Speaking to graduates of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, David Byrne dumped a big bucket of cold water on their career prospects. Rachel Aron, who was there, summarizes:
In a slide-show presentation on the auditorium’s projection screen, Byrne showed a series of graphs, based on information compiled by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), illustrating that if you chose a career in the arts you are, basically, screwed. A pie chart, based on 2011 data, showed that only three per cent of film and theatre grads, and five per cent of writing and visual-arts grads, end up working in their areas of concentration (forty-three percent work in the arts but outside of their specialties; forty-one per cent work outside of the arts altogether). A subsequent bar graph showed that, according to those stats, fourteen writing and fourteen Columbia visual-arts graduates will go on to careers in their fields, and eight theatre and eight film grads will go on to careers in theirs. “That’s the end of the charts,” Byrne said, after sharing another, which showed the median salaries of people working in the arts (between thirty-five and forty-five thousand dollars across all four sectors). “I’m glad you’re laughing.”
Colin Marshall tries to find the silver lining:
[F]irsthand reports from the ceremony don’t describe a too terribly shaken Columbia graduating class, and even Byrne took pains to emphasize, or at least emphatically imply, that truly worthwhile careers — such as, I would say, his own — lay outside, or in between, or at the intersection of, definable fields. And why would you want to work in the same field you studied, anyway? To paraphrase something Byrne’s friend and collaborator Brian Eno said about technology, once a whole major has built up around a pursuit, it’s probably not the most interesting thing to be doing anymore.
Meanwhile, in a commencement address at McGill University, the philosopher Judith Butler offered a more hopeful appraisal for those studying the humanities, focusing on the non-financial aspects of such an education:
The humanities allow us to learn to read carefully, with appreciation and a critical eye; to find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the middle of the ancient texts we read, but also to find ways of living, thinking, acting, and reflecting that belong to times and spaces we have never known. The humanities give us a chance to read across languages and cultural differences in order to understand the vast range of perspectives in and on this world. How else can we imagine living together without this ability to see beyond where we are, to find ourselves linked with others we have never directly known, and to understand that, in some abiding and urgent sense, we share a world?
She continued:
You will need all of those skills to move forward, affirming this earth, our ethical obligations to live among those who are invariably different from ourselves, to demand recognition for our histories and our struggles at the same time that we lend that to others, to live our passions without causing harm to others, and to know the difference between raw prejudice and distortion, and sound critical judgment. The first step towards nonviolence, which is surely an absolute obligation we all bear, is to begin to think critically, and to ask others to do the same.
Related Dish coverage of Joss Whedon’s commencement address here.
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