Graham Hammill, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School
It’s important to understand that universities help societies thrive economically. It’s part of what we do, but it’s not all that we do. We help students live full lives as individuals and as citizens, to be intelligent when confronting the complex ethical choices that life throws at them, and to be able to process information and think in nuanced ways about current events. The idea that higher education is simply job training is truly short-sighted. But I’m not worried that we’re going to become a society of unthinking, un-self-reflective robots. People want to have deeper understandings of themselves and of the world around them. I simply don’t think trying to do away with the humanities is going to work.