Jonathan Iwry | Why your major sucks

The Faithless Quaker | The liberal arts have been saturated with their own freedom; it’s time to trim the fat.

By Jonathan Iwry 11/24/14 11:20pm

I t’s not uncommon for people to ask what I plan to do with myself now that I’ve wasted my undergraduate years studying philosophy. I like to fire back that I also majored in history “just to be practical.”

For better or worse, I’ve gotten used to hearing about majors more “impractical” than mine, including from a distant friend who recently graduated from a liberal arts institution with degrees in gender studies and human rights.

Behold, the curse and blessing of “artes liberales” — an education worthy of the free citizen. Visionary heroes from Jefferson to Jobs have preached the gospel of an expansive education. In theory, learning for learning’s sake integrates the findings of various fields into a sensibility of intellectual strength and curiosity, sharpening young minds at the crossroads of literature and the sciences.

But rather than diversify their studies across a range of subjects, students seem to be settling into niches, many of which have little to offer by way of intellectual growth. Dialogue has withered between disciplines. We now face the balkanization of the academy and a hodgepodge of arrogant postmodern proto-activists eager to reduce everything to a social construct, only to plead for mercy at the first sign of math with the excuse that “I’m not a numbers person.”

I doubt that my human rights comrade is quite so extreme. More likely, he’s well-intentioned but naively under-equipped — what Wendell Barry called the “custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from.”

It’s often the case that courses that grab students’ attention are not supremely effective at teaching critical thinking. Although good, smart friends of mine managed to work hard and seek out difficult questions through their cinema studies majors, such fields just don’t put the same reliable pressure on them to grapple with intellectual challenges as might be found elsewhere.

Part of the problem is that entire fields in the humanities originated out of an attempt to make academia a platform for social justice. Righteous though their causes might be, leaving them unchecked has fostered an undeniable normative slant in the humanities.

The result is a quasi-kangaroo court in which historically significant texts are put on trial for their content and students voice simplistic, trendy opinions in return for participation points. Critical thought loses out to political correctness and lazy relativism, and classes that parade themselves as shrines to the plurality of perspectives have instead acquired a “pensee unique” of their own.

I might happen to agree with many of those departments’ left-leaning views. That doesn’t entitle them to be enforced in the classroom. It’s nearly impossible to teach or learn objectively without suspending personal beliefs about what ought to be, at least for a time. We should be relying on universities to teach us not what to think, but how to think.

Academic institutions ought to be focusing on fungible skills — abilities that can be applied across a wide range of areas and challenges. Skills that come to mind include carefully interpreting information, identifying concepts and analyzing alternative points of view. In short, universities should be more insistent about teaching critical thinking.

What if we got rid of majors and concentrations completely and replaced them with a rigorous and universal core program? Everyone would read the same core materials, discuss the same core questions and learn the same core skills. There would still be room for electives, which would give students ample opportunity to pursue the specialties that drive them. Your post-post-Marxist roommate would have no problem gorging on anarcho-structural meta-narrative discourse in his queer theory classes — but not without getting grounded in formal logic first.

I’m not suggesting that everything fun and worldly should be banned from the academy — only that nonessential studies shouldn’t be given equal priority to those that encourage rigorous and disciplined thought. Analytic philosophy, STEM, history and some forms of literary study should be emphasized at the undergraduate level. Journalism, business and studies devoted to social and political causes — African studies, Jewish studies, gender studies and so on — should take a backseat.

A liberal arts education is valuable, both for its own sake and for the strengths it fosters. But not all majors are created equal.

Jonathan Iwry is a 2014 College graduate from Potomac, Md. His email address is jon.iwry@gmail.com. “The Faithless Quaker” appears every Monday.

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