Q: How does a humanities education prepare students to be leaders?
A: “We believe that by taking courses in the humanities, students get motivated to make a difference,” says Lauren Onkey, dean and chair of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Humanities Center at Cuyahoga Community College. “When we study the humanities, we dig into that record of human history where we see that people are questioning these things: What’s the best kind of society, what’s the relationship between my dreams and the needs of the people around me? Students begin to ask questions, they begin to want to know the history of things, the policies that led to a certain breakthrough and then begin to ask, ‘What is my place in the world?’ ”