Graduation season is upon us. Taylor Swift has an honorary doctorate from NYU, so she gave a commencement speech in which she was unwilling to give graduates unsolicited advice. Instead, she reminisced about her own path to stardom and presented some life hacks. I’ll spare you my rant about honorary doctorates as someone who has yet to receive an honorary Grammy despite my lack of recorded singles.
Skimming through Ms. Swift’s remarks made me think about commencement speeches in general, and the lessons college graduates learn along the way to earn their degrees. I realized that the best lessons were those learned in kindergarten. These lessons focused on taking turns, sharing, believing in one right answer to basic questions like “What day of the week is it?” and not eating the paste.
For the majority of us who attended public school during kindergarten, those lessons were free. Or at least, our paid for them through their taxes. These days, those of us who attended college in the 21st century or hope to will likely spend a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars to learn some lessons that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Here’s my list of the worst lessons learned at Universities:
1. Do what you love, the money will follow.
No! No, no, no! Good grief, this is one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve seen college students take to heart. There are some people who are fortunate because they love their job and are able to make enough money to support themselves, their families, and the lives they want to have. Other people go to a job that’s okay so they can make the money to do what they love. Both groups of people can still have rich, fulfilling lives.
Instead, college students need to think about their strengths, abilities, and personality, the skills they have and the ones they hope to develop, and the life they want to have. Then they should review career options that are best suited for these things. If they love their job, great! If they work so they can do what they love, great!
And the latter shouldn’t envy the former too much. From my experience, when you turn what you love into how you make your living, there are great days. There are also days when you feel like you’re doing a list of chores. I love reading, but after eleven years of post-high school education, it’s taken a bit for me to return to reading for fun. Don’t romanticize all of those who monetized their passions.
Other versions of this lesson include things like those who doubt your dreams are haters, don’t let others judge your dreams, and never give up on your dreams. Yes, sometimes the “haters are going to hate, bro-tato chip.” Sometimes even those closest to you will doubt you. And sometimes your dreams aren’t going to work out, so go dream something else and make yourself useful in the meantime. Holding onto dead-end dreams is worse than being stuck in a dead-end job because you’ll eventually retire from the latter.
2. Draw on your lived experience. Rely on the lived experiences of the oppressed.
If you’re in college and a professor tells you this, or something like it, ask for a refund. Seriously. If they look confused, ask them, “What do you have to offer me if my lived experience is a sufficient way of knowing?” If you’re really feeling bold, ask your professor this follow-up question: “Why does the race, gender, or sexuality make the lived experiences of some worth more than others?”
Academia in general and liberal arts degrees specifically were created to prepare students to become ideal citizens of republics. Renaissance institutions did this by drawing on the classics, or dead Greek and Roman dudes. And unlike today’s narrow degrees, a liberal arts education included mastery of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Modern college classrooms are less interested in exposing young minds to the great ones that came before and are more interested in telling them how horrible our past and present really are. Instead of approaching these topics with evidence, the scientific method, or any nuance and context, students are encouraged to seek out limited, biased, uncorroborated first-hand accounts laden with political agendas. I’d say analyze both, but I’m no longer an academic.
So, we can’t teach texts written by dead, white guys any more in order to make room for all these “lived experiences.” Never mind that these texts contain the ideas that shape our world. I know for a fact that professors select readings based on the gender and race of their authors. Ideas count for little if they come from the wrong source. That by definition is the genetic (or origins) fallacy.
3. Previous generations broke it, but your generation can fix it.
What?! Some of the most activist-oriented students I taught as a professor in political science were sometimes among the worst performing students of their class. While this could be for a variety of reasons, it struck me that those who are most insistent at destroying our institutions, culture, and way of life know very little about them.
One day I really had a student claim that her generation is smarter than all the ones that came before. She did this next to a smart phone while on a computer sitting in a building all of which were conceived of and built by stupid old people. Irony of ironies is that this was in the middle of a class in which I (one of those older, less intelligent PhDs) was explaining the broad strokes of a text over a century old, the nuance of which was lost on at least half the class.
This message also fills our youngest generations with unearned confidence that quickly slips into arrogance. Couple this with their ignorance, and we’re in a for a world of hurt. And these are the generations that should be familiar with children’s classics like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” which teach us that simple things like demands for reimaging anything will have broader consequences than we first thought.
4. When others expect you to conform to their rules, they’re oppressing you through a system of white supremacy.
This one is the most common in English Departments, from my experience. As someone who briefly taught in an English Department, I was told than insisting that all students but especially students of color use proper grammar and conform to academic standards of writing was racist. No, I’m not kidding.
It’s inherently bigoted in its assumption that non-white students are incapable of using proper English, or that all white students came pre-wired with “the white man’s tongue.” Just forget those Americans of European decedent that came from non-English countries and had to learn English to assimilate into American life.
A common tongue is supposed to unite a people. Academic standards are supposed to bring clarity and accessibility to intellectual work. None of this makes those who don’t understand the rules of English grammar or university-level writing less than. But why would anyone go to college if they weren’t taught the basics like effective, clear writing?
5. Be your authentic self because you’re enough.
I’m going to gloss over the irony that those who promote this bumper sticker saying tend to lose it whenever anyone else doesn’t virtue signal the way they should. Like other pearls of modern wisdom, this sentiment contains an ounce of truth surrounded by a pound of nonsense.
Yes, people should be free to expression themselves. That being said, I don’t anyone’s authentic self, and I know no one wants me to be fully authentic, either. Harry Potter character Sirius Black once said, “We all have light and dark within us.” And he’s right. We’re all a mixed bag, and instead of embracing that, we should strive to live in the light and tame the dark within us.
And if we’re enough, what are any of us striving for? Yes, on one level I believe that all humans are of infinite value. I also believe that we have a responsibility to do the hard work of improving ourselves, honing our gifts, talents, and abilities, and leveling up our character.
A better slogan would be “Understand your strengths, work on your weaknesses, and elevate who you can be.”
Parting Thoughts
Not all the lessons I learned at universities are worth discarding. I learned how to read more critically, write with clarity, and debate issues thoughtfully. I was also fortunate to have intelligent, wise, and kind mentors from my bachelor’s program to my dissertation committee.
Even so, I’ve clung to this quote throughout my tenure as a scholar.
“I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”
-Mark Twain
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