Klein, and a host of other would-be eulogists, are attempting to frame Kirk and his signature “Prove Me Wrong” events as a modern-day incarnation of the long, necessary tradition of public dialogue and debate within a democracy. It’s a lovely image: Kirk as a modern-day Socrates, wandering the agora of America’s universities seeking to find truth by means of rhetorical contest. Unfortunately, it’s not quite what he was doing. In fact, hardly anyone on the right or the left is engaging in real civic dialogue, and it’s one of the reasons our democracy is now in crisis. 

As Kirk’s one-time mentor, former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh, wrote after his death, Kirk was a provocateur. Despite his invitations to “debate me” and “prove me wrong,” he was not interested in a conversation. Kirk was instead the godfather of the “Debate Me” Bros, purveyors of a prevalent internet-based entertainment format that, in an era nearly void of substantive debate, is too often passed off as such. 

The “Prove Me Wrong” blueprint first emerged on YouTube in the early 2010s and is a staple of the platform, where channels like Jubilee rake in millions of views and dollars. The genius of the formula is its accessibility: No expertise is required, just the confidence to spar. Consequently, the format has spread to nearly every corner of the digital world, replicated in TikTok stitches and in Facebook comment threads, where your boomer aunt and high school boyfriend can “debate” questions of policy, theology and science. Even the world’s most popular podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is centered in large part on people who don’t know what they’re talking about arguing with each other under the guise of debate. 

“Debate Me” Bros are selling entertainment; they’re not really interested in public policy. This means they only talk about emotionally-driven culture war topics to juice their viewer numbers. Race, religion and the rights of LGBTQ people and women dominate the format. There is no Jubilee video, for example, on municipal transportation infrastructure or protecting public drinking water. Such omissions are intentional. While those are essential topics of our common life, they aren’t very entertaining — and they’re certainly not emotionally triggering. 

“Debate Me” Bro culture is to civil discourse what porn is to sex: An intentionally titillating, vaguely degrading, commodified reproduction of something that is normally good, or at least neutral. Anyone with real experience in civil discourse can see that what the format’s practitioners are doing is a very unrealistic imitation, which explains in part why both debate and porn are most popular with those who can’t get much of the real things.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

As reflected by Kirk, and a large segment of his fan base, both the creators and audience for these so-called debates are overwhelmingly young, and usually male and white. While they tend to possess natural intellectual gifts or charm, they are often lacking in formal education or concrete expertise. The “Debate Me” Bros are people who have been largely shut out of the places where actual highbrow debate and dialogue occur: Traditional media, university classrooms, conferences and debating societies, and the elite dinner tables and parties that once-dominated intellectual life. They are also smart enough to know they are unlikely to be invited to join these spaces. 

It’s easy to blame this lack of welcome on exclusionary, or perhaps just plain snobby, elites. There are legitimate arguments about the gatekeeping and nepotism that still govern these kinds of elite institutions. But none of these arguments support the contention of the “Debate Me” Bros and their audience that everyone is equally qualified to parley over every topic. Nor do these concerns change the fact that genuine — and productive — political discourse requires much more than an opinion, passion and a bit of chutzpah. 

Democracies need free and public debates that are accessible to as many citizens as possible. But debaters should be held to a higher standard than simply having the confidence to step up to a microphone. They ought to be educated experts in the topic at hand and, just as crucially, trained in the principles of fair argument and logic. They should come prepared not only to persuade, but also to be persuaded themselves, ready to concede when their case has been dismantled — and the audience should see that happen. True public discourse of this nature, though, is rooted in the liberal arts, which teaches critical thinking, research and analysis, communication styles and problem solving, among other vital skills. With this in mind, it’s not surprising why so many of the “Debate Me” Bros — including Kirk, who published a book (verbosely) titled “The College Scam: How America’s Universities are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth” — have made the liberal arts, and liberal arts education, their mortal enemies.

In our present moment, just because you don’t know what you’re talking about doesn’t mean people won’t take you seriously. And when millions mistake performance for persuasion, the very foundations of democratic life are at risk. True debate — rooted in dialogue that brings people together and feeds the health of our democracy — is hard and not always entertaining. We are in desperate need of it. But we aren’t going to get it as long as we indulge the rhetorical gladiatorial fantasies of the “Debate Me” Bros. The more we confuse their spectacle for substance, the further we drift from the civic habits that make democracy possible.

The post “Debate Me” Bro culture has ruined civil discourse appeared first on Salon.com.

Decades ago, universities across the country began making cuts to the liberal arts. The humanities, fine arts and social sciences are endangered everywhere, as evident by the staggering variety of state colleges and private universities no longer invested in their survival. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated its world languages department, reduced its education department by a third and slashed its programs in art history, music, architecture and natural resource management. In the same year, Lasell University, a small private school in Massachusetts, killed five majors, including English and history. In Ohio, numerous of the state's best-known institutions of learning have announced cuts to the liberal arts, including Kent State, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Youngstown State, Baldwin Wallace University and Marietta College.

But the academic carnage in the Buckeye State is hardly an outlier. A quick Google search reveals intellectual wreckage piling up across the nation. The University of New Hampshire permanently closed its art museum, the University of Tulsa eliminated degrees in history, and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system has instructed all 25 of its campuses — which enroll more than 160,000 students every year — to prepare for reductions in liberal arts programs.

My alma mater, Valparaiso University, is now preparing to join in the self-destruction. A Lutheran liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan, 50 miles or so southeast of Chicago, Valparaiso recently announced that it is considering the “discontinuation” of 28 programs, including philosophy, public health, theology and the graduate program in English Studies and Communication, where I earned a master's degree. When I graduated in 2010, Valparaiso had a regional reputation as a small, private institution with excellent educational standards, bolstered by an emphasis on the arts and humanities.

The English Studies and Communication program was a hybrid, requiring study of creative writing, journalism, English literature and mass communication theory. Professors collaborated with the directors of the campus art museum and instructors in the social sciences and business departments, to demonstrate that knowledge is impossible to segregate or compartmentalize. A truly educated person should be adept at making connections across disciplines, cultures and different sectors of society.

Gore Vidal defined an intellectual as “someone who can deal with abstractions.” Valparaiso, at its best, did exactly that — equipping its graduates with an ability to handle abstractions, while showing that abstractions aren’t all that abstract. What might seem abstract in the academic context, as recent American history ought to have taught us, may soon transform into the concrete, creating situations of urgent social consequence. Arguments about democracy, disinformation, the public good and moral philosophy are inseparable from such issues as climate change, gun violence, the effects of new communication technology and the struggle to defeat autocracy.

In the 14 years since my graduation, Valparaiso has suffered from poor leadership that has caused consistent damage to its reputation. In 2020, it shut down its law school after years of lowering its standards to attract enough more students. Last year, the university's current president, José Padilla, launched a bizarre crusade to fund the renovation of a first-year dormitory by selling off a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, along with other signature works of art from the campus museum. Despite widespread opposition from students and faculty, and condemnation from the American Alliance of Museums, Padilla seems determined to proceed with this philistine maneuver (I wrote about the proposed sale for the New Republic.)

