Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?

First rate article by Mark Edmundson in the Oxford American HERE. It's a very sensible plea to undergraduate students in the hope that they will actually work to find meaning through a liberal arts curriculum. Here's the punchline:

So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.

You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.

The great recession has been really difficult for the liberal arts here. I think kids today are rightfully much more anxious about their job prospects and as a result don' t follow their bliss as much as kids did ten years ago. The fact that universities continues to shovel resources into programs that teach what until very recently educated people used to get as on the job training has not helped.

I don't know. Would our republic be any less served if all of the education, journalism, and business schools just disappeared? With the exception of accounting, business school is an absolute scam. Far more American CEOs have engineering or science degrees, and slightly more have liberal arts degrees. And the MBA has been shown to make no difference to lifetime earnings (if you compare people with similar SAT scores that do and don't get MBAs). And wouldn't we be better served if journalists and teachers actually had degrees in, and a passion for learning about, areas relevant to the subject matter about which they will report or teach?