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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