Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

AARICA MARSH 

and DEREK WOLFE 

EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS

LEV FACHER

MANAGING EDITOR

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 —Friday, January 9, 2015

M

om wants me to have 
a good job. And even 
though I go to art 

school, she still 
thinks that some-
day I’m going to 
be a great doc-
tor. I know that 
it’s not likely that 
I’ll ever make the money a doctor 
makes, but like most artists, I didn’t 
major in Interarts Performance for 
the impressive starting salaries. 
In fact, a non-profit called BFAM-
FAPhD reports that only 10 percent 
of arts graduates are actually mak-
ing a living as artists.

I’m here because the University 

is a sort of utopia — a sometimes 
fractured one — that values com-
plex ideas, nuanced views, hard/
boring work and strangeness.

I’m here because artists are 

taught to be a little reckless, a little 
sloppy, but hopefully smart.

I’m here because I get to work 

with genius professors.

I’m here because my peers are 

geniuses, too.

I’m here because I believe in 

a community of artists who are 
interested in asking big and foolish 
questions.

But I’m not here for job training.
I know that the rest of my life 

is probably going to be an absolute 
pigfuck. And I’m happy about that. 
Excited, even. I knew that when I 
signed up for a degree in perfor-
mance art (or whatever).

I didn’t always know I wasn’t 

here for job training. But a class I 
took in the fall helped me find out.

Six credits of my schedule each 

semester are devoted to thesis 
work. It’s split between indepen-
dent studio time and class time 
with seventeen others also working 
on their theses. And during the fall, 
one credit is spent in a Professional 
Practice lecture.

The idea is that Professional 

Practice will teach the young art-
ists and designers how to get out 
there and get jobs. The course exists 
because past graduating classes felt 
that they were left unprepared in 
terms of job-hunting. Professional 
Practice is the Penny W. Stamps 
School of Art & Design’s way to 
help fill in those blanks. Faculty, 
alumni and other guests give pre-
sentations on topics like “Inter-

viewing Skills,” and “Resources for 
Finding Employment Opportuni-
ties and Resources About the Mate-
rials You Need to Apply for Them.” 
You know, the sort of classes they 
offer inmates.

While 
incredibly 
useful 
for 

students planning to enter the 
design field, Professional Prac-
tice is where a young artist might 
get a little queasy. The conceptual 
sculptors and installation artists 
and performance artists amongst 
us have their dreams squeezed by 
notions of “startups” and “clients” 
and “internships.” For an hour a 
week last semester, the sad cloud 
of employability hung so large over 
the Stamps School of Art & Design 
that its shadow blotted out the 
“Art” part.

If you’re a designer, you can get 

paid. If you’re an artist, you can 
become a designer.

A 
guy 
I 

will 
call 
Mr. 

Employer 
vis-

ited 
Profes-

sional 
Practice 

one 
day. 
Mr. 

Employer is a 
vice president at 
a Big Company. 
He is Important. 
He spoke with a 
deep voice in a 
kind, Midwest-
ern cadence and he offered advice 
about how to get him to give you a 
job. Don’t be too early. Don’t be ner-
vous. Don’t make any spelling mis-
takes. Do take an interest in him. 
Do look good when you show up at 
the office for an interview — “I’m 
judging you as soon as you walk 
through that door.” Do give him 
a firm handshake. Do send him a 
LinkedIn invitation soon after your 
interview — “I think that’s cool.” 
Don’t send him a LinkedIn invita-
tion while you’re still in the parking 
lot — “I think that’s too much.”

It’s nice of Mr. Employer to share 

his time with us.

But Mr. Employer is not the boss 

of me.

I don’t want someone to talk at 

me about how to become present-
able for a job interview, because I 
want to work at a place that is going 
to hire me for the big dumb idiot 
that I am. I don’t want to hear about 
having a firm handshake, because 

maybe someday I won’t have arms. 
And LinkedIn is for the birds.

I do think it is important to 

talk about jobs. Making money is 
important.

But the artists in the room know 

that being an artist is just like being 
anything else — you might work 
so hard you accidentally become 
a millionaire or you might die in a 
fire. So talk to us about how to make 
lattes or how to steal supplies from 
Jo-Ann Fabric or how to cry silent-
ly in public without disturbing oth-
ers. Because having a job is not the 
important thing. We’ll find jobs.

It’s a tough beat if a brilliant 

artist is going to be invited to the 
Venice Biennale because they gave 
Mr. Employer a very firm hand-
shake. Artists are after something 
different, and it’s OK to talk about 
how messy and terrible that might 
be. Talk to us about how for three 

years 
we’re 

going to be frus-
trated because 
it 
seems 
like 

nobody 
cares, 

but if we keep 
at it, something 
will 
finally 

give. 
Talk 
to 

us about how 
after spending 
a year trying to 
be a Real Artist 

we might find out that all we really 
wanted all along was to be a social 
worker. Talk to us about the 90 per-
cent of art grads for whom it just 
doesn’t work out. Or talk to us about 
how a young Robert Rauschenberg 
made some of his most important 
work out of garbage he found on 
the street because he was too poor 
to buy canvas.

