On Being Useless

There’s nothing quite as heartwarming and uplifting as being told that what you’re doing is unproductive, unprofitable, and useless. I’ve always said that. Further, at no time are you likely to be given this soul-stirring assessment of your interests, dreams and goals than when discussing your choice of college major. I’m leaving out graduate degrees, because for now graduate school still has a certain, if limited, prestige to it, and so we’re not subjected to quite as much abuse as undergrads. Note that I didn’t say we don’t come in for any ridicule at all, just not quite as much. There’s been a lot of talk lately about what the most and least useful college majors are. Site after site, from The Daily Beast to Forbes, has been publishing its take on what’s most useful and what’s least useful to aspiring work force initiates. What’s interesting is that Forbes and the Daily Beast used the same data provided by Georgetown and came up with differently ordered lists, but that’s a methodology question interesting only to those of us in the social sciences. The lists are based loosely on earnings data and projected earnings and growth in the field. You will notice that money, and only money, is the driving concern behind both of the lists I’m going to present as well as any others you may find. “How much will you make with that,” seems to be all that matters, and from a philosophical perspective (philosophy ranking somewhere on everybody’s list of useless majors) I find that interesting and discouraging. Here are the lists, ordered from most abominably useless, number 1, to merely unprofitable at the bottom. If you don’t want to read them, skip down to find the rest of my thoughts. The 13 Most Useless Majors From Philosophy to Journalism Published April 23, 2012 http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2012/04/23/the-13-most-useless-majors-from-philosophy-to-journalism.html 1. the fine arts 2. drama and theatre arts 3. film, video, and photographic arts 4. commercial art and graphic design 5. architecture 6. philosophy and religious studies 7. English literature and language 8. journalism 9. anthropology 10. hospitality management 11. music 12. history 13. political science and government The 10 Worst College Majors Published October 12, 2012 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/10/11/the-10-worst-college-majors/ 1. anthropology and archaeology 2. film, video and photographic arts 3. fine arts 4. philosophy and religious studies 5. liberal arts 6. music 7. physical fitness and parks recreation 8. commercial art and graphic design 9. history 10. English language and literature Did you major in anything on those lists? I double minored in two of those items and majored in a foreign language. I didn’t see foreign languages on either list, possibly because they fall outside the parameters the “researchers” were using. Honestly, these lists tell us more about the people who compiled the data and about our culture as a whole than they do about any value there may be in these majors. What does it say that value is defined by so many through earnings? Countless people, from the guy next to me on the bus to Governor Rick Scott of Florida, have called for the closure of departments like anthropology and philosophy and for increased funding to STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With those calls, a misperception of liberal arts is on the increase. College students and their families will talk about religious studies and English lit in one breath as they slam the liberal arts, and then they go on to extol the virtues of biology and calculus as though those subjects are outside the liberal arts. In reality, math and science have always been at the heart of liberal arts studies as well as language. Grammar, rhetoric and logic have been at the core of the liberal arts since the ancient Greeks. Rome gave their study the name Artes Liberales, and during the Middle Ages, the study of these three core subjects was expanded to include music, geometry, astronomy and arithmetic. So we see from this thumbnail sketch of history, another of the subjects deemed useless in both lists above, that subjects like music and language arts have been considered just as essential to the makeup of a person as science, technology, engineering or math. These lists, while they might appear convincing to some because of their use of statistics and projected earnings data, also don’t represent the whole picture even from an employer’s point of view. Carol Christ, president of Smith College, makes a few interesting points. Here’s her article, www.smith.edu/docs/president/Spring2012Christ.pdf. She quotes a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and universities in which three quarters of employers surveyed indicated that the most valuable skills they seek in new hires are: strong communication, flexibility, creativity and critical thinking. Now, I ask you. In which subjects are those skills taught? Mathematics? I don’t think so. Physics? Not likely. Engineering, sometimes. You’re going to find those foundational skills taught and fostered in core required subjects: communications (public speaking), English, philosophy, logic, history, to name but a few. President Christ goes on to make another telling point. Even as we’re trying to narrow down the focus of education and slashing funding to certain liberal arts departments, our economic competitors, particularly China and Japan, are discovering the value of a broadly based liberal arts education: Surveys in China and Japan, cultures long held as supporting regimented learning, have begun to show that employers there are complaining about the inflexibility of a workforce educated without a focus on creativity or problem solving. Facing the same pressures of internationalization and innovation that have generated increased scrutiny of educational styles in the United States, universities in Asia are adapting liberal arts education as an economic necessity. You shouldn’t need to be the president of Smith College, where I applied for a job last year by the way, to know that other liberal arts apart from math and science have value. As a doctor, how are you going to make judgment calls about patients’ lives e.g., quality of life and the merits of continuing life support without a basic understanding of ethics? How are you going to communicate your scientific findings in a way that will land you that three million dollar grant without a good grasp of writing skills in general and of persuasive writing in particular? How are you going to find that creative solution in particle physics if you’ve never been taught to think outside the box? The short answer is that you’re not. Being able to think across fields and disciplines makes you a more valuable hire than having expert knowledge in one subfield of physics and that only. Leastways, that’s what President Christ seems to have uncovered. So where does that leave us with our handy lists of “useless” majors? It’s time we reconsidered the notion of value as being solely money-driven. The fact that a graphic designer might get paid less than a computer engineer is trumped, for me, by the possibility that it may be that designer’s logo that makes the computer engineer’s company universally recognizable, boosting sales, productivity and pay checks for those computer engineers. It’s worth thinking about.

