Revenge of the Liberal Arts

The day I got my acceptance to my first-choice college in the mail, I called my parents from the phone booth in my boarding school dorm to tell them that I would major in English, unlike my siblings who were both engineers. In response, my mother just sighed. She probably didn’t think I’d ever get a job offer.

Well, after college I did get an offer—as an English teacher at St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. I made another long-distance phone call to give my parents the big news. This time, when my Dad picked up, I told him that my remuneration was room and board plus $5,000.

There was a long silence, so I noted another perk of this great pay package: “It’s tax deductible!”

“Of course, it is!” he said, “It’s below the poverty line!”

Fast forward to 2025, though, and what’s this? New Computer Science graduates can’t get jobs? Folks with hard degrees—data scientists, economists, financial analysts, engineers, mathematicians, accountants—entire job types like these are going away? Do I hear the sound of schadenfreude in Liberal Arts buildings on campuses around the country?

Now, let’s not get carried away, my friends: writers, artists and musicians are screwed, too, but we were ALWAYS screwed. Liberal Arts majors are used to scrambling for a living. We’ve literally made an art of thinking about our careers creatively, being flexible, re-inventing ourselves.

The point is, we know that artists and poets and writers are important to the world because powerful people are threatened by them. They’re the ones who get censored, banned, imprisoned and even assassinated in times of upheaval. No one throws customer service reps or data analysts into jail, last I heard. Apparently, creative people are not without their impact. The AI revolution may sweep through here like a tsunami and wash away all the other jobs, and the only survivors may be the artistic weenies everybody laughed at in study hall but who knew how to make for higher ground.

1994 graduation from George Washington University with an M.A. in International Affairs. That’s me with my soon-to-be-husband Ken, a History major.

So, tell young people this– We don’t know what’s going to happen, so keep your head up. If the human race is to survive, there will still be work to do. Look around you, look to the sky. Be curious about the survival skills of cockroaches and potato bugs. Read great books, weep over art, thrill at the mathematical patterns in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the hallucinogenic fractals in snow flakes and flowers; open yourself to the beauty of physics, the symmetry of the body, the certainty that we are literally made from the remnants of dead stars, that it’s all a fabulous, chaotic, senseless world, and that if someday Large Language Models do obliterate all the good-paying, jobs with health insurance and 401Ks, we liberal arts majors will still have the power to improvise, and maybe land a 747 in a pinch, while staying in touch with our feelings—

—and that, my friends, is what makes us human beings.