American Culture and Your Future

A classic liberal arts education aimed to create citizens with a serious breadth of knowledge.  You would graduate conversant in the various sciences.  You would know a language or two (possibly even ancient and impractical ones).  You would be well versed in canonical literature.  You would know how to think, how to write, and how to speak.  Having mastered these skills, you would then find your way in the world.  The skills would help you succeed, but they were not in and of themselves, a career.

That was the ideal, of course, and you can catch the dim fragments of it in the core curriculum requirements (and the name!) of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

But then the meaning of a college or university education turned in the opposite direction:  it was all about professionalization.  At graduations, you'd see the folks from the professional and graduate schools-business, engineering, pharmacy, law, medicine-chanting "We've got jobs!  We've got jobs!"   Well, that's still true today.  But maybe not quite so true as it once was.

Today, many students have revalued the old skills of the liberal arts education, not because those skills create "well-rounded citizens," but because they develop the elasticity of mind, the critical thinking abilities, the multi-world savvy and sophistication, and the skills in cultural interpretation and production necessary for success in a rapidly changing global economy.  The old liberal arts education has been replaced by interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary boundary crossings that reject the lines between history and literature, politics and sociology, high culture and low. 

The Program in American Culture aims to offer exactly this kind of quick thinking, fast moving, culturally sophisticated, multi-world education.  We emphasize a new brand of ethnic studies, one rooted in global migration and movement, transnational identities, and unexpected juxtapositions.  We put those insights into play with the world of cultural production and consumption: new media, music, technology, film. And we underpin the whole thing with an appreciation for the history, literature, and art that has been and continues to be produced from American centers and margins.

Armed with these skills, our graduates imagine for themselves a future:

In the culture industries:
  Publishing
  Journalism
  Television and film
  Criticism
  Media
  Sports

In public and civic service:
  Law and politics
  Social activism
  Local, state, and federal government
  Primary, secondary, and post-secondary education
  Public arts organizations
  Public history and museum work

In the work of the world:
  Labor organizing
  Non-governmental Organizations
  Teach for America
  The Peace Corps
  Non-Profit Organizations

A Career Guide for American Culture (PDF) *