In defence of the BA
Our future requires the sorts of things that you find in a good BA, writes Professor Richard Shaw.
Last week was a big week for bagging the BA. First, Rosy Harper-Duff suggested people are better off avoiding ‘‘imprecise’’ degrees like the BA, and then there was the wee flurry of social media activity following the tweet showing a slide from a University of Canterbury lecturer who suggested the Arts were ‘‘easy’’ (as if dealing with the complexities of the human condition isn’t stonkingly challenging).
Having a public conversation about the relative merits of different degree is a good thing but denigrating other people’s qualifications on the basis of tired, clunky old stereotypes is not. Instead, let’s have a reasoned exchange of views and let’s also recruit a bit of evidence in support of our positions.
In that spirit, here is a renewed defence of the humble BA in three parts. First, the BA is central to the future employment prospects of New Zealanders. There are various estimates of the displacement effects of the fourth Industrial Revolution, but when everyone from the World Bank and the IMF to the Chartered Accountants Association of Australasia is anticipating that perhaps 50 per cent of jobs will either go or be substantially transformed within a couple of decades we know something’s happening.
Let’s take as given the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects to this brave new world. But here is Kim Campbell, chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, on RNZ’s Insight programme in May 2016: ‘‘Soft skills are really important . . . These things are hard to measure, but boy are they important in building a career.’’
Here is Mark Averill, chief executive officer of Price Waterhouse Cooper, noting in the NZ Herald in March last year, ‘‘the growing tendency in the IT industry to seek out Arts graduates to train up in technical and technology skills – as those grads are better equipped to build business relationships than many out-andout IT degree holders’’. And here is Project Oxygen, in which Google concludes that of the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in last. The seven top characteristics are all soft skills.
We are much more than our work, and so the second element of the case for the BA concerns its contribution to those other aspects of our lives. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith feared that a ‘‘merely instrumental education directed towards meeting the needs of the labour market would produce moral decline in its recipients’’. A good society is one which promotes the rounded wellbeing of its people.
Arts disciplines are fundamentally about making sense of the human condition, in all its vast, glorious, richness. My oldest daughter once described her BA as an intellectual OE across time and space; more prosaically, a colleague of mine calls a BA ‘‘number eight wire for the mind’’.
But perhaps Steve Jobs put it best when he explained that ‘‘It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough: it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing’’.
We live at a point in history when the systematic assault on the very notion of truth risks casting us all into an Orwellian abyss in which what is true is determined by those who hold power.
In this new flat-earth age the humble BA can help provide the tools needed to test the merits of competing truth claims. By inviting us to engage in reasoned and reasonable discourse, to think clearly and critically, to listen rather than always speak, and to reflect thoughtfully on our own and others’ ways of being, degrees like the BA can help us live well with others, and hold to the fire the feet of those in positions of economic, cultural, and political authority. Uncomfortable though it may be for some, the message is clear: Our future requires the sorts of things that you find in a good BA. Alvin Tofler told us in Future Shock that ‘‘the illiterates of the future will not be those who cannot read and write. They will be those who are unable to learn, unlearn and relearn.’’
Well, future shock is upon is, and the illiterates are not enrolled in a BA.
Professor Richard Shaw is director of the Bachelor of Arts (external connections) at Massey University and a professor in politics.
‘‘We need cars to be safe because they’ve got to save us from our terrible lack of attention.’’
Johnny Moore