Anyone who has had the opportunity to take a class with Dr. Doug Julien, Chair of the Humanities Division, knows that it is not an experience they will likely soon forget. With his unorthodox teaching methods and his penchant for sentence enhancing language, Doug has a different philosophy than some about teaching. His reason for teaching? He says, “It’s that idea that I can still learn shit from people.” 

As a professor of the humanities, Julien doesn’t deal in absolutes and hard skills. However, he places a high value on the “quantum soft skills” that the humanities can teach. Rather than hiding behind a long reading list, piles of homework and multiple-choice tests, Julien believes in giving students a path towards success by letting his students forge their own way. As he says, “Let me show you how to deal with that shit, so that you can go out and find your own shit and use these tools to deal with it.”

Julien states that the real issue with humanities is that “too often the humanities are seen as only in service of everything else.” While he believes in the importance of a well-rounded education, he also sees the humanities as foundational to the human experience. Rather than an education in humanities being in service of getting a nursing, biology or engineering degree, they provide their own value. Julien says, “Humanities help you critically think. The humanities help you communicate… Humanities help you understand human nature and all these things.”

According to Julien, the humanities aren’t just about life skills either. Without the humanities, he believes that we would be left without the little things that make life enjoyable.  He says, “There’s also just simply a fundamental joy in the act of reading.

There’s joy in listening to a song, right?” 

The important lesson that Julien wants his students to remember is that “reading is reading” Whether it is instruction manuals, trashy romance (which he would tell you is not trash at all) or crusty old philosophers, it is all the same transaction. He will tell you that there is “a lot of value in supposedly low-culture stuff” and that sometimes, as he says, you just “need to have taco bell.”