The Pre-Professional Arts

By Patrick T. Brennan

Last week, National Public Radio’s Defense Correspondent and current Nieman Journalism Fellow, Guy Raz, gave a talk sponsored by the Classics department on the practical usefulness of history—specifically classical history—in a variety of careers. After working nine years as a correspondent for NPR and CNN, he is currently spending his year studying classical history at Harvard. He prefaced his talk by asking the audience, primarily Classics concentrators, whether they’d ever heard the question, “Classics, so what are you going to do with that?” His suggested answer was to repackage Latin and Greek as derivatives, purchase credit default swap insurance, and sell them as collateralized AAA debt. His more meaningful, extended answer, is that the study of the Classics, and other liberal arts disciplines, prepares a student for life and employment far better than most vocational majors.

Harvard prides itself on not offering pre-professional majors—as it should—but a disturbing and deleterious trend of vocational aspiration has begun to infect our university nonetheless. Economics, an academic discipline with myriad meaningful uses, has become little more than an ever-narrowing funnel towards Wall Street. Mathematics, the purest of sciences, has transformed into a training ground for the next generation of “quants” focused on making more accurate tranches rather than writing more elegant proofs. Organizations like Harvard University Women in Business and the Harvard College Consulting Group attract hundreds of ambitious students every year, eager to while away their college years learning about finance, business, and consulting.

Such organizations are appallingly out of place at an academic institution, which has the professed (in 1650) purpose of “the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences” (not that Harvard’s current administration would deign to quote anything written before 1960). Given the amount of bad literature, art, and science that infects Harvard these days, students certainly cannot afford to waste any time on inappropriate, meaningless vocational education. The phrase “liberal arts”, commonly applied to the College’s curriculum, comes from the fact that literature, philosophy, and the arts were disciplines a liber, a free man, had the privilege to study. For the Greeks, leisure was a luxury only afforded to the rich, which they spend being educated, leading to our word “scholar”.

Students at the world’s greatest university are famously ungrateful, and this is perhaps just another incarnation. Is it really that difficult to recognize the privilege of the academic and cultural opportunities Harvard offers? Spending these four glorious years learning skills that can be learned from pressing the F1 key in Excel is a tragic waste. The other day, I reflected on the fact that I currently have the privilege of taking a class of just twenty or so students on what Dryden called “the best poem by the best poet,” taught by the world’s preeminent expert on the poem. Would I, or any other student afforded such opportunities daily, really be better off spending that time “comping” the strangely named Veritas Financial Group, rather than pursuing true veritas? Harvard students are remarkably myopic if they do not realize that they will never again have such opportunities to learn from the best of the Academy. They can learn accounting from the author of Accounting for Dummies whenever they want, but only have one chance to listen to Stephen Greenblatt lecture on Shakespeare.

I am certainly not trying to demean the value of learning a trade, or vocational skills, at some point. However, the troubling trend of pre-professionalism can have nothing but deleterious effects on Harvard’s academic efforts. Last week, the Crimson’s “weekend supplement” Fifteen Minutes (which, as far as I can tell, is meant to describe the maximum amount of time they spend editing the grammar in every issue) published an article about student entrepreneurs, whose efforts range from t-shirts to utterly useless travel websites. These students deserve more admiration than their classmates intent on usury as a career path, with the possible exception of those who created a “travel website” which reminds students when spring break is. It remains quite disturbing, however, that both the writer and many of the interviewees conclude that Harvard ought to offer more support to these student entrepreneurs, in the form of classes intended to aid them in their commercial pursuits. When Harvard cannot afford to hire any more professors in academic disciplines, should the University really be expected to provide classes which could be taken at Bunker Hill Community College? And lest they suggest that current classes should be given a more pre-professional focus, I need not remind anyone that Gregory Mankiw should not be teaching students how to read a balance sheet.

There are a variety of reasons for the disintegration of the liberal arts at Harvard. For one, the allure of the Croesan salaries offered by the finance and consulting industries have led astray many students whose talents could be put to actual use elsewhere. Students also arrive with much less proper education at Harvard than they used to, many of them coming from high “schools” which have traded Virgil and Aristotle for AP Economics and Accounting. Moreover, the continued repudiation of the idea that certain academic disciplines are more valuable than others, and that academics should be engaged in the pursuit of truth, not the denial of it, has hardly bolstered proper scholarship.

Perhaps the current financial crisis, which has become an existential one for many a WIB or Lehman intern, will remind students to cherish their time within the Academy. All students should heed the ancient ballad, gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus, but it is surprising indeed that we must now be reminded that we should also be reminded to cognoscere, to learn and inquire (not of Jim Cramer).