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John Harrington

John Harrington chuckles as he recalls a time when, as a professor at a New York City college, he saw a group of engineering students build a video unit in an oscilloscope (a device used to measure electrical wave signals). Once the students succeeded, the biggest problem became apparent: what to play on the screen.

“They ended up running Leave It to Beaver reruns,” Harrington says. “The point is, they had all the technical skills, but no context. This is where the humanities play an important role in education.”

Harrington’s mission as the new dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer is to blend technological expertise with humanistic values, innovative artistic endeavors, and social scientific discoveries. The departments under his leadership are: Arts; Cognitive Science; Economics; Language, Literature, and Communication; and Science and Technology Studies.

“If students have some kind of background in humanities, then they have some background in humans and culture,” Harrington says. “They have some background in the context in which business or engineering or science is practiced and that becomes more of a real-world view. This makes it much more likely that students will succeed in their careers and ultimately in their lives.”

Connecting the human aspect of education with the technical is not a new endeavor for Harrington. Before coming to Rensselaer last fall, he served for 10 years as the dean of humanities and social sciences at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City.

Harrington began his journey toward a profession in the humanities in college, when he walked into Columbia University as an engineering student and graduated with a B.A. in English. He went on to earn an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Studies at the University College in Dublin, and received his Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University. As a scholar of Irish literature, Harrington has written several books. They include The English Traveller in Ireland (1990); The Irish Beckett (1991); and The Irish Play on the New York Stage (1997).

Harrington does not intend to make English majors out of engineering and science students. Still, he sees his goal as nothing less than instilling the values of humanities and social sciences into Rensselaer’s core academics of science and technology to foster scholarship, innovation, and creative discovery.

“It is not enough to have well-defined technical skills. Employers, and the world at large, are looking for those who have flexible skills, such as communication and problem-solving abilities,” Harrington says.

With this in mind, the role of humanities and social sciences, particularly in today’s job market, has never been greater, Harrington adds. Technology in recent years has provided new and more focused areas of study in the humanities, especially in digital media. This is one area in humanities and social sciences at Rensselaer that has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, and has opened the door to careers in everything from videogame design to international policy analysis, to more conventional manufacturing and industrial work.

“Even in coal mining, communication is through digital media. So, that’s a very big workplace for someone who is training in communications or electronic arts, whether it’s in Web design, or developing software for new applications, or consulting,” Harrington says.