The potential gutting of Valparaiso's liberal arts programs is one small part of a much larger social and cultural trend of viewing education as nothing more than a business proposition. As Matthew Becker, a theology professor at Valparaiso, wrote, this decision, "if implemented, will completely dismantle the stated mission of the university":

Valpo will no longer be "grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith," nor will it really be preparing students "to serve in both church and society." With the elimination of foreign languages, music, the theology programs, and other programs in the humanities, Valpo will no longer be a liberal arts university.”

My nephew, Justin McClain, a recent graduate of the endangered public health program, stated the obvious: “On the heels of a pandemic that resulted in millions of lives lost and trillions in economic losses … educational institutions should be embracing students interested in joining a field that has proved far too valuable to the functioning of society at large yet remains chronically understaffed.”

Becker identified Valpo's plan of self-destruction as “completely market-driven,” and that's a critical point. Padilla and other university leaders have offered exclusively economic reasons to explain their agenda.

Time and again, college and university leaders across the country have cited financial justification and a business-model imperative for transforming their institutions into glorified vocational schools. And this wrecking-ball campaign runs in parallel with an ideologically motivated war on learning.

Right-wing governors and legislatures in many states, including Florida, Texas and Tennessee, have attempted to strip-mine universities, often by eliminating diversity, equity and Inclusion programs, prohibiting instruction in topics related to race and gender, and even threatening to deny loans to students who want to major in an “impractical” discipline.

This anti-intellectual campaign of destruction against higher education takes place alongside book-ban campaigns in many of the same states, where astroturf organizations funded by right-wing groups have worked to remove books from school curricula and libraries that focus on issues of racial justice or LGBTQ equality. 

It may be worth noting that many of those who claim to hate education are blatant hypocrites. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a defender of book bans who routinely bashes institutions of learning, also has a Harvard Law degree, as well as a B.A. in public policy from Princeton. Even Donald Trump — despite his incoherent rambling and his impressive lack of knowledge on almost every conceivable topic — doesn't technically qualify as “poorly educated.” Although exactly how and why Trump was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in the first place remains unclear, he holds a B.S. in real estate from Penn's Wharton School. 

For all their phony anti-educational posturing, Republican officials and pundits have succeeded in selling ignorance as virtuous to their voters and viewers. A 2022 Pew Research survey found that 76 percent of Republicans now believe that colleges “affect the country negatively,” while 76 percent of Democrats said they believe colleges “affect the country positively.”

A good rule to follow is never to trust highly educated people who tell you that education is a waste of time. A good question to ask, after that, is why they want so many people to remain ignorant.

If democracy is to function as intended, it demands a well-informed and reasonably sophisticated citizenry. Without an intelligent electorate, democratic governance is under threat from despots and demagogues who can acquire power by appealing to base emotions and instincts. Thomas Jefferson called information the “currency of democracy.” America is now at risk of bankruptcy.

Jefferson was also one of the founders of the University of Virginia, where organized a committee to develop a holistic program of learning that, in today’s ruthless, profit-obsessed climate, would not survive at Valparaiso, at West Virginia University or at countless other schools. Its program was to include “ancient and modern languages, mathematics, physio-mathematics, physics, botany and zoology, anatomy and medicine, government and political economy and history, municipal law, and Ideology (rhetoric, ethics, belles lettres, fine arts).”

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George Washington advocated for a national university that would teach the arts and natural sciences, along with literature, rhetoric and criticism. But the father of our country might now have pariah status on most campuses — perhaps as an adjunct instructor with no health benefits, begging for a summer course.

In an age of extreme partisan rancor, there is dispiriting bipartisan unity on one point: Most Americans are increasingly hostile to the liberal arts. While only Republicans are overtly hateful of higher education as a whole, many students and administrators no longer claim to see the value in programs that, according to their standards, lack immediate and practical application to the job market. Recent data indicate that only 10.2 percent of college students major in any humanities discipline, and barely over 1 percent major in history or political science.

High schools across the country, meanwhile, have been cutting courses in civics, the social sciences, humanities and fine arts for decades.

Richard Hofstadter, one of the premier historians and public intellectuals of the 20th century, explained in his 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” that most Americans view intelligence as merely functional. Brainpower, in this view, should serve some practical and tangible purpose, typically one that can be measured in dollars and cents. Abstractions, to return to Gore Vidal’s remark, are seen as irrelevant distractions from learning the skills that can earn a bigger paycheck.

One of the numerous things people seem to have forgotten amid this rat-race competition is the question of how to maintain a democratic system of governance. Representative government is complicated, and often moves slowly. It requires sustained wrestling with the complex and thorny questions of ethics, personal freedom versus social responsibility, and balancing the progress driven by new knowledge and new ideas with the benefits of existing norms and traditions.

That kind of intellectual labor is taxing enough for those with a decent formal education, but with no training in the study of government, culture or mass communication, Americans are increasingly likely to fall for bad arguments and stupid ideas. Divorcing education from philosophical, political and social ambitions creates a culture in which people view public-health measures during a pandemic as stepping stones to the gulag, convince themselves that a racist con man most famous for hosting a game show could not possibly have lost a free and fair election, or believe that information about transgender people is more dangerous than assault rifles.

Democratic voters hope — as should everyone else with a conscience — that Joe Biden can overcome his poor approval ratings and doubts about his age by appealing to Americans' belief in democracy. He will have to consistently remind the electorate that his opponent presents an unprecedented threat to the system that millions of voters take for granted. For many Americans, however, democracy is a hazy concept at best. Survey results consistently show that large proportions of the American public don't understand the Bill of Rights, cannot name the three branches of government and are unfamiliar with the most important and basic facts of U.S. history.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher, author of the new history and memoir “Burn Book,” recently observed that leading figures in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have "no sense of history." If so, they are little different from the average citizen in that regard, yet they are routinely heralded as geniuses. It is hardly surprising that they’ve allowed hate speech, deceitful propaganda and other harmful material to proliferate on their platforms.

A society actually grounded in the liberal arts might see Zuckerberg and Musk as allegorical characters, perhaps as archetypal warnings against the reckless pursuit of wealth and the refusal to balance technical wizardry with more mature forms of insight and wisdom. But that is not our society. The outsized influence of Zuckerberg and Musk — not to mention Donald Trump —makes clear that we are at risk of handing our country over to cynical, power-mad morons who are, at best, indifferent to hate, poverty and violence. A little education might help.

The post Ignorance and democracy: Capitalism’s long war against higher education appeared first on Salon.com.

As a specialist in the 20th-century philosopher and educator John Dewey, I’ve been watching these debates with interest. The most-cited academic philosopher of the 20th century, Dewey made, arguably, the past century’s most significant contributions to the development of educational thinking. Among other things, he influentially criticized education conceived as “mere preparation for later life.”

Looking back to Dewey raises pertinent questions about education’s fundamental mission today. Is the principal aim of education to provide a padded yoke for the state’s preexisting workforce? Or is it, all things considered, to improve our lives?

The purpose of education

In the 19th century, women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller admonished the practice of educating girls just to be wives and mothers. “A being of infinite scope,” she wrote, “must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation. Give the soul free course… and the being will be fit for any and every relation to which it may be called.”

In my view, educational policy in the United States today is entangled in a practice as constrictive as the one Fuller criticized more than 150 years ago. For many, the mission of K-12 and higher education is, in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s infamous words, “to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs.”

