Much to the dismay of my father, a computer scientist, all three of his children pursued majors in the humanities. When my twin brother shared with us that the engineering and pre —med majors at Johns Hopkins, who make up roughly 75 percent of the undergraduate class, call history classes and the like “arts-and–crafts time,” my dad chortled in tacit agreement.
When I—at the time an intellectually puffed–up freshman— protested, Dad argued that there is simply a different degree of rigor in the practical knowledge needed for engineering classes than for liberal arts classes.
“If you walked into an upper–level computer science class,” he said to me, “you would have no idea what was going on without the skill set developed in earlier classes. However, anyone can walk into any level English class and be able to understand what’s being discussed.”
I readily admit that I would have no idea what was going if I walked into an introductory computer science class, that’s why I’m majoring in American Studies and English. It’s not that I disagree with my father’s point —I recognize that there is a limited number of people who can pass Organic Chemistry—but his stance hearkens back to an antiquated view of academia as a rigidly separate hierarchy of disciplines, ignoring the modern necessity of interdisciplinary studies. I’m not sure when this perceived hierarchy of academic disciplines was created, but I am certain that it is outdated.
Maybe I’m just a little over-sensitive after years of, “You’re taking what? Is that actually a class?” I’ve noticed a trend at Georgetown, though, wherein cultural and interdisciplinary study seem to be taken less seriously. During New Student Orientation week, my Orientation Advisor introduced his girlfriend to our group and promptly ridiculed her American Studies major, pointing out that while she gets to take classes like “Baseball in America,” he has to take Orgo. Culture and Politics majors are the black sheep of the School of Foreign Service – an acquaintance once commented that CULP majors might as well just do International Politics, a “real” major.
My friend Dan seems to think that being an American Studies major means that I’m a repository for any historical or cultural fact regarding America. When I can’t answer one of his trivia questions, he asks me what the point of my major is if I don’t know which movie won the Best Picture Oscar in 1973.
Perhaps the wariness towards interdisciplinary work speaks to academic institutions’ conservatism. More recent pedagogical criticism raises questions about how methods of teaching can adapt “learning for a world of constant change.” In a paper titled as such presented at a June 2009 colloquium on the “Future of the Research University,” Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown describe the importance of shifting from a system that emphasizes learning as a passive “acquisition of skills or … information.”
We’ve already seen how new media and technologies are transforming our cultural landscape—at some point these changes are going to need to trickle down into academia, but not just in specially—designed programs, in every discipline. There are some professors at Georgetown who incorporate different technologies into their courses. When one of my English classes created a wiki on Finnegans Wake for example, we still had to engage with the material, but the digital format required us to consider not only what we were learning, but also how to best structure and convey that information using a variety of mediums.
When we graduate, inevitably we will be presented with a variety of multi–media platforms in our “real life” jobs. Some, like Facebook, we’re already familiar with, but in the context of our personal lives. As the digital world blurs the lines between work and home, it is imperative that we become adept at applying our acquired knowledge to them.
Most of us already do this outside of class, but the Internet is not going away and the academic institution should be doing more to adapt. I wouldn’t go so far as Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia University’s religion department, who wrote in an April 2009 New York Times op–ed that universities should abolish tenure and establish a mandatory retirement age for professors. His point, however, that liberal arts study is in a state of crisis and needs a drastic overhaul, starting with more flexibility between academic departments and disciplines, is a good one. Much like the dying newspaper industry, both suffer from an unwillingness or inability to break from tradition.
This week I had to send in a transcript for a job that I’m probably not qualified for (although according to a career advisor, with my majors I am qualified for pretty much every job—barring those in medicine and engineering—which makes me suspect that I’m not especially qualified for any jobs), and I was a little embarrassed looking it over, skeptical of how seriously a prospective employer would consider a person who has taken classes like, “Musicals on the Stage and Screen,” “Advertising and Social Change,” and “Sports Personalities of the Twentieth Century.”
Yes, all of those fill my American Studies requirements. Perhaps they sound a lot like a higher—education equivalent of “arts-and-crafts” classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not academically and practically relevant—especially for a real world career in the Information Age.