But don’t ask Robert Rauschen-

berg to create a LinkedIn profile. 
(Note: I’m not the Rauschenberg 
in this case, but our Rauschenberg 
was there for Mr. Employer’s lec-
ture too.)

Job placement rates aren’t really 

that important. Good art doesn’t 
happen because you read Mr. 
Employer’s memos.

And you can make good art 

without making a good career.

I hope.

— Willie Filkowski can be 

reached at willjose@umich.edu.

The sad cloud of employability

Edvinas Berzanskis, Claire Bryan, 

Regan Detwiler, Devin Eggert, David Harris, 

Rachel John, Jordyn Kay, Aarica Marsh, 

Victoria Noble, Michael Paul, Allison Raeck, 

Melissa Scholke, Michael Schramm, 
Matthew Seligman, Mary Kate Winn, 

Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Resisting careerist ideology
A

s long as I can remember, I’ve always 
understood that when people asked, 
“What do you want to be when you 

grow up?” what they were 
really asking was, “What 
career do you want to have 
when you grow up?”

What’s strange is that 

none of the words in the 
first question denote any-
thing job or career-related. 
This means that our under-
standing of the question 
must rely on connotations. 
Even though the ques-
tion only denotatively asks 
about what one wants to be as an adult (or a 
“grown-up”) — which could be a wide range 
of things, like a parent, a good person, a read-
er, etc. — we interpret the meaning of the 
question very narrowly, so that it just refers 
to jobs or careers. Why would we reduce what 
could be a beautifully open-ended question to 
a depressingly close-ended one?

Careerist ideology. Instead of indepen-

dently thinking through apparently enig-
matic questions like being and one’s future, 
we prefer to defer to culturally and societally 
fabricated answers — e.g. careerist ideology, 
by which I mean a belief 
system based on the idea 
of the career, which holds 
the virtuosity of careers as 
self-evident and considers 
them centrally important 
to being.

In 
a 
society 
where 

careerist ideology is pre-
dominant, when the ques-
tion of “what to be when 
you grow up” arises, we 
connote the condition of 
“being” accordingly and allow our thought 
to be guided and constrained. The conse-
quence is that we often confuse or equivocate 
“being” with “being a (specific) career,” and 
not exclusively in the context of this question.

What scares and intrigues me is that we 

mostly process these connotations uncon-
sciously — that is, once we’re past a certain 
age, the intended meaning of this question 
is automatically clear to us. This careerist 
ideology exists within us largely outside our 
conscious awareness.

Careerist 
ideology 
can 
be 
primarily 

explained by what’s sometimes called a con-
junction fallacy — mistakenly believing that a 
conjunction of events (a hot and sunny day) is 
more probable than a single event (a hot day). 
When explaining this concept in lecture, my 
cognitive psychology professor gave us the 
following example: “Imagine a health sur-
vey was conducted on adult males. Mr. F was 
included. Which is more probable? (1) That 
Mr. F has had one or more heart attacks, or (2) 
That Mr. F has had one or more heart attacks 
and is over 55 years old? Studies show that 
about 55 percent of people say they believe (2) 
is more likely,” even though it’s not!

The probability of two events co-occurring 

(Mr. F having had one or more heart attacks 
and being over 55 years old) can only be less 
than or equal to the probability of one of the 

events occurring (Mr. F having had one or 
more heart attacks or the probability of Mr. F 
being over 55 years old), never greater.

“To be” does not necessitate “to be career.” 

Obviously there are many other ways to be, 
but in our career-oriented society, we casu-
ally believe in just the one partially because 
of this conjunction fallacy (which, in full, is 
a conjunction fallacy from casual reasoning). 
But there’s a deeper question: Why and how 
do we regularly commit the conjunction fal-
lacy? Why and how is our probability judg-
ment frequently distorted?

Psychologists have a few explanations, but 

one prominent explanation pertains to how 
we represent these scenarios in our minds. 
When we imagine someone having a heart 
attack, we typically imagine an elderly per-
son, and so we sometimes falsely conclude 
that being old and having a heart attack is 
more likely than just having a heart attack.

So it is with careerism. The careerist ide-

ology in our society is so predominant that 
we often assume that being an adult and hav-
ing a career is more likely than just being an 
adult. When we imagine ourselves as adults, 
we imagine ourselves with careers, because 
many of the adults we know have careers. 
Because modern life (or perhaps more accu-

rately postmodern life) 
is hyper-saturated with 
media that what we imag-
ine for ourselves as adults 
highly depends upon the 
simulacra shown on tele-
vision. How many televi-
sion shows today aren’t 
only about a character 
with a career, but are 
about the career itself?

Why would we reduce 

what could be a beauti-

fully open-ended question that offers the 
opportunity to actualize the highest poten-
tials of human creativity to a depressingly 
closed-ended one that basically offers a 
choice between two collars (blue or white)? 
I have maybe avoided this bigger question 
by delving specifically into careerist ideol-
ogy. Careerist ideology is but one facet of a 
much larger system, spanning multiple levels 
of analysis, not least of which is economics 
(i.e., capitalism). Understanding this single 
but critical facet of our collective societal 
consciousness can potentially awaken us to 
related latent mechanisms in our thinking.

