Having Light

7.62 miles, 11:44 pace. 

Now that that’s out of the way…

It was a great weekend here in Philly. My wife and I both managed a long run on a beautiful if blustery Saturday morning, and Sunday we got our hands dirty and greened up our back balcony. I love planting in the spring. The flowers and vegetables spread along the railing signify that spring is really and truly here—and it helps counteract just a little the monumental space left by the neighbor’s ruthless tree removal.*

* This weekend showed why the trees were removed: the neighbors wanted a place to play bocce with their pseudo-punk hipster friends, which they did before trying to light an open campfire on one of the windiest days of the year. If that sounds bitter, it’s because I am. I mean, it’s their property and whatever, but I also don’t want my apartment building to burn down. 

But of all the things I was able to enjoy this weekend, perhaps the most unique was a visit from my friend Ryan. Ryan and I have been friends since the first assembly of New Student Days at Wittenberg, when I leaned over and introduced myself, at which point he told me his uncle (or great-uncle or some other relative) wrote Wittenberg’s alma mater.

Wittenberg, dear Wittenberg…[mumble mumble]…

Since that first meeting, we’ve been part of a rather large yet very close group of friends. He was one of the residents of what was known as the 8-Man, an off-campus house that eight of my friends rented, and which would become a center of wackiness and occasional debauchery, as well as a frequent rehearsal hall for The WittMen Crew, the a cappella group in which we both sang. 

Since college, our group has spread across the country, from Seattle to North Carolina, from LA to New Jersey. Despite the distance, we all remain close, if not necessarily in constant contact. Some folks I talk to on a regular basis, while others will pop up at more infrequent intervals. Still, even with these folks, whom I may talk to only once every year or two, it’s effortless to fall back into conversation, as though no time has passed at all. I consider myself lucky to have found myself in such an extraordinary friend group, and the moments when we can get together are a treasure.

Ryan was in town for a conference, and he decided to arrange his schedule to give him Saturday afternoon and evening off, a strategy I myself have used on countless occasions during my conferencing years. Coming up on the weekend, he had a few things on his Philadelphia checklist, some of which got taken care of in the first days of the conference. He saw the Love Statue (which we both agreed was underwhelming), and decided he didn’t care so much to the Liberty Bell, a sentiment I also agreed with. Instead, the two main things on Ryan’s list were the Philadelphia Museum of Art and eating a cheesesteak.

That’s how you Philadelphia.

Much of the day was spent walking, which I enjoyed despite having run, again, 7.62 miles at an 11:44 pace. We first met up at Goldie for falafel sandwiches and shawarma fries, enjoying a nice meal and diving right into conversation. After lunch, we toured the art museum, then walked around the building and along the Schuylkill River Trail, making our way past Boathouse Row and out towards the statues and cherry trees further north. After our stroll, we headed back to my apartment and had a few beers on the back balcony, talking about life and art and everything between. For dinner, we hit up Pat’s King of Steaks (my favorite, Jim’s, is still closed after a fire last year), then meandered north along 9^th Street and into the Italian Market.

Ryan is, I think it’s fair to say, one of my most cultured friends, a description I think he would cop to himself. We like to talk about the books we’ve read (or the ones we’d like to read), the movies we’ve seen or the music we’ve been listening to. We talked about the writing we once did, and why we stopped, and whether we’d ever start again. We talked about the poetry he finds himself reading, or why he likes going to the Cleveland Museum of Art every time he goes home, despite having been there numerous times before. And lest you think he (or I) are too highbrow, we talked about our love of some of the schlockier junk out there—even if it was to discuss the aesthetics of garbage.

Over the course of the day, our conversation ranged far and wide, as you’d expect for two people looking to catch up on all that’s happened over the course of time. But time and again, we kept returning to ideas of art and creativity, and what it means to be both producer and consumer, and how acts of creativity influence the world around us, whether people realize it or not. Perhaps especially when they don’t. This, of course, may have been expected, as Ryan and I are both deeply committed to the idea of liberal arts.

