liberal arts woes

A year ago, I wrote about how we undervalued the humanities. Now, I’m going to counter it.

We live in a world that does not need political science grads. I don’t think anyone would disagree. Political science produces thinkers. Overwhelmingly, if a word had to define our generation, it would be ‘build’, not ‘think’.

We are practically in a second industrial revolution, where neither banking nor academic rule, but tech and mechanization. Industries are focused on the technology that will move business to the cloud, streamline transactions, make efficient the things that were once so labourious. The developers today are similar to the engineers of yesterday, who tested out steam engines and hydroelectricity. Today, we test out apps, robots who can understand us, and sensors.

So — it’s hard to imagine where a polisci grad fits into that. Of course, we have all heard (and I myself have even said) that political science is important. Being ignorant of global movements is just that — ignorant — and that comes with its own setbacks.

A year ago, I argued that the value that polisci grads is high, perhaps even equivalent to those in STEM fields. The issue with political science as a discipline laid in how it evaluated competency — instead of testing grads in ways that showed how they tangibly affected society, political science ultimately rewards people who test ideas only in the theoretical, those who bury their heads in books and papers, and not those who go outdoors to incentivize change. Something about the way we evaluated political science in both schools and in the job market had to change.

I still think that’s true. Now like to add a caveat, which might even be a counter-argument. Specifically, I’d like to ask if, as useful as polisci is, we still need as many grads as we have, and if there’s a more useful way to apply their skills than in an academic setting. So many polisci grads end up in Starbucks or malls or car lots — let’s explore if there’s another way.

Let’s start off with polisci as a whole. If you are also a polisci student, and you’re anything like me, you probably entered polisci because you had a vague notion of wanting to help the world. You imagined that you would be a ‘world-builder’, that someday, maybe after like 15 years of education, you’d get to sit at a table with a bunch of old and high-ranking people who would really listen to you. Spout forth, brilliant ideas! Then people would stop going hungry and wars would end and governments would behave logically.

That’s definitely how I felt; idealistic, if I had to use a word. I really did want to help the world. Perhaps the difference now is that since then, I’ve realized the world is so much bigger than I imagined. Probably too big for one person like me to change on a large scale. I also started to realize that my good intentions didn’t mean much in polisci — to get ahead, I was going to need get a lot of degrees, and lot of profs to like me.

These factors alone weren’t enough to dissuade me. I was already kind of an academic person. Besides, as long as it helps the people, of course I didn’t mind taking a few extra years of grad school and kissing up to a few profs!

The first time I ever started to question my degree, however, was in second year. I was in a tutorial for an IR class. We were discussing ISIS; specifically, whether we would consider it a state (it occupied a definite mass of land, it was driven by a central ideology, it had an economy). Somehow, the topic veered off into how ISIS was created, and who, if anyone, was responsible for it.

Across from me sat a white classmate. She had been kind to me all semester. I’d often come late and she’d share her notes with me. She was the kind of person who could leave tutorial light-hearted, despite the heavy topics we’d talk about in class. I often felt envious, since I often left my polisci tutorials feeling more skeptical and angry about the world than when I entered.

She said that it might be prudent to consider if Islam, in and of itself, bred extremism. That perhaps there was something inherent in the religion that allowed for it, or perhaps something about the nature of the people there that allowed for it.

The room went a little silent. Another student brought up a counter-argument, and the discussion continued heatedly. I zoned out, though, unable to forget what she had said.

I thought about her, and speculated her upbringing.

She went to the University of Toronto, an expensive school, in a well-off country, in an expensive city. I recognized her cardigan — Artizia, $240. She wore glasses — paid for with health insurance, no doubt. She held a Muji pen. Her teeth were white and straight, likely the handiwork of a dentist.

I thought about the upbringing she might’ve had, that might’ve led her to say something like that. I thought about the kind of privilege one must be afforded, to be white, in a majority white classroom, to be able to say that brown people, or the religion so beloved by so many of them, are inherently evil. That there’s something about this centuries-old faith-based system, of which she had no direct experience, that enabled her to say that. I thought about how she had likely never set foot in Syria, or Afghanistan, and had never spoken to a national from there, how she had never seen a bomb go off or a family member die from hunger or warfare, and how that enabled her to say something about the rage and pain of an entire nation.

I wish now, that I could’ve said everything. I don’t think her point was totally moot. But I do think about the way she so easily said it. I thought about how IR made it so easy to criticize others’ beliefs and experiences, from a distance. How it actively encouraged it, with this tutorials-based education.

Perhaps I did have some relation to it — I connect deeply to my Chinese culture, and I’m often shaken by the awful ways China is described in Western political dialogue. It’s often made out to be this place where there is no freedom, stability, where one can’t see the sky or breathe the air or walk two steps without seeing a child slave. I often roll my eyes at it, wondering if such critics had ever actually gone to China to see it for themselves. Now, I was witnessing this kind of cultural assumption again, only as a third party.

