What the Humanities Can Offer Business Education, and What Business Education Can Offer the Humanities

For several years now, I’ve staunchly advocated for business schools to offer humanities classes to their MBA students. The reasoning is simple: the humanities are broadly characterized as the study of human experience and culture. Effectively, they serve as case studies, much like the cases I pored over when interviewing to become a management consultant. However, instead of evaluating pure dollars and cents, the humanities delve a bit deeper, ultimately developing superior interpersonal and analytic skills for students, far more so than the calculative case studies of business school. In short, the humanities, and social sciences as well, can help us see the bigger – and often more complex – picture. 

To that end, my perspective has always been one-sided. In other words, I’ve been consistently beating the drum in one direction, advocating for the humanities to find its way into business education. My message has always been, “the business world stands to benefit from embracing the humanities!” 

My perspective broadened, however, during a recent conversation with Sydney Greer Callaway, a humanities graduate student at the University of Chicago. We were discussing this very topic when she posed a provocative question: what would humanities students stand to benefit if they embraced business education? (Though perhaps her big-picture question is a perfect illustration of why the humanities should work its way into the business world!)

The truth is, I speak with a lot of humanities graduate students – a lot. And, hands-down, the most common question I hear is: “how do I transition out of the academy and into the professional world?” There’s a reason why this question is so common.

When I first entered humanities graduate school, the Dean gathered all the new students together in a room. “How many of you plan on being tenured professors?” she asked. Virtually all hands went up. “About 10% of you will be,” she said, “not because you’re unqualified or incapable, but because there are so few academic jobs available there’s just too many of you to fill the handful of positions that come up every year.”

It was a startling wakeup call and, of course, everybody in the room murmured to themselves that they were going to be in the 10%. But inevitably, the Dean’s prophetic message came true with every graduating class. The vast majority of humanities PhDs will work outside of the academy. 

The humanities world and the business world are precisely that: two different worlds. But they are two worlds that are desperately in need of one another. The business world needs the humanities to engage with big picture thinking around issues like strategy, values, ethics, and innovation. But the humanities need the business world because it provides doctoral students with an avenue to practically apply the lofty ideals and theories that comprised their intellectual journeys. If the humanities classroom is where blueprints are drawn but never built, the professional world is where you grab a hammer and some nails.

That is why, when asked by graduate students how they can transition from academia into the professional world, my answer is they first need to be good translators. Not literal translators from Mandarin into English for example, though that might help, but they need to learn and speak the language of business environments. Exposure to business training or even introductory case studies could be an excellent starting point for humanities students as they will begin to develop their vocabulary while simultaneously identifying transferrable skills.

We most certainly need to put the humanities to work for the business world, but thanks to Sydney’s open-ended question, I now realize that doing so effectively will require that we first put the business world to work for the humanities.