This posting was inspired by a recent entry in the blog entitled “stuff white people like.” This blogster pokes fun at a variety of elite white pretensions: Priuses, vegetarianism, organic food, bottled water, gifted children, gourmet sandwiches, bilingualism, and so on. There is enough truth in the stereotypes to make some of them quite funny; after all that is how and why stereotypes work. And I freely admit that many of them apply to me: I recycle, bike to work, and would drive a Prius if I could afford one. I have “gifted” children who are learning second languages. I have studied and lived abroad, in locations where I have been the only white North American around. I like coffee, overly elaborate sandwiches, sushi, dark chocolate, wine, and tend towards a vegetarian diet. I have, not one, but two “useless” degrees, in Anthropology and History respectively, am happily ensconced in my own Ivory Trailer, and can discuss arcane theorists and philosophers. I also do most of my shopping at Walmart (we all have our contradictions); except for produce of course, that comes from the locally owned and operated community farm.
So that’s all very nice. A full disclosure in the confessional mode. How very Foucauldian. Not to mention ironic. Now what about graduate school?
The entry, which can be found at: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/81-graduate-school/ argues the following:
Whites are congenitally addicted to intellectual one-up-manship. An impractical undergraduate degree is insufficient to succeed in this game. So further higher education is needed with preference for “ the true ivory tower of academia …. as it imparts true, useless knowledge. The best subjects are English, History, Art History, Film, Gender Studies, <insert nation> Studies, Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, <insert European nation> Literature, and the ultimate: Comp Lit.”
Pursuit of a graduate degree also allegedly enables one to live a life of sloth while obtaining it and then provides an inexhaustible fund of erudition that can be strategically deployed at cocktail parties.
Lest I be dismissed unfairly as a humorless white girl, let me say that I did find the satire funny, because, after all, some of it is true. My mother, who had a B.S. in chemical engineering, used to say that B.S. stood for bullshit, M.S. stood for more shit, and Ph.D. meant piled higher and deeper (that would refer to my dad who had a Ph.D. in chemical engineering). Of their progeny, one kid got a Ph.D., one got a Master’s and one dropped out of college after about a year (that would be NS or “No shit!”) Incidentally, No Shit!, when in the workforce, made considerably more money than Piled Higher and Deeper.
We have all run across irritating pretentious intellectual poseurs in social settings. And hey, not all of them are white. Irrespective of color though, it is easy to write them off as useless, self-indulgent dilettantes whose educational forays are bankrolled by secret trust funds or mom and dad. However, I suspect they are in the minority. Many graduate students dig themselves deep into student loan debt, and, if they obtain the coveted Ph.D., face uncertain employment prospects and modest salaries. If this is the case, and if one privileges economic self- interest over other goals, it begs the obvious question, “are you friggin’ stupid or what? If you’re that smart, why not become a lawyer instead?”
Our blogster would seem to agree, stating “It is important to understand that a graduate degree does not make someone smart, so do not feel intimidated. They may have read more, but in no way does that make them smarter, more competent, or more likable [sic] than you.” Picking pretense over profit, in fact, would make one dumber, less competent and less likeable (or perhaps merely “likeable enough”).
True, a diploma does not confer brains, despite what the Wizard of Oz may have claimed to the Scarecrow in the MGM movie. Or, to quote another line of the Scarecrow’s from that film, “some people without brains do awful lot of talking.” Plenty of advanced degree holders are, in my opinion, complete idiots. And I also count among my friends a number of very smart, resourceful people who never completed college, or even high school. But to dismiss the acquisition of a specialized, graduate degree as merely frivolous and self-indulgent is to miss the point. Most people that follow that path are people of good will, motivated by idealism, a sense of vocation, and a desire to create and disseminate knowledge. They often give up years of potential income and career advancement and require a great deal of tolerance from friends, spouses, and children along the way. Given the degree of sacrifice required, if this path were pursued solely out of a desire to feel intellectually smug, well, these folks indeed would deserve our mockery and contempt.
However, I’d like to believe that the average academically-minded person, white or otherwise, is not that pathetic, shortsighted, or shallow. Given that I am a professional academic, you might dismiss this belief as shamelessly self-serving. But let’s think a minute about what purpose the supposedly “useless” disciplines of literature, history, philosophy, or political science serve. The successful pursuit of a liberal arts degree, from the B.A. to the Ph.D., requires the development of a certain skill set. You must learn how to read, write and think critically about material that is often difficult to understand upon first reading. Ideally, you then pass on those skills to others as a teacher or in some other professional setting. A foundation in critical thinking might then be translated into real life situations like being able to pick apart the logic or evidentiary grounds of arguments for or against global warming. Or to be able to see through cheap political tricks during election season.
One of the privileges enjoyed by complex societies is the economic wherewithal to support an intellectual class. That class, while it may provide its fair share of obfuscating, impenetrable prose, also produces art, literature, and investigations about how individuals and societies have behaved, thought, and acted, in the past and the present. In fact, the blog “stuff white people like” is a perfect example of this kind of intellectual production. Its author is providing an ethnography, of sorts, of the values held by a certain class of the mainstream white population in the early twenty-first century U.S. But undergirding this site is the belief that affluent white people behave the way that they do, not out of genuine conviction or conscience, but simply because they want to feel superior to the rest of humanity. Yes, I get that it’s satire. But if it happens to be true, it’s not very funny.
