"También No-hacer es creador, pues no sólo de hacer vive el hombre"- -Gonzalo Arango
This week, The Economist debuted its first-ever college rankings. Yale University flunked, and came in at No. 1,270 out of 1,275. A host of no-name pharmacy colleges fared better. Its criterion: "Which colleges do most for their graduates’ pay-packets."
Two days earlier, the world tuned in to the Republican primary debate. A brain surgeon who acts as if he’s suffered a few undiagnosed strokes himself argued for a tithe while twittering his "gifted hands." The ousted CEO of the company that made my shitty printer argued for trimming bureaucratic fat but stayed mum on the 30,000 layoffs she oversaw. A real estate executive who likes to marry Eastern European women insulted the soft-spoken governor of Ohio who called frontrunners’ platforms "fantasy."
In our culture, Ben Carson could conclude the first Republican primary debate by bragging he’s the "only one to have separated Siamese twins," or Donald Trump boasting about his private wealth, or Carly Fiorina regarding the merger of HP and Compaq. Our polity worships financial and medical success, even in the absence of minimal knowledge of world affairs. Something is rotten in the state of Florida. We can’t separate the financial valuation of universities from our money-crazed GOP race. We’ve gone to Preview, where, as English junior Jack Edmondson remembers, "Everyone told you to become an engineer." UF’s catalog’s headline for the English major reads: "Undergraduate study in English prepares students for diverse careers in law, publishing, advertising, media and business, teaching and advanced degree work." Note what comes last. A professor of mine once said students should learn to write poetry in order to write emails. But if we study English for portable skills, why not fire brilliant scholars like him and switch to copy-editing instructors?
Under Gov. Rick Scott, who proposed shifting funds to STEM my first Fall here, and discounting STEM’s tuition my second, I’ve long felt on the defensive. Many literature students I’ve talked to have had buyer’s regret. I understand: Why bother taking a course instead of reading the syllabus?
Through my interviews, I have tried to figure it out. Professor Kligerman described the rush of finishing his oral exit exams and his caring professors; Professor Schuering described the alienation and excitement of leaving home, and the passion of classrooms. I once teared up as Professor Rylkova compared the loss of provincial Russian life in "The Cherry Orchard" to our current trimming of the humanities: We just can’t afford the cherry orchard. So, what are we saving up for? Razing bookstores and erecting blood plasma centers? Mark Edmundson writes in "Why Teach?" it’s hard to defend a liberal arts education to someone who hasn’t had one. This explains the overwhelming plurality of vocational degrees on our Board of Trustees.
For me, the study of literature, culture and history as if they mattered taught me compassion, breadth and perspective. It taught me how little I knew and how to learn. In Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård’s recent gargantuan memoirs, they capture the freedom of literature education, and of writing life into something valuable. I quivered at the Hialeah Metrorail transfer one evening, last winter, reading Knausgård on discovering modernism: "our ludicrously inconsequential lives…had a part…in the supreme…you only had to read." And the other day, I read a Susan Shapiro interview: "Bob Dylan said when he first heard Elvis Presley, it was like breaking out of jail. That’s how it was for me with the confessionals." As Goethe wrote, "He who does not know how to give himself an account of three thousand years may remain in the dark, inexperienced, and live from day to day." The Swamp isn’t interwar Paris, and as Mark McGurl writes in "The Program Era," the college teacher has replaced Gertrude Stein. We need authors, editors and reflective citizens who think beyond bottom lines. We need university spaces of free thought, exploration and critical reflection, because the beauty of life is superficial: The rest is shitting, pissing and dying. We need more than printers and money and a brain stem.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
