College students these days, I happen to know, have very different concerns than I had in my own rather wasted years as an undergraduate at Columbia (the College, or King’s College as we knew it then) and Barnard (into which I transferred in my junior year for literally no other reason than because I was too lazy and stubborn to complete the science requirement of Columbia’s core curriculum). My main priorities as an undergraduate were making sure I had no classes before noon; convincing my mother that it would be a wise choice for me to live off campus not in Morningside Heights but in the Chelsea Hotel, and dabbling in whatever random course piqued my intellectual curiosity or was conducted by an intriguing male professor. Planning a semester schedule was like choosing cookies from a boxed assortment: Milano today, or Pirouline?
That your route through college was meant to determine your future career and thus your earning potential barely crossed my mind. I don’t remember any adviser ever asking me if I wanted to attend grad school or if I knew what I wanted to do to make a living — financially speaking — after college. I mean, someone may possibly have posed the question but I don’t think so, and I was forthrightly ignoring them if they did.
This is how I ended up studying Reconstruction and African-American history under Professor Eric Foner and Co., meandering over to the Schomburg Center in Harlem to check out rare “slave narratives,” and making nonstrategic sideline forays into seminars on early Christianity (this turned out to be excruciatingly boring) and the Southern novels of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. This last seminar was memorable because the professor, some notable public intellectual whose name escapes me now, told me a paper I did contrasting these Southern writers’ sentence construction was — and I can quote this part perfectly from memory — “brilliant and at times profound,” a mega-compliment of such overblown flattery that I have been nourishing my ego on it ever since, and this happened in 1987!
Mind you, I feel entitled to indulge myself in this retroactive bragging on my own scholarly brilliance because I wasn’t exactly an A-plus academic all-star. There were quite a few Bs on my transcript. I can make excuses for the Bs because this was before “grade inflation” became a thing, but the truth is that I was inattentive, a nocturnal nightcrawler who needed a pair of toothpicks to keep her eyes propped open in class (not really!), and completely lacking in the self-discipline to do my assigned reading.
I can clearly picture myself wearing a black velvet top hat — on my actual head, like Axel Rose — as I sat in a classroom in the Columbia Journalism Building for a fancy-pants graduate writing seminar I’d talked my way into with Phillip Lopate, the essayist and critic, that had no discernible connection to my undergrad history major and certainly didn’t have any positive impact on my educational “return on investment.” I look back with a mix of embarrassment and bemusement at the image of myself in my denim rags and statement rock-and-roll hat, reviewing with the class some chapters of the book I was writing, a teenage romance set in the Delaware Water Gap, with a main character based on a real-life acquaintance of mine, Michael Chandler of the band the Raunch Hands, who I had met on a barstool at the Stephen Talkhouse when I was 15. These academic pursuits did not improve my R.O.I.
In the 1980s, many of us — those of us privileged enough to have been born into what was then the safety and security of the American middle class, which we mistakenly thought was eternal — were just pursuing a liberal arts education for education’s sake. We studied the humanities at one of a broad list of schools that then commanded our peers’ respect, a list much broader than ambitious kids pine for today. High schoolers weren’t nearly so obsessed then with the brand-name prestige of the Ivy League — or, to employ the shorthand of Reddit, “HYPSM,” which stands for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and M.I.T. The boarding schools and competitive public schools of the East Coast sent a humanities pipeline not just to HYPSM but to Oberlin, Kenyon, Reed, Sarah Lawrence, and Bard, and that was cool. (Whatever happened to cool?)
Nowadays the high school kids make spreadsheets, I happen to know. They make Excels to chart their potential R.O.I., attempting to ensure that their future college major will be a straight shot to an “outcome” (that’s the buzzword) with a starting salary in the six figures. Of course, with artificial intelligence changing the world so fast that our heads are all spinning wildly on our shoulders, giving the world vertigo, the attempt by a pimpled and anxious high school calculus nerd to predict a future R.O.I. based on his or her choice of academic major seems almost as poignantly misguided as my black velvet top hat. Who the hell knows what professions are about to disappear in the next three or five years? Elegy for an accounting major. A funeral ode to an actuary!
Let us now quote Walt Whitman on the mystery of life cycles and of deep time:
Long, long, long, has the grass been growing,
Long and long has the rain been falling,
Long has the globe been rolling round.
Of course, I can quote Walt Whitman, the great American mystic of planetary motion and the passage of time, thanks to my liberal arts education. I love Walt Whitman because he was able to place the individual consciousness in the flow of long and long and long millenniums. (Read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” if you haven’t.) I’m not sure if we may not be coming to the end of the burning wick of human history — if you know what I mean. The human mind has now been joined with the machine mind, and I’m not sure we will ever be able to extricate ourselves.
Of course, to an old warhorse (dinosaur? goblin?) of a liberal-arts major like me, the galaxy-moving might of A.I. should only inspire the college students of today to dip into the cookie box of humanities — education for education’s sake, humanity for humanity’s sake — rather than trying to calculate their way to a projection of future earnings potentials in the computational and data fields. I hope my son, who is 16 going on 17 and will be applying to college next year, God willing, won’t sign himself up to major in computer coding or paralegal professions. I don’t think he will.
He brightened my day this morning by calling me to discuss the lineup of story ideas he is proposing, as editor in chief, to the reporting staff of his school newspaper, The Dub. He founded The Dub last year, after his previous newspaper project, the famous Ditch Weekly, fell out of print following a slow-rolling dispute among its three founders about whether there was any point in publishing. That he would still be carrying the battle flag of print journalism into the fray as the information wars roar and the arrows fly past our ears — taking out editors and layout designers to our left and to our right, like the knights and foot soldiers falling on the field in the Bayeux tapestry — warmed the cockles of my stupid heart.