At Least I Am Not Writing a Thesis

by Lauren Drayer

There are many things to complain about when it comes to your academic life. Your professor has questionable logic, he assigns one hundred pages of reading every week, and his class is based on the premise that you will fail; your lab partner spells the most surprising words incorrectly, she never remembers what time she was supposed to meet with you, and she keeps changing her mind about the font she uses in her emails. The smallest little things—and academia is nothing if not an aggregate of small things elegantly orchestrated into a master concept called a major—can get in the way of the big picture. They cloud your perspective: it is hard to project yourself a semester into the future when you are currently worried about whether you professor intends to fail you this semester because you deserve it or because he feels like it. The little things also prevent you from sleeping well: they nag and nag at you until all you can see when you close your eyes are all the little failures of the day. Most importantly, they prevent you from enjoying that burger you’ve been craving—who enjoys a burger when they have to rewrite their paper outline for the fifth time? That being said, at least you’re not writing a thesis.

The truth is that I did write a senior thesis. A very long one. On the biochemical characterization of antibodies. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about writing a thesis in a department purposefully geared toward emotional pain: the Humanities. Humanity means the human race, or human beings collectively. It also means humaneness and benevolence. Academically, the humanities are the study of literature, philosophy, art … all things that are at the core of human beauty and creativity. It should be intuitive, it should feel good, it should reflect our energy, our capacity for good. It should feel human—good-human. But there is nothing good-human about the humanities. At their core they are vague, violent, mean.

There is this thing in law that dismisses regulations entirely if they are too vague to be reliably obeyed and enforced. The actual term is “void for vagueness”. We should be able to dismiss the humanities as a whole on that premise, because there is no structure within this area of study that would allow any practitioner to reliably produce a good analysis of literature, art, and especially philosophy. Why especially philosophy? Because philosophy is not even properly rooted in words; it exists in our minds as an abstraction of ideas that few have intelligibly translated into documents such as the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Just kidding; that book is unintelligible. Which further proves my point that philosophy rarely yields a structured response from anyone. Not even the Great Thinkers. Thinkers should keep their thoughts there, in their heads, in the space directly surrounding their bodies—not on paper, for it is there that it infuriates me the most.

So, above I have addressed why the “vague” portion of humanities is a problem. My conclusion, more or less verbatim, is that “it infuriates me the most.” My next point has to do with violence. We all have preconceptions of violence. Homicide comes to mind, police violence, battery. But obviously this is not the sort of violence that we notice in the humanities. It is far more subtle, because the humanities have mastered the art of quiet warfare. It comes in the form of an essay you thought was about Monet, when it really is about income inequality of Latino lesbians with lupus. You always, always get tricked into a carefully convoluted web of knowledge that is neither here nor there, all disguised as an essay inconspicuously titled “The Straightforward Explanation of Monet’s Paintings”. See? It is violence of the most sophisticated kind: directed at the reader wholly and personally.

Lastly, I need to address why I think the humanities are mean. There isn’t a very well thought out opinion there, so I won’t discuss it in any detail whatsoever.

In conclusion, when developing a humanities thesis, the student has to surmount the vast vagueness of his topic, realize that his writing will cause physical pain to his readers, and he has to understand that as a result of his work people will view him as mean, and probably avoid him in the future, both in the short and long-term. We all have many complaints about our academic experience, but if we are lucky, we are not humanities students, and at least we aren’t writing a thesis.

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.