My B.A. in English

“What do you do with a B.A. in English?” asks Princeton, the character from “Avenue Q” for whom “the world is a big scary place.”

Today, I’m eating my words. Last September, I lampooned the “proliferation” of majors, trying to combat the overcredentialization happening in college today.

Now I plead guilty. Last Wednesday, I officially declared a second degree, a Bachelor of Arts in English.

I find ways to circumnavigate my previous stance, rationalizing that back then I was really only lashing out against the bad reasons people use for adding majors. For example, I still find it indefensible to add a major because “it’s only a few more classes.” These evasions, though, still seem hollow, so I’ll just concede the hypocrisy and move on.

While this addition might come as a surprise to the people who know me as The Math Guy, it is not foreign to me.

I come from word people. My father is a word man, as was his father before him. They are English teachers. The love of words is in my blood, and this inheritance evokes a silent stirring which draws me back to the word.

Along with surprise, I often get kudos for being “well-rounded” or using “both sides of the brain.” I find this frustrating. First, it exemplifies the tendency to only treat interests which are legitimized by a degree as genuine.

Second, I dislike the right-brain/left-brain conceit. It assumes that just because the brain is split into hemispheres that the mind is divisible into two meaningfully distinct halves. Based in some science, it has been overextended, overused and oversimplified.

There is one reaction I don’t receive. My math major shields me from the interrogators who demand of most English majors, “But who will hire you?”

It is a common lament among English majors who, after so many rounds of questioning, have resigned themselves to the expectation of post-baccalaureate unemployment.

The imperative of economic value extends beyond individuals. Increasingly, cash-strapped universities and society in general force the humanities to justify their existence.

These trends have followed from the commodification of the college degree.

Because universities are now the gatekeepers to the white-collar professional world, students see the campus as a marketplace and the college experience as an exchange of goods. We pay a (rapidly increasing) price for a diploma, which we then try to trade for a comfy, salaried position.

But as the “Avenue Q” song observes, our technocratic society views a B.A. in English as a “useless degree” because it does not give students a specialized set of skills.

Indiana University should be different. IU’s roots are in the liberal arts, and its core unit, the College of Arts and Sciences, is a liberal arts institution. Moreover, we do not have an engineering school.

However, even here, we have a business school whose careerism is borderline dangerous and attitudes toward the humanities that are inappropriate for a university like ours.

While reality can be harsh, I’ll end on a note of idealism courtesy of Princeton:
“But somehow I can’t shake / the feeling I might make / a difference to the human race.”


E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu