Graduates for the revolution
Whacky degrees are actually a very bad sign that something is deeply off with our economy
And we have come to the end of another academic year. I love this transition, marking the end of another phase in the lives of our kids, and remembering how it felt to have the excitement of the whole summer stretched out in front of you.
At the end of May, a video did the rounds of American liberal arts college grads smugly boasting about the ridiculous degrees they just paid a couple of hundred thousand for. A group of women from the Gallatin School at New York University, decked out in their caps and gowns, were filmed describing the fields of study they had just completed. It was like something from a ham-fisted parody from the 1990’s of political correctness gone mad.
All of the topics mentioned were woke, though a handful were still tethered somewhat to reality. One young lady had studied “The arts education and social justice,” another “black political economy.” There were degrees in “fashion history and gender studies” and “textiles and environmental justice.” While I loathe the welding of an authoritarian ideology to otherwise uncontroversial fields of study, at least I can discern a hint of academic coherence in them.
The rest, not so much.
There was this: “Phenomenological approaches to black womanhood specifically how bondage effects psychological and sexual development.”
And this:
“Remembering or forgetting: navigating international conflict or collective memory”
And this
“The theory of monstrosity, the subaltern praxis — I created it”
And this:
“Living artfully: art as ritual, therapy, and a pathway to decoloniality”
And this: “(Un)Woman: Fugitive family relationships, and identity — the transformative black woman.”
And also this:“The unseen body and creative spaces of erasure and exposure of the queer.”
Gallatin is designed to allow students to chose their own adventure, which sounds great and the height of privilege — if not luxury. They do concentrations not majors, so you can study something like “The colour blue” from an art history perspective, mixed with psychology. Or “Trash.”
It’s easy to make fun of these women, especially since they also were exhibiting those extremely annoying quirky hand gestures that young women adopt in order to signal how fun and/or sexy they are.
But sticking-out tongues aside, there are a few serious issues with the reality that has shaped them and which they are now going to go out into the world to shape further.
The most obvious question is what kind of jobs will these people be going into? It’s too easy to just say, barista. And lots of people who are sick to the back teeth of these preening, silly, deeply ignorant, know-it-alls will take some glee in imagining them making oat milk lattes for minimum wage for people who did sensible degrees. But schadenfreude aside, I fear for how society will be able to absorb all of these useless grads. As we head into ever more treacherous economic waters, who will feed and house these young people with no discernible real-world skill but extremely high self regard and expensive expectations? Do they all have parents or grandparents with estates big enough carry their considerable weight for the rest of their natural born lives?
As much antipathy as I might have for these young people, I don’t want them to starve.
The other possibility — that there might actually be enough non-revenue generating jobs — is even more unsettling.
For example, this TikToker directly rebukes the idea of participating in capitalism: “It’s not about making money, it’s about enacting change.” In other words, these degrees are training foot soldiers for the revolution. And there might be a need for that, which scares me half to death. If there are enough think-tanks with micro-causes like supporting Asian sex workers or “sending clowns into a crisis” or creating “large-scale site specific celebrations of the Hudson River,” to support millions of middle and upper middle liberal arts graduates, while working class and blue collar Americans eek out a living on subsistence wages, then the economy is no longer real in any capitalist sense. It’s essentially one big money laundering scheme in which the young people born into the pre-existing networks of privilege will be supported despite creating no material value, and the lower socio-economic class that used to create a lot of value is locked out — in perpetuity. The ideology that these young people learn in schools — both government and independent from kindergarten to graduate programmes— then reinforces this elaborate benefits programme by brainwashing everyone into thinking that their place in society is somehow indicative of their level of virtue and enlightenment, when actually they were just born into it.
I have known for years that in the United States, and sadly now in the UK as well, college is essentially a pay-to-play scheme. (Funnily enough, this understanding did not stop me from buying into the lie and doing a Masters, which was hands-down the worst financial decision I have ever made. I would have been smarter betting 100K on a horse. Crazy how much we delude ourselves sometimes.)
Even though many, if not most, of university-educated kids are graduating with questionable skill levels, the unfortunate reality is that even physical labour jobs sometimes require the credentials conferred upon you by paying for a degree. This is unconscionable. Chefs, firefighters, hoteliers, cops — they do not need university education to be good at their jobs - or to train others to do their jobs. It’s class-based discrimination and it demands that young people without family wealth enter into debt slavery for a tenuous chance at employment afterwards.
The Gallatin grads might think they are in a far more elevated position than the hotel workers or firefighters, and if they all end up in cushy prestige industry jobs maybe they are better off for having done their ridiculous programmes. How it benefits the rest of the society and economy, is another question altogether.