A BRIEF RESPONSE TO
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S THOUGHTFUL CONCERNS REGARDING THE
EMPLOYABILITY AND PAY SCALE OF LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS
Or, You Can Make Better Money, Potentially, as a Welder than if You Study Art History
Wherein our President takes most Particular Aim
at that most Dubious Discipline,
doubly so, in that it not only
Features Art, but History
The author does beg her betters
to consider that if we don’t have Art Historians,
how will their art purchases gain in value?
This morning when I was engaged in wasteful and non-STEM productive pursuits (ie checking in on Facebook over a cup of tea following a particularly challenging week), I noted a friend’s status update referring to the Inside Higher Ed's coverage of our President’s remarks about Art History and its general value as an employment opportunity. I consider this friend to be downright heroic in her work as a teacher who is interrogating the way we approach education. She included a pithy remark with the link and the discussion was on.
http://www.insidehighered.com/...
"[A] lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree -- I love art history. So I don't want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I'm just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need."
While her friends were in general agreement that this was a pretty outrageous thing for the President to say, there were some who did acknowledge, sadly, that there was some merit to his assertion. The tone paralleled the way that adult children lament Dad’s harsh manner even as they concede that his judgment cannot be refuted.
I understand the points of view stated by these individuals—for who can argue with someone with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a career in welding? That is their experience at this point in the current economic trajectory and in their particular intersection with it. There hasn’t been a lot of “Chicken Soup” for these souls, and their “Parachutes’” colors cannot be reliably determined.
Yet, I refute Barack Obama’s assertion. As reporter Scott Jaschik noted, “There are all sorts of ironies about the president selecting art history as a discipline to question. He is a graduate of Columbia University, whose undergraduate college is rare in American higher education (outside of art schools) in requiring study of art history.”
Has Barack Obama drunk the anti-intellectual American Kool-Aid?
Is it “jobs” OR “thinking” (and “writing”)?
What world is it that we inhabit when Inside Higher Edillustrates (in a very handy chart) the commonalities of remarks made by President Barack Obama, Gov. Mitt Romney (R, MA), Gov. Rick Scott (R, FL), and Gov. Patrick McCrory (R, NC) when it comes to the creation of false dichotomies that simultaneously erode respect for Higher Education?
Politician/Discipline/Quote
President Obama/Art history/"I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree."
Mitt Romney, former governor and Republican nominee for President/English/"I wonder whether you get information coming into college that says you know, this course of study will lead to this kind of jobs and there’s a lot of opening here as opposed to – as you said, English – and as an English major I can say this.... as an English major your options are uh, you better go to graduate school, all right? And find a job from there.”
Governor Rick Scott, Republican of Florida/Anthropology/"If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so."
Governor Patrick McCrory, Republican of North Carolina/Gender studies/"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."
Much can be written about the President’s remarks which set him into opposition with Art History. But this morning, I started with this:
“Art History” isn’t really appropriately named. It makes it sound like “Sister Wendy tells you about interesting and pretty stuff for your trip to Europe.” Warning- this is about to get long, but the President just REALLY pissed me off… Art History could just as easily be named “The History of Image Making,” “The History of the Management of the Visible World,” or even the “History of Propaganda.” At my university, Art History survey courses could be used for undergraduates to meet the writing requirement. Most of them went for the Western Survey, but we also had Architectural History, and Asian Art, Pre Columbian Art, African Art, and Photographic History surveys to fulfill the same purpose. Anyway…
The Art History that I learned and taught developed the ability to look at an image and recognize that it was created, had a social context, and a purpose. Tied to this looking was the need to write an analytical essay reflecting those facts. Once one recognizes what we call “art” (for convenient shorthand) actually comprises far more than the beautiful, the decorative, or the “elevating,” we can get down to the work of analyzing what is there and learn what it is the makers are trying to say, or to TELL us. My speech on the first day of class ran more or less thus: “If you get nothing else out of this course, you will gain the tools to navigate our visual culture and thereby the ability to be a critical thinker and an informed citizen.” But, then, we showed students how cultural elites (i.e. the ruling classes) managed imagery to help them rule. And, yes, I also noted political advertisements during those silly seasons. And we talked about advertisements as well.
Caveat-I am not eliding “elitism” as we use it today and “elites.” I think we all know what we are talking about there!
Remember, President Obama doesn’t want a bunch of emails coming in because he
“love[s] Art History.” So, if you disagree with either his selection of an easily derided Liberal Arts degree as a poor way to spend your higher education dollars, don’t bother him! I’m sure he thinks it’s “fun.”
What isn’t so “fun” is his cozy conceptual relationship with those who ridicule one of the sources of critical analysis skills that has a very wide front door—our ability to use our eyes to look, and to think about why something appears the way it does.