Journal 7: 

What assessments of the Humanities generally or of your particular major/minor area of study do you see being made in current media?  Find an article to summarize, comment on, and share with the class. Good sources could include papers of record like the New York Times, or magazines that publish longer articles for a general audience (The Atlantic, The Economist). Specialized publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed provide focus but wouldn’t necessarily represent the views you’ll encounter in the general public. Transcripts of interviews such as you might find on YouTube or articles from web-based publications are all viable.

My Response:

I believe that there are many positive and negative assessments of the humanities being made in current media. In recent years the more popular of the narratives has become that the humanities are unnecessary and fruitless. I am going to quote from my journal #2 to reflect on how I feel about that… “As stated in one of my favorite movies, Dead Poet Society STEM gives us incredible tools that are necessary but the humanities give us something to live for. The humanities give us the critical thinking skills that help us think for ourselves and navigate through the world.  The humanities are created from all human emotions: love, empathy, compassion, sorrow to name a few. I believe that the humanities become vital when we are going through these human emotions and wondering if anyone has ever felt like this before.”   I strongly believe that the humanities are essential for justice, knowledge and democracy and while the world would keep spinning it would be far less civilized and sophisticated. There are philosophers who share my view and economists that disagree with it. 

I decided to analyze a video from Virginia Tech college of Liberal arts, the video is titled “What do the Humanities mean to you?” 

The video starts with a collage of words that embody what the humanities represent. A few of these words included, Innovate, beauty, hope, reality, future, expression, questions, moral decision. I believe that getting people to understand the relationship between the humanities and these core values that I know are held by many would help people appreciate why we need the humanities. In the video Laura Belmonte, a Professor of history points out that the humanities help us ask hard questions. Sylvester Johnson Professor of Religion and Culture asks “How do we create a society we want to live in? How did our world become the way that it is? What about the future of democracy?” These are the types of hard questions that Laura was referring to. Sara Evers, a Doctoral student, reminds us that the humanities are important for making moral decisions about what we want the future to look like. Hannah Jane Upson, a Political Science major says that the humanities give us hope. To end off the video we hear from Gena Chandler Smith an Associate professor in the department of english there at Virginia Tech and she says that “Understanding human needs, values, experiences and modes of expression helps us to develop and innovate the world.” I really like this video because I think it does a good job hitting on the main points of why the humanities are necessary for humanity to thrive. I also like the range of backgrounds they included in the video and think the video was well made and engaging.