In the shocked week after Americans elected Donald Trump their president, the beleaguered liberal arts received a shot in the arm. “Dear Artists: We Need You More Than Ever,” read a headline in the Huffington Post. An exhortation by American author Toni Morrison, beginning with “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity,” was passed around feverishly online.
It was a rare moment of optimism for the humanities, whose declining fortunes have been much lamented of late. Enrollment in programs has declined across the United States and Europe as students pursue professions such as engineering, law and medicine. Studies show earning gaps between graduates of programs of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—STEM—and those in the liberal arts. And business programs in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have emerged as the biggest competitor, beating both arts and science...
Alexander MacLeod is a professor of English and Atlantic Canada studies at St. Mary’s University. His short story collection, Light Lifting (Biblioasis, 2010), was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize.
Harry Critchley is the outreach community coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University, and founder and director of the Burnside Prison Education Program.
Laura Penny is a professor of contemporary and early modern studies at the University of King’s College. She is the author of Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit (McClelland and Stewart, 2005) and More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College Is Crap and Idiots Think They’re Right (McClelland and Stewart, 2010).
Rita Shelton Deverell is a broadcast journalist, playwright, performer and activist and one of the founders of VisionTV, the world’s first multi-faith and multicultural network.
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