My son Toby, currently a graduate student in English, just sent me this link to a Slate article about Mitt Romney discouraging students from becoming English majors. Here is the paragraph that caught my eye:
“You really don’t want to take out $150,000 loan to go into English because you’re not going to be able to pay it back. You might want to think about something else that meets your interest,” Romney said, noting that “as an English major I can say this,” reports ABC News. Romney graduated with an English degree from Brigham Young University and later went on to study law and business at Harvard.
I too am appalled that students have to take out $150,000 loans but, as for majoring in English, I point out to my majors that they have a wonderfully versatile major that prepares them for virtually anything. Now I have proof.
After all, judging by Romney’s example, they can become a CEO, governor of a state, a multimillionaire, presidential nominee of a major political party, and possibly even president of the United States.
I rest my case.
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I’m not sure whether I’m more surprised (a) that he would make such a wildly illogical statement about English majors (given himself as a counterexample, which I think he should be aware of) or (b) simply to hear that he was an English major. More than either: I’m disgusted that any political figure would so blithely disparage such a major element of the liberal arts.
With regard to (b), I’ve listened to the man speak hundreds of times during this ongoing campaign and I haven’t noted any particular ability to communicate effectively. I’m not of the mind that English majors should be alluding to literature constantly or even often, but a little familiarity with the canon and the craft should help one develop some fluidity and imagination in one’s prose. Maybe he’s been listening to consultants who say that elite “skills” and “knowledge” and (heaven forfend) “eloquence” are Obamish trifles, and that he should stay away from them in order to differentiate himself.
I’m not buying Buzzfeed’s suggestion that Mitt’s “The trees are the right height” is an allusion to Hemingway, by the way.
I went and looked up your Buzzfeed quote, Carl, and haven’t laughed so hard in a long time. For those of you not aware of the back story, Romney, while campaigning in Michigan, made one of his goofiest comments of the primaries:
“I was born and raised here. I love this state. It seems right here. The trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes. I love the lakes. There’s something very special here. The Great Lakes, but also all the little inland lakes that dot the parts of Michigan. I love cars.”
In case you can’t access the link, a Buzzfeed reader, noting that Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams also has praise for the trees in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, wrote the following:
As a kid educated in Michigan in the 60s, I’m willing to bet (not 10k though) that Mitt read the Nick Adams Michigan stories as required reading.
And here’s the excerpt he sent in:
There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown and soft under foot as Nick walked on it. This was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The trees had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare space they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern. (from “Big Two-Hearted River,” 1925)
Of course I was having fun with Romney’s disparagement of the liberal art to, a la Lincoln, keep from crying. What went through my mind, somewhat like yours, Carl, is that for someone who tells falsehoods with an abandon that amazes even hardened political observers, Romney doesn’t seem to have paid attention to some of literature’s moral lessons. Hasn’t he learned from, say, Faustus or Dorian Gray or (as in the passage below) Conrad’s Marlow that selling out your principles is bad for the soul. Here’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness talking about lies:
You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
Mr Bates,
I love this post… Thank you… And I am a witness…
Good Day-