Economic pressures make more students choose between Rent or Shakespeare — while ignoring what the arts can do for them and others.
Syracuse University announcing it will respond to student demand and financial pressures by closing or halting a fifth of its academic programs — with a focus on the humanities — is a red flag for a larger problem.
But I get it. Affordability and home prices have put Americans in a rat race with stony roads and no sneakers, pushing students and their parents into a survival response: the false choice of rent or Shakespeare.
Universities face a Rent-or-Shakespeare moment of their own: a broken American immigration policy that makes it harder for full-tuition-paying international students to get visas — a revenue source that helps universities make ends meet.
Syracuse, ironically, responds to these pressures by narrowing its pioneering fine arts mission in order to produce more graduates shaped for a job market that already pressures students to abandon the arts.
This scarcity-survival-choice cycle makes retreating from the arts more practical and less surprising.
I guess that’s why Friedrich Schiller’s words scream in my brain: “Art is the right hand of Nature.”
Art isn’t just ornamental. Every book we read, painting we analyze, and poem we write strengthens the mind’s ability to interpret, compare, imagine, and understand other points of view.
These are more than the soft skills you read about in every other LinkedIn post. I call them superpowers. They sharpen judgment in the workplace and in private life. They deepen our ability to solve problems, influence others, and make sense of what is missing.
And since you still need to get things done through social contact with others, the arts will help you understand the people you try to influence in a way that no accounting textbook will ever do.
But the arts do something deeper: help you discover yourself.
And self-discovery has to happen constantly in order for you to transform from the amazing person you are today to an even better version tomorrow.
All this explains why I’m sounding the alarm about people and institutions walking away from the arts: it’s warning that the American Empire is getting slow-cooked.
Lid on, low heat, and it may even look like this great American experiment will never get done. But give it time.
The affordability crisis will not go away on its own.
Neither will humans’ response to “making it” when money’s harder to come by.
Which means we are drifting toward a society organized ever more tightly around survival — and therefore becoming narrower, less imaginative, less reflective, and meaner, with fewer sources of joy.
That’s why this problem is larger than Syracuse University. And we need to stop ignoring it …
Song currently stuck in my head: “no hands ” — kim gordon
mentalunrest.com 