Notes from the Academic Necropolis

Most students are already told by their parents to be practical. This rash of useless majors is simply not real; Humanities enrollment rates are tanking. And, if people do pursue these paths—in my experience anyway—they come from solidly middle-class backgrounds. The children of the poor and the children of immigrants are not hearing that they should major in world literatures, far from it.

And who would I be to deny a student their education? I am a first-generation college student (with regard to four-year college, anyway). Most of my family members have not attended a university. Here I am as an English PhD student. How could I say “this is for me, but not for thee”? How could I tell my incarcerated students they have no business pursuing their passions when there are marketable skills to be honed? How many of those who take the position outlined at the beginning of this post have benefited from liberal education only to deny it to others?

People can minor in these subjects; they can double major and do so at a variety of mostly-cheap colleges and universities with fine Humanities departments. All telling them they must pursue business or finance can do, to the detriment of anything else, is reify existing social relations, rob them of the one period in life when they have an opportunity to freely explore these subjects, and play into the attitude already pushed by many of their parents (as any college professor will tell you, trying to get a student to major in the Humanities usually means running up against their, understandably, practical parents).

I am not sanguine about modern university education. I am no big proponent of the Great Books. In no way do I think that the Humanities will save us from capitalism. I do, however, think that it is our duty as Catholics to offer some resistance to the instrumentalization of both people and their education. We can get jobs and enjoy things; we can find lifelong passions even as we prepare for a life of providing for our families. Let us not embrace false dichotomies, but, as they say, be the people of both-and.