"Truth" in Advertising

The “Romantic” University is dead.

The idea of professors giving clandestine knowledge to students (many of them from wealthy families), educating them in the classics such as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the like, then these students leaving and becoming leaders in their communities is an idea that hasn’t applied since World War Two. Since then, the world has seen more and more students pursuing post-secondary education, more and more students graduating with degrees that would take them nowhere, and more and more students going onto do what they normally would do, only a couple thousand dollars poorer.

Now, with people doing university because its the “next step”, with more and more people considering graduate work because its something to do after an undergraduate degree, and with more and more people focusing on “useful” degrees rather than the Arts and Humanities, it is time for the Faculty of Arts to redesign what it is all about.

Coming from a history/philosophy major, I think that the Arts and Humanities in general need a complete overhaul. Again, I’m not a person who thinks these very important fields are useless; rather, they need to be reappraised to find out their real worth to today’s growing world.

Rather than having professors lamenting how useless history is to the modern world, how such-and-such a politician is bastardizing history by using it for their own propaganda, or how such-and-such an author is destroying a very important historical field by putting their own ideas forward with shoddy academic claims (yes, you know who you are), people in the academic world need to move forward past these childlike accusations to find what is the real heart of the problem - and that is in advertising.

We see it everywhere. We mock it, we destroy it, we pound on our desks in frustration of the idiocy of some claims - but in reality, it works. We all know the jingles, we all know the commercials, we all know that if we use a certain shampoo, our hair will be silky and shiny on both the inside and the outside due to certain ingredients which do such and such. All of these commercials are doing the same thing. Selling us a product.

Here’s my claim: The Arts and Humanities (as well as Universities) are (unfortunately) now a consumer product. They’re FANTASTIC products, but the truth being said is that they are a consumer good that is sold for profit.

So if we want to do something about the lack of respect for the Arts and Humanities, dare I suggest that we “sell out”? “Give in to the Man”? Realistically speaking, its the only way that we can continue to do what we love, to continue to expand the academic world - because as of right now, very few of the proletariat are caring about the academic world that will have no direct effect on them, which is why engineering, business, science, and all the “useful” majors are expanding quickly. If the Arts and Humanities want to keep up with them, we need to market ourselves as being useful.

The University as a basic institution is at its heart both a business and an institution of higher learning. There has been too much focus on the “higher learning” part than the “business” part from the Arts and Humanities - and that pillar is slowly collapsing. The Business and Institution rely on each other, much like an arch relies on two posts to continue holding itself up. If we support the business side for once (the higher learning side has, if anything, been almost over-saturated from academia), there is huge potential for people to realize the worth of our fields in real life.

We can do it. We’ve held through till now, we can continue - its just a shift in perspective we need.  And lets be honest – we’re fairly good at that in the arts.

TL:DR - The Faculty of Arts needs a shift in perspective in order to survive. Lets try better advertising