When speakers want to portray “liberal arts” as particularly non-pragmatic, they tend to single out “philosophy” above all disciplines. Last week, I was at an orientation for a major New England university where one speaker (a chemist ironically) was extolling the non-careerist aspect of liberal arts, noting: “It’s not as if BP is going to go hire a vice president of philosophy … but maybe they should.”

And maybe they should. At the time, BP was spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico—and handling it badly.