Whatever one may think of Walker’s politics, his general outlook is no outlier. It typifies the view that education is mostly a way to fuel industry with skilled labor – and it’s in tension with the goal of preparing students for “any and every relation to which [they] may be called.”

Rather than educating whole persons for lifelong growth, this “industrial model” treats education as just another sector of the economy. In this view, education’s job is to manufacture skilled labor, and it’s expected to do so in a way that’s maximally efficient. Knowledge is seen as a market commodity, teachers and professors are delivery vehicles for knowledge content and students are either consumers or manufactured products.

Educational institutions that follow the industrial model are seen as marketplaces for acquiring and delivering content. And when tuition is involved, that’s simply the fair price for accessing that content.

What does society lose?

When described in this way, it seems a cold, inhuman approach to education. Nevertheless, both major U.S. political parties seem to have embraced the industrial model. The parties may substantively disagree on the particulars of how to provide education, but (in the main) noneconomic values are too often not on the radar.

I contend that something is indeed lost when we treat education as nothing but a sector of the industrial economy.

First, the industrial model deepens our social problems.

It’s true that many specific goals of education are, and should be, defined by our economic infrastructure – such as the demand for a curricular emphasis on STEM. But that doesn’t mean that our primary educational aim must revolve around this. Training students exclusively to fit existing specifications not only stifles imagination and innovation, but also directs students down the very channels that are implicated in our social, economic, environmental and geopolitical problems. I believe this sacrifices our best hope for making things better.

And so we come to John Dewey. As a child, he regularly did chores on his grandfather’s farm outside Burlington, Vermont. He later lamented that such productive occupational supplements to formal education were mostly eclipsed by urbanization and mechanization. He sought ways to bring practical life into the classroom so that schooling could speak to living.

But there is an important distinction to be made. In one approach, you may infuse education with content that speaks to potential careers – so-called “real life.” On the other hand, you might allow the existing economic infrastructure to be the singular driving force behind educational practice. The latter, in the words of Dewey, turns students and teachers into “instrument[s] in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.”

The former is what most educators themselves hope for: students who become participants in the intelligent redirection of society.

Cultures of imagination, growth and fulfillment

Not only does the industrial model of education dampen intelligent social action, but it also sacrifices personal enrichment.

An educational institution is capable of training more students with fewer or lower-paid teachers or professors – just as an industrial sector can produce more clothes, cars or animal protein to meet market demands with lower overhead costs. These products can then be purchased at a relatively low price and used for, or put to work to produce, more things.

But what else do we unintentionally produce when education – or industry, for that matter – is made “efficient” in this way? For instance, do we make narrower lives? Do we, in Dewey’s words, make life more “congested, hurried, confused, and extravagant”?

As seen through a narrowly utilitarian-industrial lens, it’s simply not clear how education might address personal growth, community and quality of life. If unaddressed, I believe we risk marginalizing these aspects of individual enrichment.

Democracy and education

Democracy, Dewey urged, is not a static inheritance that we can simply live off of, but an ideal that every generation must re-achieve through active effort. Schools are our chief cultural means for educating free citizens who can intelligently and creatively participate in this effort. Education is how we invest in the future of our democracy.

Under today’s economic and social conditions, what does it mean if “education for the state’s workforce” is the chief mission of schools? Does it sacrifice the quality of a student’s present life for the sake of a promised good? Does it support a frozen system of privilege, frantic and unsustainable consumption and deadening efficiency?

Dewey argued, in opposition, that everyone should have the ongoing opportunity for a critically reflective and occupation-rich education that emphasizes growth, emotional development, imaginative engagement, aesthetic vitality, social responsibility and care. From K-12 to university, such an education can help to establish conditions for personal enrichment, critical inquiry and democratic participation.

# # #

Steven Fesmire is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College. He also holds a joint appointment as Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Green Mountain College in Vermont. He is the author of Dewey (Routledge Press, 2015), winner of a 2015 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award. He is also the author of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2003), winner of a 2005 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” award. He is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Dewey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017) and is preparing a manuscript titled Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Pragmatic Pluralism and Ecological Imagination in Ethics and Education. He was a 2009 Fulbright Scholar at Kyoto University and Kobe University in Japan, a 2015-16 Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, and a 2016 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The post Education isn’t a commodity for labor appeared first on Salon.com.

Consider some of the sage advice from the workplace experts who have recently appeared on “Salon Talks” to gain a sense of what life will be as you join the workforce. Campus life may have been comfortable over the past few years but now it’s time to learn to navigate the marketplace.

According to one recent study, starting salaries for current graduates have climbed considerably over the years. The Hay Group analyzed 145,000 entry-level jobs from more than 700 companies and found that the average annual salary a college grad can expect to make is $49,875 — 14 percent more than what graduates earned a decade ago. And for students with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, add 14 percent to 30 percent to the figure. But if you majored in liberal arts and find that somewhat depressing, don’t fret.

Here are three key questions to guide job seekers along the path to career success.

1. Did I pick the wrong major to succeed in the work world?

Scott Hartley, the author of “The Fuzzy and the Techie,” recently told Salon that entrepreneurs or innovator types with liberal arts backgrounds can be every bit as successful as graduates with science backgrounds. Hartley’s very unscientific study is based on his interactions with venture capitalists and startups in Silicon Valley. “To be sure, there were plenty of MIT engineers and Stanford computer science majors,” Hartley told Salon.

“What I would say to [those of you who] understand a particular domain that you may or may not think [has] relevance in the modern economy is that you understand a problem set that nobody else may understand,” said Hartley, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow in the Obama administration. “The real comparative advantage in this world, where technology is becoming more and more democratized and more accessible, is the understanding of a particular problem where there is actually what I call ‘a heart attack rather than a headache.’”

Added Hartley: “Where there is really a willingness to pay, there’s really something that needs to be fixed.”

Learn more about Hartley’s vision of how a liberal arts education pays off in Silicon Valley by watching his “Salon Talks” interview below.

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2. What will my life in the office be like?

To be honest, you might not even work in an office — at least of the sort that your father or mother did.

Kathryn Minshew and Alex Cavoulacos, co-authors of “The New Rules of Work,” told Salon that the old-fashioned workplace is nearing obsoletion in this era of flexible workspaces. Instead you may work from home as a freelancer or contractor, and nimbly move from gig to gig.

The 9-to-5 drill that your parents followed is being replaced by a more open-ended workday. Minshew and Cavoulacos, who run the career coaching site The Muse, encourage workers both young and old to set boundaries between work life and leisure time. As Minshew pointed out for someone to be constantly available to respond to an employer is “not a recipe for a successful, creative, productive person over the long term.”

Learn to strike the right balance by watching Minshew and Cavoulacos’ “Salon Talks” interview.

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3. How do I know what salary to ask for?

Perhaps the most daunting part of lining up a new job is negotiating a salary when an offer is on the table. “Fifty-seven percent of men negotiate their salaries,” financial news reporter Nicole Lapin told Salon in a recent interview. “Seven percent of women do.” Lapin’s new book, “Boss Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Take Charge of Your Career,” offers a provocative take on how women can find success and be in control of their careers. She advises women to remain ambitious and fight for what they desire

“I’m taking back the word and owning it as a badge of honor,” Lapin said in explanation of her use of the pejorative five-letter word in her book’s title. “When I started off my career, I was called a bitch in a derogatory sense, and what that meant was that I was strong, powerful, aggressive.”