My inkling is that individual people, once 

awakened from their dogmatic slumbers, 
would choose to focus on becoming more 
than just a lame career. Cultural thought-
control mechanisms, like the question of 
what to be, hinder the human creativity 
that precedes our great capacity for free-
dom. In recognizing these mechanisms we 
enable ourselves to push past the hindrances 
they impose. But then we’re immediately 
confronted with another challenge: the 
challenge of independently answering the 
deeper philosophical questions that ideol-
ogy answers for us.

— Zak Witus can be reached 

at zakwitus@umich.edu.

I

n the wake of Michael Brown, 
Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Aura 
Rosser and many, many more 

lives, students at 
the University are 
taking a stance 
on an issue that 
strikes a common 
nerve.

We don’t need 

to look very far to 
find these racial 
debates happen-
ing here on cam-
pus. 
From 
the 

“die-in” 
before 

finals in December to the march 
down the streets of Ann Arbor in 
November, students are actively 
voicing 
their 
collective 
stance 

against the issue of police milita-
rization. A year ago, the University 
community experienced a similar 
phenomenon of race-related open 
discussions including the #BBUM 
hashtag campaign and eventual 
demands to the administration 
and sit-ins. Months before that, 
there was another incident involv-
ing a racially insensitive party (the 
“Hood Ratchet Thursday Party”) 
organized by Theta Xi fraternity. 
Both on and offline, students have 
voiced their dissent or support of 
the Black Student Union’s demands. 
Students shared their views on the 
relevance or inanity of cultural 
appropriation. Students generally 
spoke about race relations in Amer-
ica as though they were authorities 
of these issues.

And yet, it also seems that 

despite the passion presented on 
the forums, there is a dissenting 
opinion that race shouldn’t be dis-
cussed, race relations shouldn’t be 
learned. When students aren’t con-
stantly confronted with a piece of 
news related to racial tensions, dis-
cussing it becomes frowned upon. 
The “not everything is about race” 
sentiments are thrown around.

There seems to be a strange dis-

crepancy going on. Many students, 
when pressed with the headlines, 
want to talk about race. They want 
to offer their two cents. They want 
to understand what’s going on, but 
they just as much wish to erase 
issues of discrimination from casu-
al conversations. Why is this the 
case?

The answer might lie in our first 

experiences with outward discus-
sions of race in the classrooms. For 
many students, these talks were, at 
best, outdated. At worst, they were 
completely misaligned with current 
events. The narrative of racism in 
America gener-
ally goes as fol-
lows: there used 
to be racism that 
took the form of 
slavery and then 
Jim Crow seg-
regation; 
how-

ever, thanks to 
the civil rights 
movement 
and 
protesters 

such as Martin 
Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks (but 
not the Black Panther Party), these 
forms of institutional racism have 
been completely eradicated. It is 
a narrative that relegates wrong-
doings to the past and holds our 
society today up to a false ideal of 
complete equality. “Free at last! 
Free at last! Thank God almighty, 
we are free at last!” was a quote 
by Martin Luther King, Jr. that we 
sang in my elementary school while 
holding hands and swaying back 
and forth.

While MLK and civil rights 

activists have certainly succeeded 
in improving the lives of people of 
color in many different aspects, the 
way this part of history is told in the 
classrooms and textbooks shuts out 
any need to further analyze racial 
dynamics in America. It stops peo-

ple from thinking critically of how 
racism was able to transform from 
institutionalized slavery to Jim 
Crow, and how it can just as easily 
change shape in modern contexts.

We students have been given 

an overly optimistic narrative of 
where our society currently stands, 
but we also see situations of rac-
ism in the headlines. Our response 
to these clashing narratives is just 
as conflicted — we both discuss 
racism and feel the discussion is 
not needed. We both type away on 
our keyboards or try to talk over 
our friends during heated conver-
sations and complain about how 

pointless LSA’s 
race and ethnic-
ity requirement 
is.

Ideally, it is 

in these heated 
discussions 
that 
students 

discover 
for 

themselves 
what’s 
hap-

pening in the 
world. But it is 

just as crucial that we pay atten-
tion to how race is taught to our 
youngest and most impression-
able. Other than the race and 
ethnicity class required for LSA 
students, the University does not 
provide many other opportunities 
for individuals to reexamine race 
in an academic setting. Educating 
people about race should incite 
much more public interest in race 
issues. It should reflect what’s 
actually happening and allow stu-
dents to react to Ferguson not with 
stunned denial but with an out-
spoken, well informed solidarity 
for those whose experiences with 
discrimination do not end when 
the headlines go away.

— Jenny Wang can be reached 

at wjenny@umich.edu.

Race relations discrepancy 

WILLIE 
FILKOWSKI

My inkling is that 
individuals would 
choose to focus on 
becoming more than 

just a lame career.

ZAK 
WITUS

JENNY
WANG

Educating people about 

race should allow 

students to react to 

Ferguson with informed 

solidarity.

You can make 

good art without 
making a good 

career. 

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