Surprise! Employers are looking for skills taught in liberal arts courses.

Cornell University recently released a report on “The Future of the American University.” The report is based on what employers think of recent college graduates. The employers are not happy. —

Colleges and universities have been in the scope of the Trump administration’s bazookas because of the presumption of excessive wokeness. In this view, students are being marinated in left-wing political views that are un-American and prepare them poorly for the workforce. They are being pumped up with ideology to the point that they have no useful skills. What we need is more graduates who assimilate easily into business environments, where measurables determine productivity and therefore performance.

It turns out, however, that business executives do not believe that woke indoctrination is the big problem among graduates. Rather, the problem concerns the graduates’ lack of “soft” interpersonal and self-regulating skills like working in groups, handling uncertainty, compromising and responding to feedback.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Cornell report details how employers are interested not just in knowledge measured by tests, but how people learn and communicate. Knowledge transmission through lectures is insufficient and, in fact, rarely occurs. For many years, researchers have found that lectures quickly become background noise to the students out in the seats.

The Chronicle reporter, Haley Zimmerman, summarizes the finding that “it’s not just important what discipline-specific knowledge students learn, but how they learn it. For the report’s authors, the road to ‘essential capacities needed to thrive in the professional, adult world’ runs through the liberal arts.”

Yes, those demonic liberal arts, where, unless there’s a lecture, students’ relational skills may be cultivated, a problem especially following the COVID-19 pandemic isolation.

The provision of workforce readiness, it seems, isn’t to be found in technical and vocational education. Rather, it’s in those much-maligned disciplines that involve learning how to think deeply with others about vexing, open-ended questions.

The emphasis on knowledge itself, rather than how people become knowledgeable, has long been the dominant concern of university teaching. During my career, I have been a “teacher” in high school English departments. When I shifted to university teaching, I became a “professor,” and my courses were labeled “lectures,” even though I never gave one.

The terms are revealing. Professors profess. They don’t teach.

The leading conception of college learning these days is that it is a transaction. Outgoing University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue refers to students as customers who are investing in degrees that they can parlay into jobs.

As reported in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Perdue said that universities are in the customer service business.” With that as the understanding of an education, the processes cease to matter, and the award of a degree is the purpose of being schooled, making it “even easier for young people to feel that college is a set of assignments to be completed like boxes to be ticked,” as Zimmerman wrote.

The solution from the report? For colleges “to do a better job of instilling the intangibles.”

By definition, intangibles can’t be measured. Yet measurement is how achievement is identified, according to the business-as-usual model of school and college life as preparation for jobs in business. That’s why we have such phrases as:

“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.”

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

“If you can’t measure it, measure it anyway.”

Rather, the Cornell report argues that such qualities as “cultivating sound judgment” ought to be fostered. Exercising sound judgment might involve reaching the conclusion that transactional approaches to education are moribund and don’t sufficiently prepare graduates for jobs where they will need to know how to work in groups, take criticism and build on it and exhibit other relational capacities that the lecture hall can’t cultivate.