More important: You do not need to go to graduate school in order to read, to write, to debate, to do intellectual work. You do not even need to go to graduate school to learn from brilliant scholars, though that would be a much better reason to go than any cited in this post, which, oddly, never mentions professors, scholars, or learning. If you want to read, write, and debate, you can do all that for free, and while you’re earning a living and putting money away for retirement. Why should you give up years of your time and earning potential to do what you can do right now, on your own? — and that’s in a best-case scenario, in which you’re getting full funding and therefore at least not hemorrhaging money. But what if you’re not getting that funding, and doing graduate study only by incurring crushing debt?

Anyone can learn how to land a spacecraft on a rocky asteroid flying through space at twelve miles per second. I don’t need some pencilneck with four Ph.D’s, one-thousand hours of simulator time, and the ability to operate a robot crane in low-Earth orbit. I need someone with four years of broad-but-humanities-focused studies, three subsequent years in temp jobs, and the ability to reason across multiple areas of study.

The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in its secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look.

“And my belief is that those things are inexhaustible, partly because of their great richness, and partly because they inspire you to bring things to them. You see parts of yourself in them that the author couldn’t have known was there.” Works like the Bible, or the Aeneid, or Hamlet “are big texts, and we are little people.” Grafton can point to wealthy alumni who were “good Princeton humanists” and rattle off campus Latinists who went on to land consulting jobs on the strength of their analytical abilities, but the questions about an instant payoff for humanities studies represent “a fundamental misunderstanding of the role an institution like Princeton plays in one’s career.”