Defunding liberal arts is dangerous for health care

If you want an argument in favor of teaching the humanities, I suggest you ask a medical educator.

Across the U.S., the age-old debate about the value of a liberal arts education has seemingly devolved into mortal combat, leaving the humanities in dire straits on college campuses. For example, the Atlantic recently reported on West Virginia University’s decision to gut its humanities programming, and the New York Times wondered whether the liberal arts will exist after the budget cuts happening in higher education. The burgeoning movement to defund (perhaps even defenestrate) the liberal arts is not only capricious and hasty, but also remarkably short-sighted. As a former medical school dean, I know the liberal arts are not only more relevant than ever; they are critical to the future of health and health care in America.

Today’s students, looking to justify the cost of tuition, are choosing college majors based on the likelihood of gainful employment upon graduation. “Fewer than one in 10 college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020, down 25 percent since 2012,” the Hechinger Report, an education publication, reported in 2021. In 2023, the New Yorker published a feature titled “The End of the English Major.” And, as more states base higher education funding on student outcomes data, including employment rates, schools across the country are cutting programs in English, foreign languages, art history, and more, while bolstering programs in areas like data science, finance, and nursing. At the same time, a dip in the college-age population currently has schools competing for fewer students while conservative politicians keep up a steady drumbeat of criticism of higher education, decrying a supposed liberal conspiracy on college campuses to indoctrinate the nation’s young people.

While liberal arts have been declining on college campuses, medical education is moving in the opposite direction, using the arts and humanities as teaching modalities within the traditional basic and applied sciences coursework that dominates medical school curricula. Through literature, poetry, theater, and visual arts, students acquire important professional capacities, such as tolerance of ambiguity, skillful clinical communication, and sensitivity in listening to and learning from patient stories. The Association of American Medical Colleges has developed extensive resources to harness the role that the arts and humanities can play in helping medical educators prepare students to better care for their patients.

These efforts are in keeping with a 2018 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report, which recommended higher education integrate the arts and humanities with the sciences to better prepare learners to succeed in a world of increasingly narrow specialization. Medical educators are looking to the humanities to help students transform medical knowledge into clinical wisdom that will enable them, as physicians, to optimize the health of patients and entire communities in our increasingly diverse and complex world. More exposure to the arts and humanities may also help an increasingly exhausted and besieged health care work force nurture their personal well-being and avoid burnout, which has reached epidemic levels and a threatens a “brain drain” in the health care professions.

Early results on these initiatives are promising. Researchers found that integrating the arts and humanities helps medical learners develop important skills, such as those needed for effective teamwork and communication with patients and families. In fact, the best approach to teaching empathy may be through literature, art, music, and other humanities. Other research has found that students’ exposure to the humanities is linked to the development of important personal qualities, such as empathy and tolerance for ambiguity, and to the prevention of burnout.

I am often reminded that some of the most important skills I drew upon throughout my career were learned in my first year at a small liberal arts college. As a high-achieving student in the sciences, I was deeply unsettled by my performance in my freshman composition class. I received a D on my first paper and a C- on the next, but I persevered, climbing a steeper learning curve than I found in any other class in my entire educational career, including medical school. The communication, argumentation, and writing skills I acquired in that course have served me well throughout my career — first as a pulmonary critical care physician, then as a medical school dean, and now as the president of a private foundation dedicated to improving the education and training of health professionals. Equally important, coursework in art appreciation and literature and time spent as a flautist in my college’s orchestra nurtured curiosity, concentration, and a lifelong appreciation for the arts that became a powerful antidote to burnout while working grueling hours and caring for the sickest patients.

You might ask: Why does the broader societal attack on the liberal arts matter to health care if medical educators are compensating for cuts in the humanities taking place on the undergraduate level? But medical school is too late for students to get the grounding in the liberal arts that can prepare them for success in their chosen career, as well as for success in life as well-rounded, broad-minded, compassionate human beings.

This is why doctor and poet Lewis Thomas advocated decades ago that medical schools should admit applicants who focused on classical liberal arts subjects rather than pre-med studies in college. I have long observed that students with this background adapt more readily to the demands of medical school. Liberal arts studies nurture crucial human capacities, including curiosity, critical thinking and analysis, empathy and compassion, ethics and integrity, appreciation for diverse perspectives, and a growth mindset.

The humanities also remind us that we are much more than highly specialized technicians — as Walt Whitman wrote, we “contain multitudes.” All of this differentiates us fundamentally from ChatGPT and the other sophisticated technologies we developed and now rely on to enhance our human abilities.

Our world is rapidly growing more complex — one estimate suggests medical information is doubling every 73 days, much faster than “our ability to assimilate and apply it effectively” — but this is a reality of our own making. We must not fear or fight complexity, but find the best strategies to embrace it, harness it, use it to propel humanity forward. The liberal arts offer us the best preparation for the challenge ahead.

Holly J. Humphrey, M.D., MACP, is president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.