Your Place in the Ivory Watchtower

by Tiernan Cahill

It seems a rather obvious question to ask when you find yourself stumbling through yet another highly theoretical, barely comprehensible, utterly application-free tract written by someone you’ve never heard of, but who your professor assures you is very prestigious among those in the know: What the hell am I doing here?

“Life”, writes James Freedman, “is what we are doing now.” And as the former president of Dartmouth (and the New York Times’ chosen spokesperson for the defense of liberal arts academia), he should know. But while it’s a beautiful answer, a world in desperation won’t let us off the hook that easily. We need to know, for our own sake, and be able to explain our value to society. And we do have a value, although it may be nebulous.

Think of our old acquaintance from across the Charles, the Harvard MBA grad. She’s basically guaranteed to be a success on some scale. She’s the one who will make the decisions that make or break the lives of hundreds or even thousands of others. She’s one of the keystones that our faltering economy depends upon.
But apart from the marketing graduates she hires as consultants, and the production students he, in turn, hires to make commercials, our MBA depends upon us in a broader sense. When she was young, she read children’s books written by one of us. Now that she’s older, she reads magazine articles written by the children’s writer’s old roommate. When she takes a break from her busy life, she goes to see a musical or play or movie written, acted, and produced by us. In short, when she needs intellectual stimulation, she reaps the fruits of our labors.

This is more than just a distraction that we provide, it’s guidance, it’s foundation, it’s culture. “Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.” wrote Thomas Wolfe and this sums up our place in society, especially at Emerson, where Ivory Tower theoretical study rubs up against vocational training in the actual act of creation. We are the creators of art and the elevators of culture, and thus, we are the guardians of our society’s beliefs. We study those unbearable essays so that we may build off what has already been done (and contrary to popular belief, the writers of those essays are actually doing something) and turn it into something tangible, whether a classic work of art such as a poem or new media piece or something more accessible such as a television script or ad campaign. These tangible elements are then disseminated among the general public, where yet more of us select a few prime examples to be highlighted in the press and in the art world, and it is these that silently guide our society on the individual and collective level.

Let’s say our MBA has an important decision to make that goes beyond simple business sense. Do we invest in the country with cheaper labor or a better human rights record? Do we cut off our stem cell research team or hope we find the next cure for cancer? Do we provide partner benefits to same-sex couples? When forming that decision, she ultimately has to fall back on her own beliefs and what she considers to the be the beliefs of society. However, unbeknownst to her, those beliefs have been quietly formed, bit by bit, by her exposure to “culture”. The book she read as a child may have suggested a respect for fellow human beings, whereas the novel she finished a few months back may question the value of that belief. The voices do not have to be consistent, because ultimately, it’s the dialogue, the sum total of the back-and-forth that she will be drawing on to make her decision. She’s been given centuries worth of questioning and answering and reasoning and suggestion, all distilled and built upon and continually improved by us, the liberal arts students. And ultimately,
it’s still up to the MBA executive to decide which country to invest in, or which research project to fund. Culture simply gives her a pre-established and common basis for making that decision.

Our study and our eventual work provides the basis of society’s values, beliefs, and ethics on a very real and tangible level. And it’s now, in a time of necessity, when these things will be most strained and it is most critical that a vanguard be maintained.

Which is not to say that it will be easy for us. The economic reality remains that many of us will not get the jobs we want, and many of us who do will not get paid as much as we would like. But take some comfort in the fact that there is a reason for it all and that as frivolous as it may appear at first, our place in society is just as important as the place occupied by the doctors and the engineers and the businessmen.

If anything has relegated us to the currently criticized position we know occupy, it is our own self-denigration. We are the source of society’s values, after all, so why are we ourselves valued so little? Maybe we retain some sort of romantic association with the ideal of artist as underclass, or a nostalgia for a bohemian past. Maybe we’re simply uncomfortable with identifying ourselves as any sort of authority, especially a moral authority. Whatever the reason, it’s something that I believe needs to change, if for no other reason than that future Emerson
graduates can get paid a wage equal to their accomplishment.

Even in the most dire economic circumstances, simple awareness of circumstances will not suffice. What is required is a more advanced awareness of what it means and what it has meant to be human, to serve as a basis for our prioritization. Ultimately, culture underlies all human behavior and it must bemaintained by someone.

And that, not so simply put, is what the hell you are doing here.