Said Lapin: “And if that meant I was a bitch, then hello! I’m a bitch and I’m owning it.”

Both men and women can learn how to best approach salary negotiations and sustain an attitude that’s ripe for seizing opportunity by watching Lapin’s “Salon Talks” interview.

[salon_video id=”14768714″ autostart=”off”]

The post WATCH: Career advice for new (or old) grads: How to become that super innovative, employable, well-balanced worker bee appeared first on Salon.com.

In his book, Hartley profiles successful entrepreneurs and innovators who arose from liberal arts training.

“If you think back to the classical definition of liberal arts, they actually include things like the natural sciences like biology and physics, math and logic,” Hartley said during a recent Salon Talks conversation. Hartley said liberals arts aren’t just “basket weaving” and STEM isn’t just an “antidote to future irrelevance.”

In the age of a rapidly-evolving economy toward services and information systems, Hartley said sitting among the exclusive cluster of VCs and tech venture backers on Sand Hill Road in the Silicon Valley area, he noticed that many of the startup companies he met with were founded by people coming from an array of backgrounds, including manufacturing and non-“techy” disciplines.

“To be sure, there were plenty of MIT engineers and Stanford computer science majors, but I think what I would say to people that understand a particular domain that you may or may not think they have relevance in the modern economy, is that you understand a problem set, that nobody else may understand,” Hartley said. “The real comparative advantage in this world, where technology is becoming more and more democratized and more accessible, is the understanding of a particular problem where there is actually what I call ‘a heart attack rather than a headache’ where there is really a willingness to pay, there’s really something that needs to be fixed.”

Yet he also acknowledged that the growing student debt crisis in America is also causing people to pause and consider the ROI on their education.

“I think there’s been this kind of triple threat of activity between sort of the 2008 financial crisis, the coming wave of automation, the rising cost of student debt — people start thinking ‘Well what is the vocational relevance of my education?’” Hartley said. “And it begs these bigger philosophical questions you know what is the purpose of education — is it purely vocational training or is it something larger?”

The post WATCH: How a liberal arts education pays off in Silicon Valley appeared first on Salon.com.

Although the job market was good in the late 1990s, I left college with a liberal arts degree and a lot of uncertainty about my future. After an internship at a newspaper in college, I wasn’t sure I was cut out to be a reporter: I had a near panic attack any time I cold-called someone for an interview. I also spent some time in the career center reading their handout for English majors. It told me I was a generalist. I had good writing skills. I could do anything! But studies have shown that too many choices can be paralyzing and the stakes felt high.

I moved to Seattle and began my job search. I was offered a job writing for a Native American gaming magazine that was somewhat tempting –it was a legit writing job and I have been known to kill time at a craps table. But it involved a hellish commute and I didn’t see much of a future in it. Next, I went on two interviews for a job as an assistant at a distribution company. But it was located next to an industrial shipyard and I couldn’t imagine spending a gray Seattle winter staring out at cranes and rusting metal while repeatedly saying, “Ms. Martin is on another call, can I take a message?”

The recruiter did a good job selling me on Amazon when we met in her office in a high-rise in downtown Seattle. “There is no dress code –they don’t expect you to spend a lot of money on work clothing,” she said, looking knowingly at my khakis and chunky black loafers.

“And you get stock options,” she continued. This was the golden ticket in the late ’90s – get in at the right time and place, and you could be enjoying your retirement home in the Greek Isles by the time you turned 40. Of course, there were no guarantees that Amazon would make it at that time – dot-coms everywhere were erupting and then fading like fireworks in the night sky.

“And it’s in the customer service department?”I asked.

“Yes – you’ll be answering phone calls and emails, but they require everyone to have a college degree. They use a Unix-based system, so it takes some thought to operate,” she continued. “I’ve placed lots of interesting people there – history majors, art majors, philosophy majors…” This had some appeal. I enjoyed the company of like-minded liberal arts majors, no matter how impractical our degrees might be. Perhaps the job would provide an island for us to gather and put our degrees to use by memorizing Unix commands and assuaging customer fears about their missing copy of Memoirs of a Geisha.

“Is it possible to move on to other departments?” I asked.

“Of course.”

That settled it. I would do a short stint in customer service just as a stepping stone I told myself. How bad could it be?

After a month of training I sat down at my desk for my first phone shift. As I put on my headset, my hands were shaking slightly – I was worried the next few hours would be filled with irate callers. Then the phone rang and the voice on the line said, “Good morning, I can’t get into my account. Can you help me?” I could. It was an easy password change. As the day continued I found that most of the calls were straightforward. People were nice if I was, and they were often appreciative of the help.

I answered phone and email questions ranging from the basic (“When will my order arrive?”) to the semi-crazy (“I couldn’t use my gift certificate because I was attacked by wild animals”). The Internet was also still a new phenomenon for many people, and I spent a lot of time explaining what email addresses were or that we had no physical catalog or stores to send them to. I heard a story about one rep who got a call from a man asking him to find a restaurant for him.

“I’m sorry, we aren’t really supposed to do that,” the rep told him.

“But someone did it for me last time,” the caller said.  So the rep just opened up an AltaVista search window and looked up the info.

I never personally found a restaurant for anyone, but I did have an awful lot of days that went like this.

I get to my cubicle at 5:45 a.m. to prepare for a 6 a.m. phone shift and see some of the night crew mulling around in their pajamas. When I put on my headset the phone doesn’t ring immediately, so I read through the emails that have accumulated overnight. The most recent status report says: “All is quiet for now, but the angry New Yorkers are about to wake up, so get ready.” The phone rings and I jump.

“Thank you for calling Amazon.com, how can I help you?”

“Can you order a book for me?”

“I can’t, but I can walk you through the process.  Do you have an email address?”

“bob1945”

“OK, and what’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all of it.”

“There is usually more – something after an “a” with a circle around it.”

“My address doesn’t have that.”

“They all should. Do you have an Internet provider?”

“Yes – AOL.”

“OK, that’s your email address then: bob1945@aol.com. You’ll need that to place your order. Now let’s find the book you want. You can just search for the title in the box at the top of your page.”

“How do I get to that box?”

“Just click on it with your mouse.”

“I don’t have a mouse. I have Web TV.” I sigh audibly. I’ve heard of the program but never actually seen or used it myself and only know it operates differently than a typical computer.

“OK, can you describe what you do have?” I ask, settling in for a long call.

When I started working at Amazon the company was spread out among a couple of different buildings in downtown Seattle. My department was housed in the rented-out first floor of an ageing office building. I worked in a sea of cubicles lit with dimmed fluorescent bulbs, computer screens and a hodgepodge of Christmas lights. The customer service department was divided into different teams, which they called quads. Handmade signs announcing the quad names hung over different cubicle groups. Desks were decorated with action figure collections, wrapping-papered walls, or mosquito netting. My first company badge was just a simple laminated piece of green paper that had the company name and my login on it. No picture. No bar code. A fourth grader could have made a very good counterfeit replica. Most of us in the office called each other by our logins rather than our first names.

