I did not look forward to my visit to Utah Valley University in the fall of 2023. Facing the start of a new quarter of teaching, I felt that the trip would probably bring me little exhilaration. Bad news about cuts to the humanities kept rolling in from all sides, most recently from West Virginia University, which has cut more than 30 degree programs entirely, most in the humanities and liberal arts. I had been invited to lecture to students in the philosophy course that is required of all undergraduates at this huge (more than 43,000 students), open-enrollment public university. Although I had confidence in the skill and good judgment of Michael Shaw, the professor who had invited me, I had to wonder how likely it was that a public university in our benighted time would continue to support such a vast and ambitious undertaking at a level to make it really work.

How wrong, in retrospect, my reluctance was. In Orem, Utah, I encountered one of the most heartening scenes in higher education that I have ever witnessed in my long career: an overflow crowd of around 150 in the main room and as many in an adjacent room, a crowd of students who were not just marking time — believe me, I know all too well what that looks like. These were students who were really paying attention the entire hour, and who then peppered me with very hard questions for another hour. I was lecturing about justice for nonhuman animals, a topic about which I feel passionate and which is the subject of my recent book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. I hope I communicated that passion in my lecture, but it is a topic that is controversial and divisive. The students didn’t hesitate to contest the philosophical approach I was advocating, or to grill me about issues important to their own lives, such as hunting. By the end of that intense debate at high altitude (Orem is close to 5,000 feet above sea level), I felt that I had gotten a real workout, and was moved and amazed.

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David Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm, and current chair of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago (where I teach), emphasizes this constantly in speeches to business leaders. He argues that the trend for increasing support for STEM fields at the expense of the humanities is counterproductive in terms of business success itself: The humanities teach general problem-solving skills that can be applied later across a wide range of fields, thus leading students to greater success over time. Supporting his arguments with data showing the earnings over time of students with liberal-arts backgrounds, he has even coined a jocular formula to compete with the flashy STEM: H = MC, “Humanities equals more cash”!

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education