If you’re feeling buyer’s remorse about the high price of college tuition, here’s some more fuel for the fire: starting this year, a handful of our universities will be offering courses about…Taylor Swift.
One of these universities is Harvard, no less. Harvard has dubbed its Taylor Swift course, “Taylor Swift and her world”. Try not to cringe as you read that.
First, we might consider the question: why not a class about Taylor Swift? Why not a class about Kim Kardashian or Tom Cruise, for that matter?
Every young generation has its own pop culture. The Baby Boomers had the Beatles, Elvis, and all those really bad beach party movies. My generation had MTV, Michael Jackson, and the teen movies of John Hughes.
I’ve met Baby Boomers who swear that there is deep meaning in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, though they’ve mostly struck me as pseudo-mystical gobbledygook. I’ve been critical of The Breakfast Club, that iconic teen movie of my 1980s youth. (The Breakfast Club mostly tried to tell 1980s teens that all of their problems, insecurities, and disappointments could be blamed on their parents.)
That said, not all pop culture is pure trash. Elements of pop culture are occasionally worthy of consumption, and even analysis. I learned something about myself by rewatching The Breakfast Club as an adult. How callow and smug I was back in those days, like so many teenagers since time immemorial.
But here’s the thing: We don’t need expensive universities to expose young people to pop culture. The mainstream media, social media, and their friends are already doing that. I saw The Breakfast Club and heard the music of Michael Jackson and Madonna without any encouragement from an adult.
No one living under a rock in 2023 is unaware of Taylor Swift. The journalistic class simpers and coos over her every move. Swift’s music is practically the only music that the media talks about, when they aren’t discussing Taylor Swift’s personal life. It has all become a bit neurotic.
From what I’ve heard of them, Swift’s songs are as superficial and/or pretentious as pop lyrics have always been. All fine and good. Pop music need not rival Shakespeare. But no young person needs to attend Harvard to be exposed to pop music.
The purpose of a university humanities class, rather, is to expose young people to worthwhile content that they might otherwise have missed (like Shakespeare, for example). Approximately one hundred percent of today’s 18- to 21-year-olds have already heard a Taylor Swift song. How many have read Milton, Malamud, and Machiavelli?
Universities have also expelled a lot of hot air in recent years about the need for “diverse” offerings. By this they usually mean ridding syllabi of “dead white males”.
I have always suspected that this was largely posturing on their behalf. When I was a college student in the late 1980s, there were plenty of works by dead white males in the English Literature department’s offerings, but also plenty of Richard Wright, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin. I read Richard Wright’s Native Son as a high school student in 1985. I also read a lot of Hemingway and Fitzgerald that year. The attitude back then regarding diversity was “both/and”, not “either/or”.
But what could be less “diverse” than Taylor Swift? Taylor Swift is as white-bread and conventional as you could possibly get. Swift is also the queen of the one-percenters, in the parlance of Bernie Sanders. A few months ago, her net worth passed the $1 billion mark. Want to “eat the rich”? Start with Taylor Swift.
Our universities have been in decline for decades. Since at least the 1990s, American universities have become more ideological and less serious.
University degrees are also becoming less valuable in the marketplace. Throughout this past year, there have been news reports about corporate employers’ new willingness to accept applicants who never went to college. And I’m not talking about a job stocking shelves at the local Walmart. I’m talking about white-collar corporate positions with companies like IBM, Dell, and Bank of America.
How then, should universities make themselves more relevant? By going back to basics, and providing what used to be called a classical education? How about an emphasis on real-world skills?
Harvard, at least, has chosen to assert its relevance by offering a class on “Taylor Swift and her world” in 2024. And Harvard, sadly, is not alone.
-ET