01/14/2008

On Liberal Arts

We all came to Brown for different reasons. Some were wooed by the strength of a particular academic program, others by study abroad options; some were recruited by sports teams, others by financial aid packages. Most of us, including myself, came here because we thought Brown would give us what we wanted out of college. What I didn't consider so carefully, as I analyzed viewbooks of smiling students four years ago, was how Brown would give me what I wanted out of life. Now, as the specter of the real world begins to loom large, that suddenly seems like a gross oversight. Every attempt to plan for my future brings me to the same question: why am I here? I remember why I came here, but a liberal arts education suddenly seems completely irrelevant to where I'm going.

Hoping for some leads, maybe just a few ideas on how the open curriculum applies to the real world, I went to the career fairs – both of them – for the second year in a row, and for the second year in a row I walked away empty handed. To an international relations major and aspiring journalist, the investment banks, consulting agencies and I.T. companies were all fairly irrelevant. The Bloomberg recruiter did let me know that he learned everything he needed to know on the job, which only made me realize another thing: I really don't want to be an investment banker. So here I am again, wondering what I'm going to do with my life, and what I've been doing with it so far.

Since the heart of my problem is my impending graduation, I decided to look there for answers. In May I'll receive a degree representing some sort of four-year accomplishment on my part. In the most basic terms, it attests to the fact that I've paid at least four semesters of Brown University tuition and "satisfactorily" completed at least 15 courses here. In theory though this degree will say more than that; my parents aren't coming to Providence this May and sitting in plastic chairs on the main green to celebrate my ability to spend their money and get an "S" in 15 courses. In theory this degree says something how much I've learned here and how much I know now.

I can write a 25-page paper with a bibliography, conjugate verbs in French, finish problem sets while pretending to take notes, answer multiple-choice questions in Chinese, understand the business section of the newspaper and stay awake for 24 hours when necessary. And ever since taking Modern Architecture, what used to be just "the Rock" is now a post-brutalist, reinforced concrete feat of engineering. (Although I still can't fathom what vampire decided the windows let in so much light they needed to be covered in tinted plastic.) I've gotten my fifteen passing grades and paid my four semesters of tuition, and I still can't imagine why anyone would hire me to do anything more complex than scoop ice cream. I know a lot, sure, but what can I do with it?

As of October 11th, I have an answer to this question. It's courtesy of Michael Fairbanks, the director of an NGO that funds enterprise-based solutions to global poverty. In an attempt to get the most out of Brown while I'm here, I went to a speech he gave on campus. He told a story adapted from Rudyard Kipling, which I'll paraphrase here:

Two blind men were attempting to determine what an Elephant was. The first blind man reached out his hands, touched the Elephant's tusk and said, "Elephants are smooth and hard and sharp." The second blind man, a few feet away, reached out his hands, touched the Elephant's tail and said, "Elephants are long and skinny and hairy."

Most people, the lecturer said, are walking around seeing the world in the same way these two blind men saw the elephant. To an economist, everything from domestic abuse to illiteracy is an economic problem. To a sociologist, both are social problems. To an historian, they both stem from historical events. But domestic abuse and illiteracy, he said, like poverty, corruption and disease, are the elephant in the story. Each can be looked at from more than one viewpoint, and every perspective must be considered to get a complete picture of the elephant. Most problems are caused by a confluence of factors: domestic abuse happens because of economic forces, yes, but it also has sociological, historical, possibly even architectural causes (if you can’t imagine architecture contributing to domestic abuse, go take Modern Architecture.) The inverse of this realization is that these problems have economic, social, historical, political and architectural solutions – in other words, complicated solutions. Mr. Fairbanks' point was that liberal arts graduates are uniquely well-equipped to solve these problems. In other words, taking architecture, Chinese, economics and religious studies last semester wasn't a total mistake. It was preparation for a world in which nothing is simple or one-sided, in which solutions must be as complex as the problems they seek to solve, in which discussion must be (to borrow an IR buzzword) interdisciplinary and open-minded.

So this semester, to complete my well-rounded education, I'm taking geology. How can geology solve the AIDs epidemic in Africa and environmental degradation in China? Get back to me on that one in May.

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