My degree is useless, am I too?
Photo credits: Alexandra Matei
My poor mother almost had a heart attack when I told her I was moving countries to study Literature and Cultural Studies. I mean, she must have seen this coming after raising me in a house full of books. This was not a rebellious act; I was a product of long hours of bed-time storytelling. The year before I came to Amsterdam, in the rushed in-between graduation and enrolment period, I decided to start a career in international relations back at home and do something “useful” with my good grades. It took me two weeks to quit. Therefore, after my forced year of rest and relaxation, I was ready to finally pursue my “true path”.
My mother’s main concern was the (lack of) job prospects. I was expecting to reassure her after receiving some providential advice by my professors to a successful career in Literature if I had enough “passion”. Instead, halfway through my degree, one of our teachers told us that our studies were useless. Logically, an unsettling layer of panic started to spread among my classmates. While no one dared to leave the class, I know many were thinking of it, as I stopped seeing some familiar faces in the following weeks. In response, my teacher claimed that we should be proud of this choice, as it was our means to fight the capitalism that forced us to be ‘useful’. In a technocratic society ruled by productivity, the Humanities were painted to us as the caped hero ready to make us all become better humans. However, she did not consider that in Western academia this caped hero is bound to privileged circumstances, where this ‘learning for the sake of learning’ ideal is only possible if you have enough money and time to spend in a constantly increasing tuition fees.
And here I was, unable to find solace in the dream of education and fighting the system when I knew my chances of getting a job related to my studies seemed quite slim. This is why the presence of a course called “How to survive the 21st century only with a humanities degree” caught my attention. While I was not hoping for a masterclass about how to make the Humanities marketable, I guess I was expecting to be taught practical applications of all the theory we had been ingesting in the past two years. I guess I was trying to find some “usefulness” to my degree. But what is exactly to be useful? Was it to have employable skills? Was that the goal in life? And what happens when the current world order plagued by wars and climate change has endangered the security of a future at all?
What happens is that the concepts and ideas we have been raised with are out under question. What we used to consider “useful” seems no longer relevant. And yet, I am inevitably preoccupied about whether I will be able to afford rent next month or find a fulfilling job that allows me to repay my student debt. This is an extended and pervasive concern among the people around me, especially among students of the Humanities, whose skills seem not valuable to survive this century, but who have also been shown that if the current system continues as it is, it is unlikely we all will.
I don’t think my degree in Humanities is useless. On the contrary, I consider them very useful. If the Humanities are deemed useless due to their lack of exploitability, it is precisely in this slippery fluidity, in their resistance to be defined where I find their usefulness. Due to their intangibility and adaptability, Humanities have the capacity to adapt, and expand, and haunt every corner of our society and serve as a critical lens through which to approach the world that we live in. However, I do think much more needs to be done to increase the relevance of the Humanities. While attempting to present themselves as highly critical of their own methods, the Humanities in modern Western academia as I have experienced them are still struggling with the issues arising from their institutionalisation and embeddedness in the system they love to charge against.
Thus, we need to stop defending the usefulness of the Humanities and strive instead to create a self-proving body of Humanities that is coherent with what they claim. But until universities do not provide accessible education and equal support to the diversity of their students, until they don’t create the platforms for students to drive social change within, as well as outside of the curriculum, the Humanities will keep being useless, and not the kind we should be proud of.