There were only three tabs on the website when I started – Books, Music and a recently launched DVD/video store. A couple months after working there a group of reps were pulled into a “mystery” quad. They were sectioned off from us and couldn’t talk about what they were doing. Later that year we found out – auctions. Then toys. Then tools. I remember someone sending around a joke mock-up of a future Amazon homepage that had 30 tabs cluttering the top – one of the tabs said “Biscuits.” They solved the tab design issue, but otherwise it wasn’t that far off from what they became. As we moved further away from a books focus, I debated whether I really wanted to be working for the Wal-Mart of the Web. I would sit through PowerPoint presentations at all-hands meetings and realize that the quirky dot-com I had signed up for was becoming like a big corporation that I always thought I would avoid.

When I began in January the department was still recovering from the biggest challenge of the year – the holiday shopping season. The reps who had been through it seemed exhausted, and I quietly aspired to get a job in the editorial department before the end of the year. That first year the days were constantly counted down; as early as March emails would announce “Only 300 more days until Christmas!”

In October I was hired into a Quality Assurance group (the people who “may be recording the phone call for quality assurance purposes) and narrowly escaped a regular phone shift during the holidays. But when the red lights on the boards above our cubicles flashed long hold times I would jump back on the phones to help out, and still spent good portions of my day responding to customer emails.

As we crept nearer to Christmas, the company authorized unlimited overtime and many of us started pulling 10+ hour days. The Seattle department was the only branch of customer service the company had at the time, so people had to staff it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I had heard rumors of them putting some sort of “we are closed for Christmas day” voice mail on the phones during the really early years, but those days were gone.

The week after Thanksgiving I was responding to emails as quickly as possible. I had music playing on my headphones to block out distracting co-workers and the riot on the street below. It was 1999, and Seattle was trying to host a World Trade Organization meeting. Protesters dressed in turtle costumes had been squaring off with police in riot gear on the streets around our building most of the morning. Normal offices probably would have closed earlier, but we were a 24-hour customer service center heading into the busiest time of year.

The liberal arts major in me could sympathize with the anti-corporate protesters, but now I had a new perspective from my position on the other side of the fence. Customer service was far from the boardroom — we worked for meager wages (and high hopes in our stock options) and many of us actually did care about giving customers the best possible experience.

My concentration was broken by a manager’s email — there was tear gas on the streets below us, and they were shutting the office down. I gathered my things, surprised; it was the first time I’d seen the office close. I half-hoped the protests would earn us another day off, but the next morning I ran past boarded-up shop windows toward the open office.

Our department entered a blackout period in December — no one could take vacation days. The other departments ceased all but essential operations and sent almost everyone to work in either the warehouses or customer service. The holiday party –a lavish costume affair in a rented hotel ballroom — was scheduled for late January.   

Late December brought an endless stream of calls and emails as we raced to upgrade shipping, and my smoking colleagues upped their nicotine intake. The company did try to ease us through the holiday season by offering chair massages and catered meals, but it was hard to get too excited about a crepe maker in the break room when you knew each call could end with a new accusation that you ruined Christmas.

On Dec. 24 I answered a slew of emails delivering the same bad news – the orders wouldn’t arrive by the holiday. I had been working 10-hour days for over a month and had yet to begin my own Christmas shopping when I caught a flight back to Colorado that night. Since the holiday fell over a weekend, I was able to stay a couple nights before returning to work. I was relieved to have a short break, but also knew that despite the skeleton crew that had worked through Christmas, there would still be a pile of angry customer emails waiting in the office when I returned. You don’t have to do this anymore, I reminded myself. You can start looking for another job.

The Monday after the break I logged on to my computer at work and found a couple hundred emails. Among the clutter were messages from a few customers sincerely thanking me for help with their orders. In addition to the disappointments, I had made a few people ecstatic by overnighting orders at the last minute.

After the email piles settled at the end of January, I attended the company holiday party. My department enjoyed the open bar in a rented hotel ballroom with the camaraderie of a group that had just survived a boot camp. It was one of the few times a year we mingled with the rest of the company. Our offices were physically housed in different buildings than other departments and the rest of the company seemed to view us as an island of misfits.

After a man from marketing had come to our office to listen to a few of my calls he said, “I could never do what you do.” I had just changed some passwords, he literally could easily do what I had done, but fielding customer contacts was work many people viewed with fear.

We were constantly reminded about how important customers were to the company, but we were still near the bottom of the organizational totem pole. I got the impression that many people considered customer service just slightly better – maybe – than packing boxes at the warehouse (something that was sometimes still done by hand at the time).        

Customers also didn’t seem to know what to make of us. Almost everyone has a customer service call horror story – from being put on hold for hours to being passed around in endless circles where no one could help. Part of the problem is you are reaching out to a void when you call a company for help. You could be connected with a 20-year-old woman in Delhi or a 50-year-old man in Wichita.

People often asked me questions: Where are you? How long have you been working there? What are you doing working there? My answers led to pleasant banter as I waited for their order details to pull up. Many people called preparing for a fight or an endless loop of automated options and they seemed relieved to be talking to a real live person who could actually help.     

A year into the job I had grown proud of my colleagues despite their underdog status. We traded travel stories and book recommendations during lulls between calls. We had potlucks and performed Pepsi taste challenges with Dixie cups. Tattoos and piercings were proudly displayed and the only time I dressed up for work was when my group decided we should have “dress up” Fridays in a bizarro nod to other workplace’s casual Fridays.

One Friday a co-worker showed up in a tie and pin-striped suit. “Jvick,” he said, “we’re all dressed up.  Let’s go out for a power lunch!”

“OK,” I said. We rounded up some co-workers and then stopped by our manager’s desk on the way out.

“You’ll probably need this,” she said, handing us her cellphone. “You’ll look very important.” So we borrowed her phone and took turns pretending to talk on it between bites of sushi at lunch.

My colleagues also didn’t display a lot of the cutthroat tendencies rampant in other workplaces. I had come to believe what one of my co-workers had once said – that customer service was one of the few departments in a company with heart. Unfortunately, our department didn’t last long. 

When the dot-com bubble burst the landscape changed – customer service centers opened in India and cheaper areas in the U.S., and the company restructured. In 2001 the Seattle customer service department was shut down and only a few specialty groups — including the one I was in – were left intact. We were moved to the headquarter offices — which seemed to justify our existence. But during the move when boxes marked “Customer Service” were stacked by the elevators, someone from another department muttered, “There goes the neighborhood.”

A couple months later, I gave notice with plans to move to New York. My stock options weren’t fully vested, but they were submerged underwater anyway. On my last day, I carried my requisite box to the elevator and pushed the button for the bottom floor. Someone had written “goodbye jvick” on the whiteboard in the elevator. I felt tears welling up and managed to keep them down before I left the building. With a move across the country and no job lined up in my future, I wondered whether I had made the right choice.

In my early 20s, I spent some time staring out the misty windows of Seattle city buses wondering how I would look back on that time in my life. Now, 14 years later, I have a clearer idea.

The upside of my generalist humanities major is that I can now envision the alternate career paths I could have taken like shifting scenes in a view master. In the “Devil Wears Prada” version, I get up the guts to move to New York right after college, get my foot in the door at a magazine, and work my way up to a satisfying editorial job. But maybe my co-workers are cutthroat or, more likely, I’m laid off when the print publishing world starts to collapse.

In another, I hold onto the golden ticket and stay at Amazon while the company matures. I make more money, but probably have less space for a personal life. And maybe as the company grows up so do my remaining colleagues, trading in their quick quips for more serious personas and business casual clothes. 