Small town, Champaign-Urbana?

As I write this, John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” has been playing in my head. After five years here, if I were asked to describe Champaign-Urbana, the description “pleasant small town” is the first thing that would come to mind. Calling Champaign-Urbana a small town, what with its population of about 123,000 not including the rest of the county outside the towns of Champaign and Urbana, is something of an understatement. Even subtracting the tens of thousands of University of Illinois students and faculty who leave each summer and Christmas, it’s still pretty big. So how can I get away with calling it a small town? It’s the atmosphere. The longer I live here, the more I like the personal touch you find at local businesses. The Urbana Garden Restaurant on Lincoln Avenue is one of my and my wife’s favorites. Whenever we go there on a date, the serving staff usually recognizes us and asks how we are. At my favorite Indian restaurant, Bombay Indian Grill on Green Street, they know how I like my vindaloo and my korma. Our preferred cab company, Orange Taxy housed on South Neil Street, keeps our debit cards on file. We know most drivers by name, and our favorite drivers, people we ride with whenever we can, never fail to treat us with friendly respect, and city bus drivers greet me by name. We live on a residential street across from a middle school and high school in Urbana, its population being half that of Champaign. When I catch my morning bus at the corner of Vine and Washington, I can usually count on at least one driver pulling up to the stop sign and asking me if I need any help getting somewhere or whether I’d care to cross the street. Lately, a lady drives by with her dog who’s always barking. At first, she apologized for the dog, seeing me standing there with Delaney, but now I simply wave to her when she pulls up and she greets me in return. Some part of this neighborliness may be chalked up to our blindness. I’ve noticed that people are often a bit nicer to me on that account. But I would be doing people a great injustice to suppose that was all of it or even a significant part of it. For many, my disability may play no part whatsoever. I rather think that much of it has to do with the kind of atmosphere that town residents, which is to say those who aren’t university students, want to engender in the town. I think the university and its student population get most of the attention when people write about the CU area, so I’m deliberately not talking about U. of I. itself. Neighborliness is a quality that hasn’t totally disappeared from America yet, though I suggest it’s on its way out. Getting ahead and staying there has become a driving force in our culture, so when people you do business with take the time and effort to remember your name without consulting a computer screen, it’s simply pleasant. Wouldn’t you say?