The large majority of our fellow-citizens care as much about literature as they care about aeroplanes or the programme of the Legislature. They do not ignore it; they are not quite indifferent to it. But their interest in it is faint and perfunctory; or, if their interest happens to be violent, it is spasmodic. Ask the two hundred thousand persons whose enthusiasm made the vogue of a popular novel ten years ago what they think of that novel now, and you will gather that they have utterly forgotten it, and that they would no more dream of reading it again than of reading Bishop Stubbs’s Select Charters.Humanities departments are not doomed to oblivion. They might deserve oblivion, but they are not doomed to it. This post is going to suggest one relatively painless institutional fix that has the potential to dam the floods up before they sweep the entire profession away. (...)
— Arnold Bennet, Literary Taste (1907)
Confusing a subject with the narrow band of institutions currently devoted to credentializing those who study it clouds our thinking. The collapse of humanity departments on university campuses is a best an indirect signal of the health of the humanities overall. At times the focus on the former distracts us from real problems facing the latter. The death of professorships in poetry is far less alarming than American societies' rejection of poetry writ large. In as much as the creeping reach of the academy has contributed to poetry's fall from popular acclaim, the collapse of graduate programs in literature and creative writing may be a necessary precondition for its survival.
Academics don't want to hear this, of course. But the truth is that few academics place "truth," "beauty," or "intersectional justice" at the top of their personal hierarchy of values. The motivating drive of the American academic is bourgeois respectability. The academic wants to continue excelling in the same sort of tasks they have excelled in since they were 10 years old, and want to be respected for it. The person truelycommitted to the humanist impulse would be ready pack things up and head into the woods with Tao Qian and Thoreau. But that is not what academia is for. Academia is a quest for status and certitude.If pondering on these things you still feel the edifice is worth preserving, then I am here to tell you that this possible. The solution I endorse is neat in its elegance, powerful in its simplicity. It won't bring the halcyon days of the '70s of back, but it will divert enough students into humanities programs to make them somewhat sustainable. (...)
"Many things not at all" is what the current system teaches. The structure of generals and elective courses struggles to produce any other outcome. Learning something well depends on a cumulative process of practice and recall. Memories not used soon fade; methods not refined soon dull; facts not marshaled are soon forgotten. I remember the three credits I took in Oceanography as a grand experience (not least for field lab at the beach), but years later I find I cannot recall anything I was tested on. And why would I? After that class was over the information I learned was never used in any of the other classes I took.
This sounds like an argument against learning anything but one carefully selected major. That takes things a step too far. There is a benefit to having expertise in more than one domain. I am reminded of Scott Adam's "top 25%" principle, which I first found in Marc Andreeson's guide to career planning:
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
Become the best at one specific thing.
Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.
....Get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix...
It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.To this I would add a more general statement about the purpose of a university education. In my days as a teacher in history and literature, I used to give a lecture to the Chinese students I had helped prepare for American university life. This lecture would touch on many things. This was one of them. I would usually say something close to this:
Students who go to America usually fall into one of two groups. The first group is focused like a laser beam on grinding through coursework that will easily open up a new career to them upon graduation. You will know the type when you see them--they will be carrying around four books on accounting or chemical engineering, and will constantly be fretting over whether their GPA is high enough for them to land an internship with Amazon. In many ways those students will spend their university years doing the exact same thing they are doing now: jumping through one hoop after another to get good grades and secure what they hope will be a good future.
On the other hand, you have many students who arrive in America and immediately devote themselves to the pleasures they could not chase at home. These students jump at the obscure class in 19th century French poetry, glorying in their newfound freedom to learn about something just because they want to learn about it. They follow their passions. Such passions rarely heed the demands of a future job market.
Which student should you be?
My advise: be both.
The trouble with our new expert in Romantic poetry or classical Greek is that even if she is smart enough to do just about any job out there, she has no way to prove that to her potential future employers. Her teachers will have her write term papers and book reviews. Your ability to write an amazing term paper impresses nobody outside of the academy (even if the research skills needed to write one are in demand out there). If you do not have a technical skillset they can understand — or even better, a portfolio of projects you have completed that you can give them — you will struggle greatly when it comes time to find a job. Your success will not be legible to the outside world. You must find ways to make it legible. You must ponder this problem from your very first year of study. It is not wise to spend your entire university experience pretending that graduation day will not come. It will, and you must be prepared for it.
On the flip side, I cannot endorse the path of Mr. I-Only-Take-Accounting-Classes either. He lives for the Next Step. My friends, there will always be a Next Step. Life will get busier, not easier, after college. You may never again be given such grand opportunity to step back and think about what is most important.
What is wrong? What is right? What is true, and how will I know it? What is beauty, and where can I find it? What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Your accounting classes will not answer that question. Now the odds are high that your literature, art, and history classes won't really answer them either—but they will ask you to develop your own answers to them. That is truly valuable.
I will say it again: you may have another period in your life where you have the time, resources, and a supporting community designed to help you do this. If you are not having experiences in university that force you to spend time wrestling in contemplation, then you have wasted a rare gift.
So that is my advice. Do both!
I cannot tell you exactly how to do both — that will be for each of you to decide. But recognize which sort of student you are, and find ways to counter-act your natural tendency. If you have no desire greater than diving into a pile of history books, perhaps take three or four classes of GIS on the side, and create skins for Google Earth that draw on your data. If you are driven to find a career in finance, go do so — but then arrange to spend a semester abroad in Spain, or Japan, or somewhere that let's you experience a new culture and lifestyle.
Prepare for your career. Expand your mind. Find a way to do both.
Far fewer students have taken this advice than I hoped. I am partially fond of my alma mater's new system because it forces all of its students do exactly what I advocate they should. But the logic of the system is compelling on its own grounds. By requiring a science based minor, all students are required to master the basics of statistics and the scientific method. They do this not through a series of university-required, general-purpose, mind-numbing courses, but through a minor they choose themselves. All students are required to master a professional skill that will give them options on the post-college job market. They will learn how to make their work and talents legible to the world outside of academia. And all students are required to round this education out with an in-depth study of art, history, or culture.
From an organizational sense, the system's greatest boon goes to the humanities departments. The prime reason students do not take humanities courses is that college is too expensive to afford a degree which does not guarantee a career. That is it. As the number of people graduating from college increases, merely having a degree is no longer a signal of extraordinary competence. Any student that goes hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for the sake of a degree which will not provide them with the skill-set they need to pay it back is extremely foolish, and most of them know it.
From an organizational sense, the system's greatest boon goes to the humanities departments. The prime reason students do not take humanities courses is that college is too expensive to afford a degree which does not guarantee a career. That is it. As the number of people graduating from college increases, merely having a degree is no longer a signal of extraordinary competence. Any student that goes hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt for the sake of a degree which will not provide them with the skill-set they need to pay it back is extremely foolish, and most of them know it.
by T. Greer, The Scholar's Stage | Read more:
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[ed. Congratulations to this year's graduates.]
[ed. Congratulations to this year's graduates.]
