For many years I kept a close look on the way in which academia,
and in general the educational offers provided by various universities, have
evolved. One thing that I noticed, which is not extremely surprising, is that
fact that a new wave of non-traditional study programs made their way into
quite a lot of universities. This is not by any means something that we should
be worried about, but in the same time, we should not leave it to spread in a
very chaotic manner.
The new wave of non-traditional study programs, and by
non-traditional I am referring to certain research areas that constitute a
niche, they don’t actually form a self-standing academic domain, or are
somewhere at the crossroad of various domains. Another thing that they have in
common is the fact that their “independence” from other fields, or fields that
they were previously assimilated to, is correlated to a certain extent to the
evolution of technology, of the internet, and a diversification of research
journals that are mainly based on online platforms.
I think that it is truly wonderful that nowadays we have a greater
selection of Bachelor’s and Master’s programs that we can choose from. But in
the same time I have strong reasons to doubt the validity and pragmatism of certain
study programs that promoted by certain universities.
The most fraudulent ones, which usually rank very poorly in terms
of pragmatism and assimilation in to the job market of graduates are the cultural studies programs (American Studies, British Studies,
Irish Studies etc). You
may wonder what makes these programs to have such poor performances on the job
market, there are a few basic ones:
-
they
are not correlated with a very well defined academic area;
-
there are no job positions that can be accessed only by students
that graduate these programs
(ex. somebody that finishes with a degree in accounting can apply for an
account position at a company);
-
these
programs are actually a mish-mash of courses extracted from different academic
areas, but they lack a very solid core of their own;
-
totally
lacking a clear set of research methods that could actually validate their
claims;
-
you don’t
actually need a degree in this, you can learn it for yourself, you can write
books and articles on related topics with or without a degree in CS.
These programs focus on the study of different cultures, but in
their research they usually tend to utilize sources that cannot be very
reliable. You cannot expect to conduct a valid study of the lifestyle of the
American farmers from the South only through analyzing various novels, letters
or diaries that make references to this subject. This is mainly because novels,
letters and diaries display a profoundly subjective point of view, of single individual,
in most cases. Using almost exclusively sources like the ones that were just
mentioned, the studies that are produced by CS departments hold no particular
value to the study of culture in general.
Some of you don’t actually realize that the staff the works in CS
departments was mainly collected from various Literature departments. So, by
taking this into account, it is no surprise that many of the professors that
hold CS courses are not very capable of analyzing cultural phenomena through
the use of hard data, or more importantly, being objective. This leads us to
the following point, the courses and research that are mastered by CS staff
will present you only a puff-piece image of a particular culture, they will
tend to over exaggerate the positive sides of a culture, while pushing under
the rug the negative ones.
There are individuals that still try to connect CS with Anthropology,
and that is a big No-No. First of all, anthropologists use a variety of
reliable sources when conducting their studies, they heavily value the role of
physical, biological, and material factors when analyzing various cultures, or
cultural phenomena in general. Demographical data and the material remnants of
a culture also hold take an important place in anthropological studies. Unlike
CS, anthropology has deeper roots in academia, so it manage to set for itself a
more coherent mechanism of self-regulation, thus minimizing, to some extent, research
that is useless or that defies search ethics.
CS journals are a waste a paper filled with bombastic titles for articles that explain things that are very basic in their essence.
Another huge lie that CS programs are pushing is that of the trans-disciplinary
outlook. We have numerous examples of inter-disciplinary programs that produce
valuable research such medical engineering, bio-chemistry or video game design.
CS is just not one of them. A thing that you need to keep in mind is that you
can mix in mostly 2 area, that have a certain degree of compatibility, to form
a study program, but when you mix in 6-7 area such is the case with CS
programs, you just end up with getting a little bit of general knowledge from
each, but you can’t become an expert in none.
And finally, many of these programs are more interested with
spreading ideology that with building a critical framework for the analysis of
a certain culture. They are determined to determine you to like a culture,
rather than giving you the necessary knowledge that would let you figure that
out for yourself.
Some CS programs receive funding from different entities linked to
actual states, as a result, the curricula will be influenced by the need for a
good image that many nations are desperate for, while leaving authentic
academic values on a second, or third plan.
In order to end in an optimistic note, we should acknowledge that
there are new study programs, that we may still find exotic, that have a huge
potential in our current economy. We can include here video game design and
programming programs, web design programs, cosmetic science and the list can go
on.
If you truly want to study culture in a serious manner, go for a degree in Anthropology or Archeology!
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