I’m Dan Crowley BA now, thank you very much.
Three and a half years of lectures, tutes, and awkward campus coffee dates - all done, all down to a couple of letters now. BA.
So what’s it all been for? What, after three and a half years, has it tallied to?
The temptation, of course, is to break out that old trite platitude, what David Foster Wallace called “the single most pervasive cliche of the commencement speech genre” - that an Arts degree teaches you how to think, more so than what to think.
Wallace thought this cliche was insulting (“if you’re like me as a student… you tend to be insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think”), but to me, its worst crime is its vagueness.
How exactly am I supposed to think? I’m not sure that I know. I know how to plan out an essay, and use Chicago A footnoting (I dabble in MLA as well), but thinking? When was that seminar?
At no point in my degree did any professor or precariously employed casual tutor spend even a single PowerPoint slide on the subject of thinking. And sure, you might say, it was there in the subtext, but what underslept, overworked, caffeine-addicted Arts student is paying attention to subtext? Who has time to read between the lines?
We’re too busy grinding. Sizing up our tutors’ taste in argument, massaging sources to suit our thesis statement, crunching the numbers to work out the maximum number of lectures we can skip before it affects our final mark. Find me a student who’s cut no corners, and I’ll show you the extra 4-5 marks they could have scrounged for each of their essays if they’d been shown a bit of rat cunning. The naive idiot.
But back to the point. What does it even mean - to learn how to think? Hell, what does it even mean to think? Is it weighing up arguments? Forming your own? Researching others’?
No commencement speech ever spells it out. And maybe that’s why it’s such a popular cliche. The words ‘learn’ and ‘think’ are so broad and capacious that they can house thousands of different definitions. The speaker isn’t actually saying anything, they’re just inviting us to fill their empty word shells with whatever meaning we want. Whatever makes us feel good, whatever makes three and half years of HECs seem worthwhile.
As mega-genius Matt Bruenig says, around 90% of disagreements centre on people having different definitions of words. Nathan says capitalism is good? Well, his definition of capitalism is certainly good. But my definition is bad. We’re not arguing about capitalism, we’re arguing about definitions. What actually is capitalism?
It’s the same problem here. What actually is thinking? I have one definition, Nathan has another. Did our Arts degree teach both definitions? Why didn’t I learn his definition? Why didn’t he learn mine? And how many different definitions is one faculty capable of teaching? 2? 10? 1000?
These questions, and their answers, and the cliche itself, are meaningless. It’s not insulting to be told that an Arts degree has taught you how to think, because you’re not actually being told anything at all.
At least, that’s my way of thinking.
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But it’s too easy just to tear down other people’s answers. The hard part is coming up with your own.
So what’s mine? What is the value of an arts degree? What’s it all for?
For David Foster Wallace, it’s not learning how to think, but being given the “choice of what to think about.” It’s complete, life-affirming academic freedom, the type that protects you from going through life “dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” An Arts degree, ultimately, is freedom. From the monotonous routines of adult life, from the stifling inertia of modernity, from the feeling of “having had, and lost, some infinite thing”.
I don’t know what to make of this. I’d certainly like to think that I’m in possession of some infinite thing, that I am alive, conscious, and free, more alive, conscious, and free now than I was three and half years ago. I’d like to think that every tute, lecture, and essay had some grand cosmic meaning, inching me second by second, focus question by focus question, closer to freedom.
But that’s not my experience. I loved my degree, loved most of my classes, but for three and half years it was simply something I had to do. Not to say that I was forced into it (god knows no one forced me to choose an Ancient Greek major), but that it became routine. University was the routine, the inertia, the separation from the infinite. I didn’t wake up every day and choose afresh what to think about - I thought about what was contained in subject manuals, course handbooks, reading lists and essay prompts. There were little bursts of freedom, but for the most part I read from a script. My Arts degree didn’t free me from the “day-in day-out” grind of adult life. It was a day-in day-out grind of its own.
But I’m back to tearing down other people’s answers, aren’t I? Come on then - what’s my answer?
More and more, I’m starting to see that the answer to everything, this question included, is relational. An Arts degree, like everything, is about relationships. It’s about me, and you, and Nathan, and David Foster Wallace, and the connections between us.
Every Arts subject area is, at heart, about relationships. History - the history of human relationships. Politics - systems of ordering human relationships. Philosophy - theories of human relationships (including language, knowledge, beauty, and truth). Journalism - bearing witness to human relationships. Creative writing - putting human relationships into words. Literature - reading the words of others about human relationships. Classics - learning how to totally bore the people you’re in human relationships with.
An Arts degree, ultimately, is about connection, and community. It’s about understanding a little bit more about who we are as people, and the ways we co-exist, coalesce, and clash. It helps you see the world not as an array of loose individuals, but a tangled, messy web of relationships, a complex world of mutual obligation and responsibility.
I may not know how to think, but after three and a half years of an Arts degree, I like to think I know a bit more about the people doing the thinking.