By Nicola Perera The Arts Faculty admits and graduates the largest number of students every year. The private sector tells us that most are unemployable because they lack English skills. The university’s apparent failure to instill English skills in its students is then taken as reinforcing a stereotype that already exists—the irrelevance of the Arts and Humanities degree. In this article, I look at how the Arts graduate is constructed as a failure in the public imagination, as well as the need for a more critical pedagogical approach to teaching the English language in the university. The stereotype: public