallery and in publishing before receiving her doctorate – was motivated to work on the project after years of trying to help graduate students find jobs.
"I think the academy wants very badly to create miniatures of itself," she said. "The feeling is that if you don’t get a job at a research university, you’ve failed, and the university has failed."
Employees with graduate degrees can also face an unexpected bias in the workplace, Streuber said. "In the industry, the Ph.D. is one of those degrees that is viewed as a little impractical," she said. "Doctoral students often have to prove they can think on their feet more than someone who has a B.A. or a master’s degree."
UC Davis’ program will give students skills to find meaningful employment in a number of areas. Robson, who has been investigating curricula for the program, envisions it including new courses on legal issues in the humanities, group dynamics, nonprofit accounting, and intellectual property rights in culture, along with existing classes in the humanities, such as critical theory, cultural rhetoric, American folklore and the history and philosophy of philanthropy.
Students would cap off the program with a summer internship and a project that integrates their humanities specialty and their area of career interest. Though the applied humanities degree would be a master’s level program, students studying for their doctorate or those who have just completed their degree could "dip in" to applied humanities offerings at will, Robson said.
Partnership-building stressed
Community and business input would be essential to UC Davis’ program, too, she said. Robson has been impressed with the way that Graduate School of Management Dean Robert Smiley has cultivated relationships with Sacramento-area businesses and hopes to develop a similar rapport.
A faculty committee will be developing the program, and a director could be hired by the end of the academic year. Langland believes the program could form quickly and with minimal funds since many of the faculty members who would teach in it are already on campus. She’s hoping other faculty members, who, like Robson and Constable, have worked in professions outside the university, might want to get involved.
Law School dean Rex Perschbacher said he’s in favor of any interactions between the professional school and students in the humanities and social sciences. "They produce benefits on both sides: on one hand broadening legal education and on the other side providing some expertise in law and business."
Graduate programs in public policy and arts administration, which also combine academic theory and practice, are designed to place graduates in specific types of jobs. That isn’t the case with the applied humanities program.
In launching the pioneer program, Robson acknowledges that UC Davis might have a hefty task in front of it. "Our aims are so broad," she said. "The reason that it hasn’t been done before is that it is difficult."
The new program aside, Robson would like the campus’s humanities departments to do more to encourage graduate students to consider a wide range of careers. "It’s only fair to make all graduate students aware that the academic job market is not the be-all, end-all," she said.
"You don’t want to dampen their ardor about an academic career, but it’s very useful for them to think about wider audiences and how to present their work in different ways."