I‘m currently away from home for work, and I’ll write about that after I’m back, but there were some thoughts I wanted to get down while they were still relatively fresh. I’ll be your indulgence, dear reader, that I refer to some work I’ve done elsewhere online, here. It’s an older piece, one written when I still had some hope that I might secure an academic position but had begun to have my doubts, and it reads very much from that time in my life. But the central idea in it still obtains, I think.

Said idea is that people ought well to hire those trained in the humanities for work outside of them. Yes, it is the case that those who are trained in, say, English studies won’t likely have coursework in accounting or management. But it is also the case that, even in an age of increasing reliance on so-called AI and putatively data-driven micromanagement, those trained in such fields bring habits of mind with them that are useful in any number of endeavors.

I will be vain (surprisingly, I know) and use myself as an example. (I know, at least, that I have permission to do so.) My degrees are all in English, as I’ve not tried to hide, and my formal training was in how to make sense of the works of the past and how to understand what they still say to readers far removed from those for whom they were composed or by whom they were recorded. It is the case, to be sure, that a number of my extracurriculars spoke to the work I do now; I had to write grant applications and budgets before leaving academe, had to account for money. But what of it I did, I did through trial and error; I later learned better ways to go about such tasks, and I use them many days in my day job now.

That I was *able* to learn those ways, though, and to do so quickly and completely enough to come up to competence is a direct result of having done the work of earning my degrees. I learned how to learn, how to find information and to make sense of it at speed, in the process of composing a thesis and a dissertation. Knowing where to look and how to look is something that came from years of pouring over documents and slotting their contents together, finding the questions they do not ask but probably ought to if they’re going to say what they say.

How this applies to my day job most is in dealing with all of the documents I address daily. Yes, I’m sure there are programs that (purport to) sort and collate documents, but I suspect they read only as well as their programmers–and there are folks with worse handwriting than mine. I suspect they aren’t able to follow implications and suggestions individual documents can offer, not only from the words on the page but also from the qualities of the pages themselves. I know well they can’t help their readers make the leaps of understanding they need to make to best orient themselves in the world. But I have some success that way (I said I was vain), and I do attribute much of it to my earlier formal training.

None of this is to say that more targeted training is bad; there’s a reason I’m away from work at the moment. But it is to say, again, that the humanities are far from useless fields. They have value in themselves, and I continue to espouse them, but I also know the context in which I live–and I know that any hope of listening has to come from some commonality. A person can’t pick up what isn’t set where they can get hold of it,  however strong their grip might be.

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