Price Check on the Liberal Arts Education

[An article I wrote about some recent difficulty at King's College of London, where I am studying a semester abroad]

It has been passed down like an old time decree from inside the walls of 10 Downing Street to the office of the Board of Directors and then, less formally, trickling through the halls and classrooms of King’s College – funds are drastically low, redundancies must be corrected.To be more precise the “redundancies” are, in fact, members of the King’s College staff and the “correcting” is going to be carried out through a sacking of roughly 10 percent of the professors and administrators that make up the King’s College staff. More frightening still, the board of directors overseeing the budget cuts has suddenly decided that this is the perfect opportunity to rethink this strange college curriculum referred to as the liberal arts education.
When Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State, announced the 12.5% budget cut for the funding of higher education the blow was absorbed by King’s staff and students alike with gritted teeth but steely resolve. After all, what else could be expected? For over a year now the financial markets worldwide have been characterized by down-turning lines and governments from the United States to China have been struggling to find the money necessary to continue on with at least some of the business as usual. But for the United Kingdom, one of the strongest economies in the world, the strain is everyday becoming more apparent as many areas are forced to make do with less funding. King’s College along with the other eighteen members of the university of London system are being put to the test – can a school that regularly makes it into the rankings of the top 25 universities in the world still make the cut after being put on this fiscal diet?
The higher-ups, namely the board of trustees and the board of governors, seem to think that a massive restructuring is what is called for. When the re-apportioned King’s College budget was released it was a blow to everyone. The lost money would not be, as many thought, distributed evenly over every department but rather the entire liberal arts curriculum would be called into question. The new idea being volleyed around: reduce or eliminate the subjects that don’t have a direct and evident correlation to post-graduation areas of employment. Say Auf Weidersehen to the German literature department, Au Revoir to the French equivalent and as for the King’s paleography department, the only one of its kind in all of London, it can go the way of most of its reference material – the history section. At the same time the economics department and the school of business remain untouched.
The decimation of choice departments might help tighten the school’s belt in the short run but will also have a much longer lasting effect on the well-rounded quality of the education that King’s students receive. Despite the relatively small percentage of students who will be directly affected by these cuts there has been a backlash that has united the campus in a way that few other issues have. The feeling around the campus is one of great anger. Students who appear apathetic as they day dream in their morning Medieval Book lecture are alight with indignation as they rally and petition for the subjects they chose to study and the professors who continue to inspire them.
What the board of directors do not seem to understand is that the liberal arts education has an intrinsic role in the forming and nurturing of many social and intellectual skills; skills that are crucial to the workforce and cannot be manifested in students in any other setting. A student of comparative literature doesn’t simply study the semiotics of great and impractical literature but also how to read, write and think critically about any topic that should present itself. Students in the Africana studies department don’t just sit and chronicle a history but learn to decipher social codes that help us to better understand the world we live in.
We are all becoming painfully accustomed to tightening our belts as the world economy trudges up slowly from its steep fall. We must all make sacrifices both superficial and significant. But in a time when we are continually let down by the status quo, when we are brought face to face with the harsh realization that the perfect system was in fact imperfect, doesn’t it make sense to, at the very least, not put all of our eggs into one basket again? The workforce may demand recruits with particularly relevant skill sets but the world demands the creativity, free-thinking and dexterous intelligence born of a liberal arts education. Here is a useful thought exercise for the well-educated men and women who sit on the King’s college board of directors: if you eliminate the classes that study metaphor and the never-ending epistemological dialogue, if you downsize departments dealing in the subtle distinctions of language, if you deem unworthy the classes that help us understand being, then what will we have to look forward to once we meet our precious bottom line?

Wanted: A Nostalgic imagining of the Job Market

Well, it's that time of year again. The last chilly days are quickly dwindling and some of the more petulant flowers are forcing their way open as Spring begins. For me and most college students what that really means is another mad dash for a summer job.

If you will allow me to wax poetic for a few lines about a better time that I only know about through skewed representations on old Nick-at-Night re-runs of the classic television canon like Happy Days or Saved by the Bell. And still, I feel like I do remember the good old days just outside of my grasp when jobs were plentiful and the resume and cover letter were foreign documents replaced instead by an affirming grin and an eager look in your eye. Why can't I step into a restaurant and ask for a job in the kitchen? How else am I supposed to learn? How can I overcome this closed circle of flawed logic that insists on years of experience for even the dingiest of food joints? And what exactly is this NYC food certificate that I keep hearing about, like an initiation tattoo I don't have. Surely it is just another bureaucratic 5-hour class where no one learns a thing they didn't already know.

And where are all the jobs picking up empty glass bottles of milk from people's doorstep to replace them with their filled counterparts, rich and creamy thick at the top. Don't golf courses need caddies? Is anyone still looking for a pool boy?

Suddenly i'm lost in a world of job websites and endless facsimiles of the same cover letter being printed and sent off to every corner of the earth for jobs where you don't have to move a limb past your knuckle joints which flitter about all day on keyboards exchanging endless sets of information with other working drones. How can an entire anthro-centric world exist if all of the people refuse to be unseated?

Like I said this might be useless nostalgia - the kind of superfluous information I just readily criticized - but it leaves me unsettled nonetheless. Particularly because I feel as if I do understand how things are meant to work on a more fundamental level. It takes months to accumulate enough biomass for rich soil. Hours on your knees to spread the seeds and cover them in earth and water. Anywhere from two weeks to three months of near daily attention to reach the time of harvest when you can reap the benefits of all of that work. And that is just one aspect of the most simplified existence I can imagine.

Maybe I am just thinking in the wrong terms. maybe this argument has a lot less to do with the mystic disappearance of daily toil and everything to do with the oddities of economics, the difficulties of absorbing immigrants into our society, the use and abuse of fossil fuels and the determined blindness we force upon ourselves to the immense difficulty of others. All that I know for sure is that students are encouraged to go out unto the world and gain experience, to temper their education and round out their cognitive growth, but the only lesson I seem to be able to learn is that work is outdated, antiquated, a relic to be left in the past alongside Fonz and his Jukebox.