It’s a Sunday afternoon, and I’m watching #47 in a documentary series about the history of England, when the most casually dystopian headline pops up on my phone from the news app: Do Poor Students Deserve The Humanities?
I click on the link because I am a glutton for punishment and read about the wealthy white octogenarian president of West Virginia University gutting the school of all “useless” degrees, referencing the relative poverty of the student body and their need to pursue courses of study useful to capitalism. Who needs art? History? Literature? Not these students, he says – they need stiff preparation for an uncaring world that wishes to delegate these “useless” pursuits to AI so there is more disposable meat for the machine of making money. Of course he didn’t say this in so many words, but we all know the message by now.
I feel lucky that I – a poor single parent raised by poor addicts – was able to attend a rare adult program (now defunct) at a well-regarded liberal arts institution where I majored in art and minored in anthropology. Where I got to fill my mind with the questions I would need to ask to find my place in the world. Where I would learn how to think critically and begin dismantling the internalized classism et al programmed into the populace through our progress in failing public schools and shit popular media. Where I first began to realize the vast depth of that which I did not know and wanted to find out. It grieves me that programs like this have all but disappeared from higher education, despite my student loan debt. I shudder to think the person I might be without the doors of my mind having been blown open through that experience, and sadder still for all the young minds that will never get the opportunity.
Feeling more depressed than I have time for right now, I closed the article, unfinished. Who needs the humanities? Who indeed.
