My Future and the Future of the Humanities

I'm back at college now and in a week I will be 20. I know for a lot of people, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But when I think that this is my last week as a teenager, I'm actually a little freaked out. This is what the difference between 19 and 20 says to me:

19-year-olds can spend massive amounts of time watching "Say Yes to the Dress" on Netflix. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds can know all the lyrics to "Call Me Maybe" and scream them out open car windows at stop lights. 20-year-olds shouldn't.

19-year-olds don't have to be ashamed that they spent their last Friday night learning all the dance moves to Gangnam Style, while in their horse-pajamas. 20-year-olds should be.

But, most importantly, 19-year-olds are teenagers. They don't need to have their lives figured out yet. 20-year-olds are young adults. They should.

The prospect of my future has never really freaked me out before, which I guess is a pretty naive statement. I've been a very lucky person in life. I've always known I wanted to be a writer, and I'm not bad at it. I got into my first choice for college with some scholarships. I come from an amazingly supportive family and I've got great friends and a terrific boyfriend. When I came to college, I knew I'd be an English major and a Creative Writing minor and I knew my goal was to go to graduate school, either for a PhD in English or an MFA in Creative Writing. A professorship would be next, some tenure, a home in New England, some novels published on the side.

So today I decided that since I'm turning 20 and everything, I should probably start thinking about how I'm going to make these things happen. I went to a workshop today on how to apply for an English PhD program or a Creative Writing MFA program. Want to know how that went? Pretty much like this: Me Being a Dumb Ass (minus getting a C and wanting to go to Yale)

Suffice to say, the general message of how to apply to graduate school in English was don't do it. Why? Out of 600 applications, 15 get accepted. Programs are shrinking, getting canceled, ceasing to exist. For the first half hour of this workshop, we were given a lecture about how the death of humanities is upon us. A panel of advisers and professors in the English department told us with straight faces that people today see little need for the humanities and its future is very much at risk. And I thought it was just mine.

I could make this post a long rant about how ridiculous this feels to me, how stupid I want to say people are, how helpless I feel but also how much I want to fight back against this stereotype of the humanities and the idea that soon it will only be something people once studied and liberal arts universities will no longer really be liberal arts universities. But I'm not. Because I think those opinions of mine are obvious. I'd heard these sentiments before but I'd never taken them too seriously. But when a group of experts in the field sit in front of a group of future experts in the field and tell them that their field is on the brink of death, it's hard not to take seriously.

What do you think? Are the humanities dying? Why do people need the humanities, and literature in particular? Because I know this was a question that I'd never thought needed to be asked.

(On a lighter note, I read a fantastic book by David Benioff called City of Thieves. In honor of it, I'm making chicken popovers (the book is about two boys hunting Leningrad in WWII for a chicken). I'll post the results up here on the next post, like I did with Lemon Cake.)