I’ve always been a strong supporter of the liberal arts, even long before I knew what “liberal arts” meant. For that I blame—sorry, I thank—my parents. My dad was a former musician, and if my mom had had her druthers, and if the world had been a different place, she would have pursued art. They may have ended up in the corporate and retail worlds, but in their hearts, they were artists, and that kind of thing leaves a mark.

As such, my early years were colored by artistic impulses, even if we didn’t have the money or time for things like formal lessons. I was taught the importance of creative expression, and that creativity and analytical thought went hand in hand. We would spend hours discussing movies or plays, debating the merits and flaws of just about everything we saw, and I loved it. My dad might have been the only parent to ever be excited that his kid was majoring in theatre—and that the “safety” major was English—with a concentration in writing poetry.

When it comes to higher education, developing skills is obviously important. When you leave undergrad, you should hopefully have gained some important skills that will serve you throughout your life, whether that’s so-called “soft” skills like writing and speaking, or the deplorably named “hard” skills, such as computer programming or complex math. If you’re looking to be a software developer, you’d be hard-pressed to get much work without knowing at least some computer programming.

To me, though, a successful undergraduate education isn’t just about learning those skills: it’s about learning context. By the time I graduated Witt, I believed the most important thing I learned weren’t the specific skills I encountered during my time, but rather the bigger philosophical question that undergirds all growth: why? I can possess all the facts and knowledge in the world, but what really makes an effective person, what makes a complete person, is knowing how to pull from that font of knowledge and deploy it in the most effective way. It’s the creativity, the ability to think analytically, to approach a problem or idea from multiple angles, that is the true value of a liberal arts education.

It’s a shame, then, that the trend in higher education is away from liberal arts. There are a number of reasons for this shift, many of which are nested together. College costs more, mostly because public funding is disappearing at an alarming rate. Combine this with the shrinking student body, and colleges and universities find themselves in an arms race, trying to attract students with new and shiny buildings, gourmet dining, and state-of-the-art athletic facilities, all while ratcheting up costs further and further in a kind of academic death spiral.

As a result, parents and students, which schools now confidently call “customers,” are demanding a clear link between the college education they’re paying for and a respectable job at the end of the road. This is understandable, of course—college is too expensive not to be concerned with the financial outcome—but it also shortchanges the students. At it’s very best, this kind of tunnel vision towards a school-career pipeline is shortsighted. Funneling students into a single career may get them a job out of college, but what happens when the requirements for the job change, or the job itself is rendered obsolete? Or worse, what happens when someone realizes they don’t like the work anymore?

When colleges make the decision to drop the humanities in favor of a deeper concentration on things like STEM training, I find myself asking: are these really colleges? Or are they trade schools?

Let me be absolutely clear: I believe trade schools are criminally undervalued in our society. College is not the right avenue for everyone, and treating a university degree as a necessity, as a shibboleth for membership in the American community, does a great disservice to all of us. The world needs plumbers and HVAC technicians, it needs electricians and carpenters and masons and oh so many other tradespeople, and we should honor their skills by treating trade schools with much more respect. 

But if what parents and students want is a program that does nothing but train students to be computer programmers or engineers or members of other specialized career paths, then let’s call that program what it is: a trade school. Let’s be very clear about the path that we are paving for these kids, instead of shutting off a valuable education path for those who don’t want to have to decide on their career path at 18, students who may realize that how they think or feel now may not be how they think or feel in the next five minutes, let alone the rest of their lives. Call those programs trade schools, make them more affordable, and work with colleges and universities to partner for those students who want a liberal arts education.

All of this comes in the context of Wittenberg, dear Wittenberg, where there is a document floating about proposing deep cuts in the humanities. While I’m dismayed at the idea of eliminating in-person foreign language classes in favor of remote online (more efficient, the schools like to say) programs, what bothers me most is the proposal to cut all programs in the performing arts. That is, the plan to eliminate all education related to theatre and music, and instead offer these programs as extracurricular opportunities. 

