Columns

There’s a great scene in season five of The Wire in which journalists at the Baltimore Sun are discussing an upcoming series on poverty in the city. The paper’s veteran journalists begin to point out the complex web of factors that contribute to poverty – education, parenting, drugs, nutrition, race – but the editor wants a narrower, more accessible piece that captures “the Dickensian aspect” of poverty.

The scene encapsulates the way in which extremely complex issues become oversimplified in the public consciousness, often with the media’s help. After all, there’s only so much we can take in, and if we want a properly nuanced understanding of a particular field, we can study it at university.

And yet, at the end of my politics degree I still don’t really know the first thing about poverty (although along the way someone probably told me it was all the fault of the bourgeoisie). At the very least, understanding poverty requires a loose grasp of sociology, geography, politics, psychology, and economics. Some gender studies would also come in handy when it comes to the issue of higher fertility among lower socio-economic groups. And the editor in The Wire was right, in a way – in order to understand poverty as more than a mere collection of facts, perhaps one must indeed be stirred by the Dickensian aspect. This would require a smattering of English in lieu of real-life experience. Does anybody graduate from Otago with this range of learning?

Poverty is just an example, and an extreme one at that; due to the ring-fencing of humanities subjects, it’s entirely possible to finish a politics degree without knowing what rape culture is, or how supply and demand curves work, or why “natural” is not the same as “good.”

Despite my repeated (and, as a politics graduate, inevitable) use of politics as an example, this isn’t a problem with politics specifically. It’s a problem with the humanities, and the way the Humanities Division designs many of its courses.

The Division does not encourage an interdisciplinary approach, and as a result turf wars break out when departments try to broaden their scope. A few years ago, the Politics department wanted to start teaching some feminist thought in one of its undergraduate papers. The Gender Studies department kicked up a fuss, arguing that this undermined their own programme, and the Politics department was forced to drop the content.

Putting aside the obvious problem here, the gender studies people were right, to an extent – if people can learn feminist thought under the umbrella of politics, many prospective gender studies students will study politics instead, and the department may lose students (and funding). But by the same token, many politics students, if exposed to feminist thought, could then be inspired to take more gender studies papers.

The problem is that this won’t happen unless it’s easy and practical for students to sample papers from a range of different departments without slowing down their degrees. And quite obviously, it isn’t. There are only three non-politics papers that can be credited to a politics degree; take a range of non-politics papers (as I did) and your degree ends up taking forever. We shouldn’t blame the Gender Studies department for getting uppity – we should blame the Humanities division for impeding a more collaborative approach between its subjects.


The traditional rationale for this ring-fencing is “specialisation.” Specialisation is important for entering the job market, or something. However, with the widening access to tertiary education, the humanities have long since dropped this rationale in relation to bachelor degrees. In order to claim specialist status, you need a Master’s or better. A bachelor degree is more about “training students to think critically,” or “equipping them with the skills needed to succeed in the job market,” or some other suitably vague words to obscure the fact that it’s bloody hard to find a job after graduating.

In reality, “specialisation” is meaningless: the humanities simply train students to view the world through certain lenses. If you study economics, you will see market forces at work everywhere, and will often think in terms of freedom, choice, and rational self-interest. If you study politics, particularly at Otago, you will come out of it a Marxist, a liberal in the Anglo-American tradition, or a somewhat confused mixture of the two. If you take gender studies, you will be a third-wave feminist. If you study law, you will be finicky and tend to miss the point.

Not only have these graduates been trained to think in these particular, discrete ways, they have been made to believe that they have been enlightened in the process. This is true to an extent – all of these ways of thinking have some value – but it also narrows the student’s mind as all other, “inferior” ways of thinking are whittled away over the course of his or her degree. Marxists are particularly bad at this, reflexively blaming everything on the class system and twisting the evidence to suit their worldview.

This applies to other divisions – science and commerce both train their graduates to think in a certain way. This can often leave them narrow-minded and with a set of entrenched prejudices, not to mention an unfairly dim view of the humanities. But in each case, there’s an obvious rationale for specialising. In order to make a meaningful contribution to the sciences, you need to think empirically; in order to be successful businessperson, you need a business-oriented mind. But I fail to see the point in flooding the market with Marxists and third-wave feminists when these graduates have no other strings to their bow.

I know it’s a bit rich to say that the humanities should be more wishy-washy, but I would have liked to have learned more economics, communications, feminism, sociology and philosophy during my degree, and I suspect many others would too.

-Sam McChesney