Last month, Opinion columnist Ryan Gorman penned a column titled “Taking Voldemort seriously,” in which he argued in favor of trendy courses at the University such as “Game of Thrones” in the English department. According to Gorman, courses that cover trendy topics can be academically enriching as they demonstrate creative modes of thinking traditional courses skip over. I disagree — “trendy” courses such as “Politicizing Beyoncé” at Rutgers University and “Battling Against Voldemort” at Swarthmore College do not belong in academia. I say this not because I am a STEM student who regards liberal arts courses as worthless. Despite my background in statistics, I have taken a fair amount of humanities courses and have previously written columns in support of the liberal arts. Defenders of the liberal arts should oppose and look down on courses such as “Game of Thrones” because they dilute the value of a rigorous liberal arts education.
Gorman writes as if those who oppose trendy courses are the same people who view the liberal arts as inferior to an engineering or business education. According to Gorman, “feeding on cultural passions to encourage learning is not a ‘joke,’ as engineers and business majors may like to say.” I don’t think engineers and business majors are the only ones who should be looking down on trendy courses. If I studied a rigorous liberal arts discipline such as analytic philosophy, I would hate for people to question the strength of my liberal arts education because of the rise in trendy courses within our humanities departments. For a course as ludicrous as “Game of Thrones” to be taught in the same halls as our English department’s rigorous courses on modernism and history of literature is a travesty. Courses in political theory, not courses on popular television, challenge people to think at high levels — these are the liberal arts courses we should value.
Gorman also makes claims about the societal effects of trendy courses that are unsupported by evidence. He remarks that student reluctance to take creative courses results from pressures to take courses that the corporate job market values. He then asserts that “this fact is one of the main roots of lagging social and economic change in the nation,” but he doesn’t develop this idea further or provide any evidence that taking courses in popular television translate into change at a social or economic level. I’m not even sure what Gorman means when he says taking courses valued by the job market is inimical to social and economic change. Gorman’s link between trendy courses and ill-defined national change is tenuous at best. If he is referring to the fact that humanities courses make students and future policymakers more politically and socially aware, then I would argue a traditional liberal arts education offers the same benefits.
Furthermore, plenty of people have written about how humanities courses make students better thinkers who have the capacity to effectuate social change. But part of this comes from the fact that rigorous humanities courses challenge students by introducing them to ideas that are complex. It appears Gorman values trendy courses for the opposite reason — they are more relatable and culturally relevant than what he calls “boring” courses such as modern politics. Isn’t exposure to difficult ideas that fall outside of your comfort zone a core tenet of a liberal arts education? Courses on trendy subjects may be relatable, but high-level critical thinking is what makes a traditional liberal arts education valuable. There’s a reason people think the “Game of Thrones” course is a joke. For lack of a better term, it’s soft. Call me elitist, but I don’t believe topics as accessible as Game of Thrones belong in the same realm as topics such as history. I’m all for a liberal arts education, but appealing to popular trends in academia and conflating trendy courses with the liberal arts only further stigmatizes a creative education. A course on popular television is ridiculous as it sounds, not just to engineers and business majors as Gorman suggests, but to people who value the traditional liberal arts.
Nazar Aljassar is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at n.aljassar@cavalierdaily.com.
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