In my actual reality, I move to New York and soak up city life for a few years before returning to grad school in Colorado. I get a college teaching job where I don’t make that much money but enjoy my work, and can mold it around my reality of having young kids.

Now, when I look back, I realize the time I spent at Amazon was unusual. The Amazon of the late ’90s gave me an imperfect but valuable transition job from the world of books and ideas to the world of people. Recent reports about the company paint a different picture of the current culture. If I were graduating now, I doubt the same opportunity would be open to me – companies aren’t often collecting liberal arts majors to build departments these days. And even if they were, I’m not sure I’d want the job. I was lucky to leave school without any debt at a moment when the economy was soaring. The future seemed bright, opportunities endless. It was a different time, a time when you could sit inside a 90-square-foot cubicle and feel as though you weren’t inside anything at all.

The post I was an Amazon drudge appeared first on Salon.com.

“Welders make more money than philosophers,” Rubio said, not for the first time. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”

So far, much of the chatter, on both sides of the political spectrum, has been about whether he’s literally correct or not. Rubio’s supporters – including the Fox News crowd – jeered a bit over his comment; some pointed out that welding employs far more Americans than philosophy. And it does: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 850,000 people employed in welding and similar fields, which compares to a mere 23,000 postsecondary teachers of philosophy and religion, the most typical full-time philosopher gig.

But Rubio’s line was about welders earning more, and here he seems to be wrong. The annual mean wage for welders – again, this is from the BLS — is between $36,450 and $40,040, while for college philosophy and religion teachers, it’s $71,350.

There are two other ways to look at this that may be more substantial than just comparing salaries. The first comes from the GOP’s anti-intellectualism and war on the liberal arts. It wasn’t that long ago that conservatives fought for the literary canon, for student exposure to Western civilization, and the like: A certain kind of Republican saw himself as defending the humanities against the identity-politics-driven radicals.

But that kind of Republican – the blue-blood WASPs as well as conservative Jewish intellectuals like Allan “Closing of the American Mind” Bloom — are not really driving the political right any more.

In the Tea Party age, a more typical conservative is someone like Pat McCrory, governor of North Carolina, who went a bit farther than Rubio along the same anti-intellectual lines. McCrory complained to old Reagan hand and high-stakes gambler William Bennett about college curriculums being out of sync with where jobs are. “So I’m going to adjust my education curriculum to what business and commerce needs to get our kids jobs as opposed to moving back in with their parents after they graduate with debt,” the governor said. “What are we teaching these courses for if they’re not going to help get a job?”

He went on to say, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”

Though Rubio has become more assertive these days, he’s still working hard to be the friendly face of the Republican field, and he rarely follows his ideas through when he speaks about them. The large number of candidates in the debates means he can just toss out a phrase including the term “21st century” in it and draw applause. But he’s coming from the same place as McCrory on these matters. Education is not there to deepen your critical thinking, expose you to the great works of the past, or enlarge the soul, but simply to get you a job.

Of course, expanding vocational training and taking it seriously does not have to be opposed to studying philosophy. It doesn’t have to be anti-intellectual to pursue a trade.

The non-reactionary case for vocational training was made eloquently by Matthew Crawford, who trained as a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, joined a right-of-center think tank, and resigned to devote more of his time to repairing motorcycles. His book “Shop Class as Soulcraft” begins by describing the huge number of “metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws” floating around now that vo-tech education has been dismantled for the sake of the “knowledge worker.”

“The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit,” Crawford writes. “Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”

The book’s argument – which is by turns individualistic, a bit macho, and a critique of capitalism – is hard to sum up. Let’s just say that, contra Rubio and his like, it’s possible to imagine an America that values both the welder and the philosopher, and doesn’t pit the two against each other. Somehow, this notion seems unlikely to come up at the next GOP debate. But that’s a 21st century I could get behind.

The post Marco Rubio declares war on the liberal arts: Pitting vocational training against the humanities misses the point of both appeared first on Salon.com.

“Weird Al” Yankovic has been releasing a new video for his latest album, “Mandatory Fun,” each day this week. But with more videos still to go, he may have hit the apex on Tuesday with his epic grammar rant. Frankly, the whole thing would have been worth it for the “Weird Al has a big dic…tionary” gag alone.

For a man who’s distinguished himself for spending the past 30 years in funny shirts and big hair, writing songs that involve doughnuts, Yankovic has also always made it clear he’s a really bright bulb. His videos are meticulous homages to their originals, and his commitment to honoring the distinction between “less” and “fewer” is already YouTube legend. But in “Word Crimes,” he takes on everything that makes being part of modern Internet culture such a goddamn ordeal for frustrated liberal arts grads and assorted pedants everywhere. Oh, Weird Al, you had me at “conjugate.”

While Robin Thicke’s career idles thanks to the worst breakup album ever, in the span of just three minutes and 45 seconds, Yankovic takes the abusers of the English language and the tweeters who spell it “lern” out to the woodshed with a perfect takedown of everything that makes grammarians apoplectic. He succinctly describes the difference between mass nouns and counting nouns, explains that when you say “I could care less” that means you do care, “at least a little.” He makes the case against the cutesy, pointless substitution numbers for letters (Why, people, why?) and oh, my God, then he goes full old school with sentence diagramming. And when he sings, in a Robin Thicke-like falsetto, “Say you got an IT, followed by apostrophe, now what does that mean?” and then proceeds to define a contraction, believe me, copy editors around the planet weep with gratitude. And in a time gone mad with changing and loosening standards, Yankovic still understands the important difference between what’s figurative and what’s literal, and gives a nod to  most precious and beautiful thing in all of punctuation — the Oxford comma.

Speaking with NPR recently, Yankovic admitted, “I have to compete with the thousands and thousands of people that are also putting out comedic songs and parodies.” It’s true that there are more spoofs on YouTube than there are piano-playing cats and twerking toddlers. But those of us who regularly receive emails informing us that “YOUR STUPID” know why Yankovic remains the master. It’s because he’s always understood the amount of intelligence it takes to pull off a particular brand of buffoonery. Weird Al is not just the guy who eats sandwiches for comedic effect. He’s the man who can successfully educate you on when to use “good” and when to use “well” – a lesson I can assure you has taken over a decade of my best efforts to force into my children’s surly little heads.

The English language is a living, dynamic thing and it changes all the time, but the rules still matter. Parameters give clarity and commonality. They’re also, in the right hands, a rich source of entertainment. And in one standout song, Weird Al’s managed to make the most memorably great grammar lesson since “Schoolhouse Rock.”

The post “Word Crimes” is literally the greatest English lesson ever appeared first on Salon.com.

The idea that dopey, unimportant subjects like humanities and social studies are the educational equivalent of a scratchers ticket – a little amusing but probably a ridiculous squandering of your money – is so persistent and pervasive, it’s become an easy punch line. In “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray responds to Andie MacDowell’s admission that she studied 19th-century French poetry by snorting, “What a waste of time!” The long-running musical “Avenue Q” subversively sets the tone for the whole show right in the opening number, in which a recent Princeton grad moans, “Four years of college and plenty of knowledge have earned me this useless degree!” In the movie “Liberal Arts,” Josh Radnor deadpans that his major was “English, with a minor in history, just to make sure I was fully unemployable.” And earlier this year, even President Obama offhandedly assured, “I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

Then this week, that “fully unemployable” description received more validation when the site PayScale released its annual college Return On Investment report. Asking, “How do you measure the value of a college education?” PayScale ranked American institutes of higher learning “based on total cost and alumni earnings,” and the results were not exactly shocking. All of its top 10 schools, with the exception of Ivy Leaguer Stanford, were for science and technology. Though Slate’s Jordan Weissmann helpfully noted that the rankings were only for bachelor’s degrees, so with “no doctors, lawyers, or MBAs, the advantage is naturally going to lie with the tech schools,” the results were soon reported with headlines about “10 Colleges That Are Worth the Money” and which “US Colleges and Majors Are the Biggest Waste of Money.” The Atlantic further assessed the top “waste of money” majors at low-ranking schools. They were: arts, humanities and English, education, and social work and criminal justice. And in case you don’t see where this is all going, last year, Business Insider crowned MIT the “best college in America” by declaring, “When it comes to assessing the value of a college, only one thing matters: how much that school will help you succeed in life.” A reader who participated in the ranking asked, “Are you going to learn any distinct, transferable skills? If the value of your degree would be negligible at a non-top-tier school, then what is the point of even pursuing it?” Uhhhh, I don’t know … knowledge? We live in one of the few cultures in the world that has the ideal of pursuing happiness – not industry, not wealth – built into its national character, and yet we increasingly treat the notion of educating ourselves in how to be well-rounded, sentient beings as a pointless expense. And learning for its own satisfaction is all but laughed at.

If you’re talking about what degree programs will most likely get you the highest salary, I understand pointing and saying, “Here’s where the money is.” I even comprehend that different kinds of training and different jobs have different financial values. What I am tired of, however, is the near constant message that those of us who haven’t had the inclination or ability to pursue the study of those more lucrative things are big fat failures who threw away our college educations on meaningless frippery like literature and social justice. My writer friend Fawn puts it this way: “I’m fed up with those trend stories saying that anyone who doesn’t make the big bucks is a loser.”

In college, I studied film and took a detour in Dublin to immerse myself in a program of Irish history and literature. If you’re looking for perspective on “useless” educations, I may not have written the book, but I can definitely produce a detailed critical analysis of it. I have never been well-off and likely never will be. Yet I somehow manage to do work I love, have a happy, reasonably balanced life, and can occasionally toss out a joke about the inscrutability of “Finnegans Wake.” Yo, I’m fine.

I want my kids to be fine too. When my older daughter was looking at middle schools, we visited one prestigious public school that boasted of its intense test prep and how it would prepare our children to be competitive in the global workforce. Lucy was 10 at the time. We went to another that vowed the students would always be doing math and science one year above their grade level, but not to stress, because on Fridays the kids would have “fun” classes like art and music.

It’s funny, because I know a lot of people who’ve spent their adult lives building successful corporate careers, but I only know a very small handful who’ve been able to support themselves with their art. Art is not easy. To make something beautiful — a song, a book, a painting – takes effort. To be able to make that your job takes incredible skill and dedication. Even Barack Obama, after his art history dis this winter, apologized to an offended professor by admitting that the subject has “helped me take in a great deal of joy in my life that I might otherwise have missed.” So spare us the hobbyist condescension, thanks!

Perhaps because she did wind up at a school that focuses on humanities and independent study, my child is now doomed to a future as college debt-riddled, smartass barista. But maybe not. Last month, the Fiscal Times reported on a new study from the Association for American College and Universities that pronounced that “Students who study the liberal arts do about as well as most college graduates in terms of annual salaries and employment rates.” I believe it. I have plenty of friends who had liberal arts educations. Some of them went on to pursue their fields of study for their careers; others went on to business and technology. None of them seem to have been especially crippled in life because they know who Aristophanes was.

Journalist Celeste Headlee, who has a master’s in music, says that her education “taught me how to stand in front of a crowd with poise and articulate my thoughts clearly, in a way that others can understand. I can’t tell you how many smart people can’t influence others because they’re nervous, inarticulate, or just plain boring.” My attorney pal Jessica echoes that, saying, “My theater degrees gave me the best possible skill set a lawyer could ask for.” Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, a self-described “proud English major,” says, “Understanding human dynamics will take you way farther than writing code (though both is a killer combo).” As he’s said in the past, “Being successful in a modern society requires a broader understanding of humanity and people.” My friend Ben, another English lit veteran, adds, “Any body of knowledge you absorbed about tech and business as an undergrad is now largely obsolete anyway. You couldn’t have studied for what our jobs are asking of us.” And a former CEO pal with a BFA says, “In the labor world, I could relate to people who worked with their hands for a living — many don’t respect that kind of work. In the political arena, my education helped with negotiations and fundraising, because I focused on the process and not the result, and it was never complete.”

When an educational system is a factory that efficiently grinds out global competitors, you may well produce a large number of people making nice money and contributing to the economic success of the companies they work for. But when your educational system also cherishes humanities, you create more thinkers and questioners. You teach people to value themselves beyond their work identities. You illuminate the human condition and cultivate compassion and service and communication. You don’t wind up putting people on a track when they haven’t been taught to wonder whether they even belong on that track, or where it’s going. I know, crazy talk! Or as my friend Laura, who holds an impressive three degrees in theater and has an actual paying career in theater, says, “Eff the corporatization of higher ed. It’s a great way to kill off all ingenuity and spirit in the country so we can all be like the line of workers headed into the machine in ‘Metropolis.'”

There are a lot of other ways to measure what Business Insider calls “success” than in job titles and salaries. In college, my friend Adam had to choose between acting and law. He opted for the former and now says, “I’ve performed in 41 states and seven countries … and I wouldn’t trade those experiences for all the money in a Candy Crush IPO.” And my friend Rose, who’s currently studying comparative literature after a long business career, says, “The fact that I can share my passion in a classroom, in my writings and research, and know that sharing knowledge in any way, shape or form makes for a more enriching life and gives back to the community at large? That’s worth something.”

I have nothing but boundless admiration for the people who’ve studied and pursued technology, medicine and business because that’s what they’re good at and that’s where their enthusiasms lie. I lack skills in all of those arenas to a truly hopeless degree, and the fact that there are people in the world who grasp those concepts is beyond my feeble comprehension. But I’d really appreciate it if schools and the media and our snottier acquaintances with bigger houses would tone it down with the reductive and inaccurate assumption that having more money means you got a better education. I may suck at math, but that’s just terrible calculation. The value of an education is how well it trains you to think for yourself, including about what you really want to do with your life, and what you truly value. Or as a friend with an MFA – who just, by the way, moved into a higher tax bracket – puts it, “If you want stability, go with a degree that provides a predictable life path. If you want to face your fears and do what you love, it might require a bit more work, but has the potential to be much more satisfying.” And the return on that investment is priceless.

The post Hooray for “worthless” education! appeared first on Salon.com.

In a statement on their website, Westboro warned “students,  faculty, and alumni that the satanic policies of this nation, especially those of the colleges and universities, are causing God to pour His wrath out upon this nation. Doomed American academics fancy themselves to be smarter than God. They promote the fag agenda with all their might and mock the word of God and His messengers at every turn.”