In any case, after that day, I started to wonder if I was complicit in this kind of system. I wondered if I continued my polisci degree, if someday I would be that kind of person — the kind of person who could summarize the experience of an entire people into an essay, even after having never stepped foot there. I wondered if I had a right to do that. If someday, I ever ended up somewhere like the UN, how would I feel knowing that my knowledge alone — complete with all my biases, shortcomings, and weaknesses — would be able to define policies for other people? I hardly felt confident enough setting house rules for my own home.

Moreover, I wondered if my degree would actually lead me to where I wanted to go. Would me sitting in tutorials for hours upon hours lead to change? Would me continuing to accumulate degrees lead directly to more people’s freedoms? Would I be destined to just talk, without doing, for ages? And if not, when would I get to the doing part?

It also struck me (enough to the point that I wrote this post last year) just how much a political science degree did not prepare one to be politically active. Political science degrees do not advise you on how to run for government, nor how to build a platform. They do not tell you how to best spread information, or how to do so unbiasedly. (Which is odd, because I was under the impression the goal of academia was to spread its ideas widely.) Political science overwhelmingly rewarded those who considered ideas only in the theoretical — people who hashed out the same shit about some shit that was written several decades ago about some other shit. It did not move people to create organizations or to even commit to action. Kids who wrote great essays got good grades. Kids who ran for student council but didn’t write great essays did not get good grades. Kids who went on to pursue 10+ years of school were rewarded with high salaries, even if that had never stepped foot in a war-torn country or volunteered. The kids who volunteered — well, obviously, they went unpaid.

If polisci offers anything useful to the world in this era, it would be knowledge. If there’s anything we can provide people, it’s clarity — we can help explain why Donald Trump acts the way he does (or at least as best we can.) We can help explain the consequences of immigration, with more than just emotional rhetoric. We can help people learn the importance of voting, and understand their government systems better, so they can truly make government work for them. Unfortunately, we often don’t. Some of polisci’s best ideas are hidden in academic circles or libraries, concealed by nebulous languages, as if written for a Shakespearean audience.

Was polisci still the best way to help people then? I started to think not. Or at the very least, I realized I would not be the kind of person for it. To be successful in polisci, not just as a major, but as a discipline, one has to have immense emotional strength. It’s not an easy field to be in, to discuss the human rights and sufferings and economies of entire populations. It is fraught with waiting, and oftentimes disappointment. UN resolutions take years to pass, sometimes not even enacting serious change, and often requiring more resources to monitor their execution than to actually create them.

I know these concepts are not new to fellow polisci grads. I’m sure we have all been struck by the sheer irony of our degrees — how much we talk about helping other people without really doing it.

For me, however, I felt that I didn’t have the emotional capacity for it. I’m an often explosive character, who is impatient for change — and increasingly, I felt like the things I was required to do in my degree, like sit in tutorials and talk about how much black and brown people don’t know how to run their own countries, ran contrary to my own ideas about what constituted a fair world. IR, and political science, as disciplines, are still only a few centuries old. And they have been overwhelmingly shaped by Western ideas and countries, the same countries that have been responsible for the plight of so many others across the world. Perhaps I’m too philosophical about it. I understand that as weirdly contradictory as the work is, it is necessary for Western nations to step in and help fix problems, even sometimes undo the very harms they created (Woo America!) I understand that the students who pursue political science are not ignorant — they are probably very familiar with these problems, and also regret the inaction that our degree encourages, in lieu of long discussions and long essays.

I just don’t think it’s for me.

But that’s okay! Because there are more ways to help people than accumulating degrees and writing essays. (I will admit I love seminars and essay-writing, so I will miss these aspects very much.)

I was fortunate enough to break into tech in my second year, and since then I’ve been able to gain work experience in a variety of business and tech fields where I’ve learned about how technologies are able to make peoples’ lives better. This makes me feel better as a whole. Technologies are more agnostic to politics than people. An app that helps people read the news in another language, a voice assistant that helps the blind set alarms in the morning, a messenger app that works with limited connectivity to help moving populations stay in touch — this is the scope to which I now want to dedicate myself. Perhaps it’s not as glamorous as being appointed to the UN — but I feel better about it, even if I won’t earn as much money, as many degrees, or as much respect from my peers.

Who’s to say if that will change though? The lesson I want to share here is: every polisci grad I’ve ever met is a good person. Most of them want to change the world for the better. And sometimes, the ways to change the world for the better will not be found in a classroom, in a textbook, or through an essay.

There are thousands of industries that require complex thinkers, which political science departments produce. There are so many people who are not globally minded, so many people who don’t give a shit about voting, so many people who don’t know how to talk about race, or equity, or migration, or taxes. There is a need for people like us everywhere.

So, I would encourage my polisci friends to ask themselves if the place where they can make the most impact is truly on the well-beaten path. Our professors have long told us that the path to success in polisci is with a master’s degree, a PhD, and a great paper. But we are critical thinkers, and we live in a time of great change. There are other ways to help — we just have to be willing to find them.