As Professor Maya Jasanoff concluded her senior year at Harvard in 1996, she faced a question dreaded by many college students: what should I do when I graduate?
Living in Adams House and finishing up her history and literature senior thesis, Jasanoff imagined what life after college would entail. “I knew that I had to support myself,” she tells the Independent. “I knew that I liked reading and writing and talking to smart people […] and I just didn’t see a path” toward becoming a writer after Harvard.
Despite the apparent inaccessibility of pursuing the humanities as a career, Jasanoff ended up doing precisely that. Today, she serves as the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard, having authored three prize-winning books and published numerous essays in publications including The Guardian and The New York Times, among other accomplishments. How did Jasanoff achieve such success in a field that was—and still is—less clearly paved than others? And how can we prepare students today to follow similar paths?
Jasanoff suggests it wasn’t her undergraduate years at Harvard that fueled her post-college trajectory. “You’re much, much, much more likely to pursue academia, at least in humanities [or] the qualitative social sciences, if you’re getting inspiration from somewhere [other than Harvard itself],” she says.
For Jasanoff, this inspiration came from home. “I am the child of academics,” she says. “My parents were pursuing the life of the mind.” Her mother, Professor Sheila Jasanoff ’64, Ph.D. ’73, J.D. ’76 is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her father, Professor Jay Jasanoff ’63, Ph.D. ’68 is the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology in Harvard’s Department of Linguistics.
Jasanoff felt a “subtle pressure” to follow her parents into academia. “I grew up in an environment that wasn’t privileging earning money,” she says. “I think that made me open to academia very early on.” While the lower salaries and slower growth rates associated with academic careers deter many students from wanting to become professors, this was not the case for Jasanoff. “I understood that the rewards of doing academia were intangible,” she says.
After completing her undergraduate years, Jasanoff earned a fellowship from Harvard to study for a master’s degree at Cambridge, then went to Yale for her Ph.D. While finishing her Ph.D., she found a job opening at the University of Virginia, applied for and got it—but these sorts of academic opportunities “come around very, very rarely,” Jasanoff says. “I was extremely lucky.” She returned to Harvard in 2007, which she describes as “a total fluke”: “There are thousands of universities. That I went here and ended up here, I think it’s pretty unusual.”
Given the random, unpredictable nature of pursuing a professorship—even for Jasanoff, whose family is embedded in academic life—one might expect colleges to guide students who are interested in such a future. However, Jasanoff finds that Harvard prioritizes certain kinds of leadership and pre-professional skills. Internship offerings from Harvard’s Office of Career Services (OCS) urge students into industries like finance, technology, and consulting, while the roadmap for creative and academic pathways is less clear.
“I wasn’t even aware of what consulting was until I was a senior. And now I think people know that from before they even come [to Harvard],” Jasanoff says.
What explains the current culture? Many students have leveraged their check-list mentalities into future careers, Jasanoff suggests: “I do see a lot of people feeling lots of pressure to continue in the groove that got them into Harvard in the first place, which was a very goal-oriented path.” Other students have had their college experiences infiltrated by external pressures. “When you go into OCS, or you see everybody running around in their suits, having their interviews, you just sort of jump to other kinds of occupations in your mind,” Jasanoff says.
She also views this phenomenon as a product of societal priorities, in which pragmatism outweighs imagination and the supposedly relevant trumps the irrelevant. “The value structure that’s set up is one that is much more in favor of doing, making, creating, quote, unquote, leading,” she says. “There’s a huge economic apparatus behind this.” The writing industry, for example, is often accessed through unpaid internships, and its wages have plummeted, despite there being more venues to publish writing than ever. These financial drawbacks discourage students from studying writing in their undergraduate years, leaving its status as a worthwhile post-college pursuit at risk. Meanwhile, fields deemed more practical, like medicine, or more lucrative, like finance, rank higher on the college student’s pedestal of importance.
Jasanoff pushes against these conceptions of relevance and viability. Financial and intellectual rewards must not be conflated, she says: “It’s important to try to separate out the acquisition of a very particular status-carrying credential, from thinking about contributions and purpose and goals.”
In other words, even though writing is typically not as lucrative as investment banking or as tangible as medical research, it is still purposeful and rewarding. “Most people who work in labs are working on something whose immediate payoff, in terms of, let’s say, saving a human life, is actually many steps removed from whatever they’re doing in their lab,” Jasanoff says. “Why do we consider that to be ‘relevant’ in a way that we don’t consider [relevant] the work that somebody is doing that might actually help, for example, bring about solutions to long-standing conflicts or more equitable political systems or better options for people from different backgrounds?”
Jasanoff argues that the humanities are useful: solutions to societal problems often require the tools of creativity, deep thinking, and introspection. Studying history, in particular, can broaden our understanding of the present day. “We live in a society at a moment in which there’s a lot of emphasis on both what’s new and on the individual,” says Jasanoff. “It’s really important for people to be aware that that’s not the whole story, that we all operate within contexts that are much bigger than ourselves, and that are themselves the products of histories or lineages that are longer than our own lifespans.”
Jasanoff weaves this idea throughout her highly-popular lecture courses at Harvard: HIST 1024: The British Empire and Gen Ed 1014: Ancestry. Her story-like teaching style portrays history as an ongoing narrative with enduring ramifications rather than as a catalog of isolated events. “Going to lecture is almost like watching a documentary,” one student wrote in the 2019 Harvard Q Guide after taking The British Empire. “She really brings the subject matter to life,” wrote another. As evidenced by the popularity of her courses, Jasanoff highlights the pertinence of studying history and seeks to refresh its position on the pedestal of intellectual importance at Harvard.
However, students’ enthusiasm for undergraduate history courses does not necessarily translate into their future career pursuits. “It seems to be a real shame that we create this institution that’s just chock-a-block with people who are talented in so many different ways, and then we kind of spit them out the other end as one of six things,” Jasanoff says. What happens to the deep thinker, who brilliantly dissects the meaning of a novel? Or the shy dissenter, who prefers expressing their opinions in essays rather than in classroom debates? Will they be pressured out of their passions after college, forced to work with numbers instead of words and feelings?
Professors like Jasanoff aim to salvage history and the humanities at large from the pit of so-called irrelevance, but these types of studies are still under attack. “It would be great if our society could find ways to valorize certain kinds of professions,” says Jasanoff. “How about teaching, right off the bat, which is very poorly compensated.”
Harvard itself could play a more active role. “The College could do something to help people who wish to pursue certain paths where they don’t have independent means or they’re not already plugged in, just to help them make their way,” says Jasanoff. If creative-minded students were more guided to chase their passions after college, perhaps the question, what should I do when I graduate? wouldn’t feel so daunting—and students’ answers would begin to diversify.
Mary Julia Koch ’23 (mkoch@college.harvard.edu) took Professor Jasanoff’s course The British Empire last fall and is currently taking Ancestry. She agrees with the Q Guide: Jasanoff’s lectures are like documentaries.