Thinking outside the BA box
“The end is nigh,” WebAdvisor informed me when its automatic email asked me if I wanted to graduate.
In my final semester at the university, I’m just now coming to terms with the terms of the agreement, the little contract the university and I drew up to occupy my waking and sleeping thoughts for the last four years.
Until this point I’ve been mildly sentient, churning out assignments like manic-depressive clockwork and sleeping like it’s my part-time job.The problem is, coming full circle has made me realize how skin-deep some of those experiences have been.
I can only speak for my program, a Bachelor of Arts in English with a French minor. It has without a doubt equipped me with the tools I requested from them when I was first dropped off in front of South Residence and took a long, late-summer walk around campus.
That self-effacing kid has now been on many walks, several runs, and numberless adventures where she made no progress at all.
I took Emily Dickinson’s poetry anthology and knocked it against my head until I understood something about life, namely my own limitations.
Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman told me to explode how I understood my place in society and eat it up to the last crumbs, and I did my best to lick the plate.
I read big books, little books, expensive books, and very scary books. I read prose, poetry, nonfiction, fine print, and academic gibber-gabber. I read indiscernible blends of them all.
I read for work and I read for play. I read when I should have slept and I slept when I should have written about what I read.
I worked on-campus and I worked off-campus. I worked from home and I worked in places I pretended were home.
I bussed tables and picked up garbage and entered data for this—this opportunity to be told in sparing detail whether or not I could do this potentially unimportant thing, whether I could do the educational system. Like one giant, expensive performative game, I progressed from one stage of pawnhood to another, and so on each semester until I got hip to the routine and learned to play the game.
Because that’s what my BA is—writing to please. Without a doubt in my mind, I know my academic successes (if we want to call them that) are the result of learning to please people in the way I know how.
Terms of endearment aside, I have to wonder if my learning, mapped best in a series of quadratic functions, has made for the best development process. Each and every breakthrough was a result of several lukewarm, lustreless moments that hang in my memory like dead air, almost more important than my highest achievements.
Those moments of unadulterated boredom are more than the sum of their parts.
I don’t mean to romanticize mediocrity, but there’s something to be said for the amount of unoriginal, unimportant work we produce in these formative years. Maybe that’s why we’re called undergraduates.
If postsecondary education models some kind of post-capitalist indentured servitude we must all complete before moving into the realm of personhood, I think it’s time to re-examine the system.
But that doesn’t mean omitting those all-important, unimportant assignments. Obtuse as the literary canon itself, those must remain. They’re a proof that this reification that takes place upon each of us like an anointment of holy oil isn’t the be-all end-all. That “Every new beginning is just some other beginning’s end,” as Semisonic morosely tells the Bullring crowd at every open mic night’s closing.
What I mean is, we make too much of our undergrads. These are $80,000 pieces of paper printed by mass-consumer press each season like paperback fiction. We are defined by them, but we are not them.
Not everyone has to pay that kind of money to learn about themselves, but I did. In fact, if I get my way, I’ll do it in another program in another city for another piece of paper, and it will be wonderful.
It’s important to look at why we do the things we do, why we tolerate the rules of these games and stand in protest against others. Why some people get this opportunity and others don’t, and why certain people feel that they squander it in mediocrity.
Us North Americans are big fans of competition, of one-on-one-on-one qualitative and quantitative tests that place us all one big staircase where the neon sign at the top reads “success.”
I think that’s imaginary. That staircase is one big set of Penrose stairs, where there’s no top and no bottom, where we just climb forever and never get anywhere because our conceptualizations of progress and success are backward.
It’s time to loosen that white-knuckled grip we have on our own futures. Those notions of perpetual progress, though valuable, compartmentalize us within our own lives.
The system isn’t all crooks and confused people, but one must wonder about the value we place in these experiences when other experiences, other histories, go undervalued.
“Tell me how much a dollar cost,” says Kendrick Lamar. The cost can be going incognizant and neglecting ourselves and our fellow people, of incorporating ourselves into a system we don’t truly understand or take interest in because we’ve always been direct beneficiaries.
I’m walking out of this degree with a piece of paper, sure—but I’m taking suitcases full of books and books full of my scribbles. And people like me and unlike me will scribble on long after I’m gone.
I’ll utter the unspeakable: my BA taught me to question my BA.
“What else can you do with a BA these days?” asks Ainsley, the crazy roommate in The Edible Woman. But the question is this: these days, what can we do?
Photo by Mariah Bridgeman/The Ontarion.