Well, Vassar might not be smarter than God, but they’re definitely smarter than Westboro. Here’s how the college prepared for their visit from the hate group: By rallying the school’s network of alums and other supporters to raise $100 to go towards an LGBTQ rights organization for every minute the group planned to protest.

And people say liberal arts degrees are useless!

The fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a national organization that provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ young people, exceeded expectations, bringing in $41,529 as of this posting. (Keep an eye on the growing total here.)

Vassar’s acting president Jon Chenette says he is in awe of what his students have done in the face of the hate group’s threats. He is also proud to be affiliated with an institution that supports LGBTQ rights — which attracted Westboro’s attention in the first place. In a statement on the planned protest, Chennete wrote:

We look forward as a college to any opportunity to counter messages of hate and bigotry and to underscore our values… In the face of Westboro’s statements, we want to celebrate the inclusiveness of our community and the multitude of backgrounds, interests, and preferences that enrich our experiences.

Judy Jarvis, assistant director of Campus Life and LGBTQ and Gender Resources at Vassar, was also unfazed by the protesters. In a statement to the student newspaper she said: “The Vassar community is so creative and intelligent, and I look forward to working with students and staff to figure out a response that shows the strength and inclusiveness of our community.”

Students have been using a Facebook group to organize students and the surrounding community in a counter-protest on campus. They are also planning teach-ins on LGBTQ rights at the college and around the country while Westboro protests on February 28.

The post College uses a visit from Westboro to fundraise for LGBTQ group appeared first on Salon.com.

They have done so through a combination of decreasing access to education and demonizing academic culture and academics. Make no mistake about it: The death of the humanities is an ideologically motivated murder, more like a massacre. The decline of student enrollment in university and college liberal arts programs is a well-documented phenomenon. These declining student numbers, along with the receding place of the humanities in the general secondary and post-secondary curriculum, does seem to spell doom for the liberal arts.

Nearly everyone, regardless of their politics, agrees that the decline of the liberal arts is at least in part a matter of economics. The rising cost of college education has made a liberal arts education simply out of reach for students from working-class and lower-middle-class families. These students are compelled to pursue vocationally oriented educations out of necessity.

Epstein notes economics in his article, but fails to cite the reasons for the rising cost of a university education. Instead he focuses on an alleged decline in the rigor and content of a liberal arts education, harrumphing that much less is expected from students who receive much more attention and support than their predecessors. More interestingly, he blames the decline of standards in the humanities on teaching and research that is increasingly concerned with theoretical analysis and multicultural topics. (More on that later.)

The economic situation is particularly dire for public colleges and universities, where the rising cost of tuition is directly related to a decrease in government funding. One of the earliest and most famous examples of this occurred when, as governor, Ronald Regan introduced tuition fees to California’s public universities in the 1970s. Today right-wing efforts to destroy funding for higher education, both in terms of subsidizing institutions and assisting students, continue with increasing virulence. Paul Ryan’s budget seeks to cut $200 billion dollars from the Pell Grant program, an essential tool for low-income students seeking higher education. The humanities disproportionately experience the adverse effects of this economic pressure. Students are unlikely to take on large amounts of debt for a degree without a clear vocational focus, and university administrators are quick to cut programs that do not carry their weight.

This financial war on higher education has been coupled with persistent attacks on the academy and academics as immoral, unpatriotic or simply frivolous. While scientists warning of climate change have recently been targeted, for the most part these attacks have been directed at those working in the humanities. William F. Buckley pioneered these attacks in his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” and his claim that universities serve as indoctrination camps for liberalism has become a standard talking point on the right. Epstein engages in a bit of this rhetoric himself. He blames the expansion of the humanities outside of “traditional” Western subjects to include areas such as African-American Studies for declining student numbers. By and large, however, Epstein’s critique is mild compared to what others have said. David Horowitz’s 2006 book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” comes to mind as a particularly vitriolic example.

This war on the liberal arts is born from the same desire that produces voter ID laws: a desire to limit democratic participation. The goal of a liberal arts education was never primarily direct economic benefit for the recipient or even the sort of personal/spiritual development about which many like to wax lyrically. The purpose of a liberal arts education was always meant to be a political education. The Latin ars liberalis refers to the skills required of a free man — that is the skills of a citizen. The Latin word ars and its Greek equivalent techne do not mean art in a modern sense. Instead the word refers to a craft or a skill. Thus, history, rhetoric and literature were seen as the skills a citizen needed for his job: governing. This was just like metal working was the skill required of a blacksmith for his profession. This is why 19th century reformers eager to expand political participation concentrated so much attention on expanding access to the liberal arts.

When creating citizens, both for the nation and for the world, it is still through the liberal arts that you get the most bang for your buck. Nothing evidences this more than the expansion of the humanities over the past half-century, the very expansion Epstein and others attack. African-American Studies, postcolonial criticism and queer theory provide students with the tools they need to live and work competently and comfortably in an ever more diverse world. Most important, they help them to be citizens of that world. The ability of the humanities to expand and adapt is one of its assets. My 19th century Classicist forebears reacted with horror to the introduction of English as an academic subject, horror similar to what Ethnic Studies Departments often encounter today. Ultimately, however, the inclusion of the vernacular language helped to keep the liberal arts relevant and to fulfil their purpose of educating future citizens.

The importance of the humanities in educating citizens is why we have undoubtedly seen the consequences of the decline in of the liberal arts nowhere more than in the quality of the public debate. The disappearance of the liberal arts from American education has meant the disappearance of the liberal arts from American culture. Rupert Murdoch and his media empire have helped by creating a post-humanities agora where a degenerated shadow of the public debate occurs without the intellectual rigor that a populace trained in the liberal arts would demand. One need only spend a morning with the newspaper or an evening watching cable news to see the horrid effects. The quality of arguments that are regularly entertained would never stand a chance if the majority of the public had been thoroughly shaped by an education with a focus on history, rhetoric and basic geography. We might be able to spare ourselves from believing in Canadian death panels or anything Glenn Beck ever said.

We might also be spared much of the small-mindedness of our current public discourse. The complete absence of reference to any non-Biblical literature during both parties conventions demonstrates how little the humanities are part of Americans’ language. St. Thomas Aquinas is reported to have said, “hominem unius libri timeo”: “I fear the man of one book.” I would add, “populum unius libri timeo.” I fear the nation of one book — even if it’s the Good Book. The fact that the Bible is the only book with which it can be safely assumed a majority of American adults are even vaguely familiar is not good if we want to have a full and vibrant public debate. For one thing, it allows our history to be re-written. It allows Americans to believe that the Founding Fathers were inspired solely by Judeo-Christian scripture without reference to the Greek and Romans (or English common law for that matter). It allows us to believe that marriage is static and unchanging institution that has come to us from Eden untouched by social and historical change. Most dangerously, it allows us to live in a democracy completely unaware of what a dangerous battle field history is for such governments, especially when those who are meant to be governing themselves lack the knowledge to do so effectively and thus abdicate their power to the richest or most powerful amongst them.

Education is a political act. For over half a century, the conservative movement has waged a political war on liberal arts education. They have waged this war because they know that without the skills we are provided by a liberal arts education citizens must abdicate our power. They know, like the Greeks and Romans did, that only those with the ars liberalis can do the job of citizens. That is why we must not allow the liberal arts to be further attacked, economically or ethically. A democracy without citizens will not long survive and citizens are only those who have mastered the ars liberalis.

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