That last part, the “extracurricular” part, is a slap in the face. I love my alma mater, and I believed strongly in the university’s liberal arts mission. I may have made so much fucking fun of their motto, but the truth is that having light, I do want to pass it on to others. It was a formative time in my life, and the continued bonds I share with the people I met there is a testament to how much Wittenberg meant to me. 

But to say that my chosen field of study, the area I spent so much of my life, is only valued as something fun to do outside of the classroom is disheartening, to say the least. And what about the Music Department? Wittenberg is a Lutheran-affiliated school, and what is a Lutheran without music? It’s like a potluck without crockpots. It doesn’t make any sense. 

I wish I could blame Witt entirely, but I don’t. I can’t. I understand the pressures, I really do. Like many other universities across the country, Wittenberg faces that same narrowing stream of college freshman, the same winnowing of public funds, and the same realization among 18-year-olds that student loans will destroy them for years. They need to cut costs while building revenues, and that’s impossible to do without pissing someone off. This time, it’s me.

But I worry for the students at these schools, who find themselves increasingly cut off from the humanities, as requirements and classes and, quite frankly, quality opportunities for engagement with being a human are shed from the curriculum. Even if music and theatre are kept as extracurriculars, who’s going to stick around to lead those groups? Is it professionals with years of experience? Will it be a professor looking for a course release—as if that’s going to happen? Will it be solely student-led? Or will there be a lucky volunteer from the community who was in a play once, and wants to lord it over a bunch of kids who just want to experience acting?

I often find myself thinking of one of my dad’s favorite movies, Mr. Holland’s Opus. It’s a little overwrought, to be sure, but there’s a lot to love about this movie, and how Richard Dreyfuss’s Glenn Holland fights to preserve his students’ opportunity to have music in schools. When his vice-principle tells him that if he had to choose between arts and teaching kids reading and long division, Mr. Holland replies, “Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.”

I think a lot these days about artificial intelligence, and what it means to us going forward. In most utopian visions, advances like robotics and AI are used to help make our lives easier. Humans harness these forces to handle difficult, time-consuming work, leaving us free to pursue lives of meaning and personal significance. The reality, as we’ve seen so far, is that while AI can be used to handle some of these menial tasks, among the more pernicious uses seems to be taking art out of the hands of artists and into the hands of corporatists, because the artist model is hopelessly inefficient compared to our robot semi-sentients.

The people who care about art and artists are horrified, in large part because of the people who don’t seem to care. AI is good at creating what feels like art, because the process is so new we don’t know the difference. Millions of data points have been put into the programs, and they combine time and again into varying iterations. But over time, without new inputs, the work will eventually be repeated, and we will grow to recognize the patterns, and soon we will get bored.

But what really separates artists from machines is the ability to judge what’s good and what’s not. An algorithm will produce a result every time, executed to the specifications requested. But what does AI know about aesthetics? What does it know about separating what’s quality work against what’s not? And without the human element, what chance does AI have of transcending its programming? You may have the pieces, the building blocks of “art,” but without the human context, you have a meaningless product, a simulacrum of art drawn from electronic blood.

To me, when we eliminate the humanities from higher education, we’re enacting a more pernicious form of artificial intelligence. We give students a box full of tools, but we only give them the narrowest sense of how to use them. For them, a wrench is a wrench, and it will only ever be a wrench. But a carpenter knows that a wrench can be a hammer or a lever, a bookmark or a fulcrum. You can have all the tools in the world, but without the context, without the ability to see beyond the tools themselves, they’re only marginally useful.

Life is lived in the margins. A career can be your life, if that’s what you want. But it doesn’t have to be. We can be more than the tools, more than the output of a pipeline. When we treat people as complete beings, when we soften or even sever the link between work and personal worth, then we can become human beings and not automatons, programmed flesh golems serving the biddings of our corporate masters.

If our children are our future, shouldn’t we want that for them?