Phil Lai

One of the visitors’ parking lots at Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood sits next to a giant wall painted to look like an ocean.  The studio has its own water tower. And when he worked at Paramount, Scott Aversano ’91 could see palm trees from his office, which has gleaming wood floors and an electric-blue leather couch. It’s one of those impossibly, impressively minimalist spaces that looks, well, like it’s out of a movie.

This guy is a big deal.  He produces movies—blockbusters like School of Rock and Team America: World Police. He’s now working as an independent film and television producer—he just wrapped a movie starring A=shton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl called Killers. But when he was studying at Brown, he was pursuing a career in academia. He had decided to concentrate in English and was considering working for Teach for America before starting a graduate program in English.

Aversano says his parents were less than thrilled when he told them he wanted to study English. “My mother was having a coronary,” he says over the phone last week. “[My parents] did a very simple cost-benefit analysis,” he says.  “But they were more enthusiastic about that than when I said I wanted to concentrate in religious studies.”

At a time when the national unemployment rate continues to hover around 10 percent and the average price tag for a year’s education at a private nonprofit college is nearly $36,000, how do we justify concentrating in subjects that don’t promise lucrative careers after graduation?

Even puppets are asking the question.  Perhaps the tension is best phrased in a song title from the Sesame Street spoof Broadway play Avenue Q: “What do you do with a BA in English?” Or, for that matter, any concentration that can’t promise gainful post-graduate employment.

In September 2007, the English department asked alumni from the classes of ’99 through ’07 why they decided to study English and how the degree has helped them after graduation.  When they were Brown students, the economy hadn’t yet plunged into the recession, but even so, the department wanted a concrete answer for students and parents who asked, “What can be done with a degree in English?” The survey received over 100 anonymous responses.

“I studied English Lit because my parents wanted me to have a more ’sellable’ major than theatre arts.”

“I came to Brown certain that I would be an English major, despite the impracticality of it and my parents’ concern that I was putting their tuition dollars to waste.”

“After years of enduring my father’s worries and the comments of my parents’ friends about where an English degree would (not) take me, I am here to report that it’s never once held me back. In fact, I think it’s been a great benefit to me.”

“Many people have asked me—what do you do with an English concentration if you don’t want to be a professor? My answer to them is: whatever you want.”

Despite parental squeamishness and concerns over “impracticality,” these students were successful: responses came from lawyers and judges, journalists and professors, financial advisers, and doctors.

“An English concentration is pretty applicable to lots of different things,” says Malcolm Burnley ’12, who decided to concentrate in English before he came to Brown.  But he admits his family had a significant role in encouraging a more creative approach to education. His parents are both college art teachers, he said—one teaches at Sarah Lawrence, the other at Cooper Union.  “They’ve kind of always said, hopefully it’ll always work out.”

Hopefully is right, since a Brown education is expensive—last year, the total cost was pegged at nearly $48,000 per year—and Burnley plans to go into teaching after graduation, maybe in an inner city. “It’s some form of giving back to the community,” he says. But, after a beat, he adds, “Regardless, it is a lot of money for a college education.”

Odds are, the number of Brown students who choose to concentrate in subjects that don’t necessarily promise financial stability is greater than at other institutions, perhaps because the University doesn’t really offer any pre-professional programs. There is no business or accounting concentration, no pre-med or pre-vet concentration, no journalism department.  But there is a modern culture and media department, literary arts, gender and sexuality studies—hell, there’s even a physics and philosophy concentration. No surprise, then, that many students turn to what they love rather than what promises economic rewards.

Brian Evenson, chair of the Literary Arts program, says many of his students go into publishing and advertising while they pursue less economically stable—but more personally fulfilling—careers in writing. Though students often”end up figuring things out as they go,” Evenson says the Literary Arts program is ultimately more valuable than, say, a pre-prefessional concentration, because his program “teaches students how to deal with language in ways that are multivalent and effective,” even if the careers the students choose are not immediately lucrative. “If you know how to write,” he says, “you do have a foot up over people who don’t.”

“We’re all really passionate about what we do,” says Hollis Mickey ’10, who is concentrating in performance studies. “This is what we love.”

The performance studies department is small—Patricia Ybarra, assistant professor of theatre, speech and dance and the performance studies adviser, said only three will receive a degree from the department this year. But Mickey says this intimacy is part of the reason she decided to concentrate in performance studies—despite the impending struggle to find a job that can justify the price of a Brown education.

“The financial situation is definitely a consideration,” Mickey says. “I think everyone’s pretty realistic that performance studies folks aren’t going to be immediately raking it in after graduation.”

But Mickey admits she isn’t as concerned by her job prospects as she could be. Though she wants to be a curator of performance—working in museums on “live art”—she also intends to supplement her income as a yoga instructor. Still, she said, her parents were initially confused by her concentration choice, though she said they were always “incredibly supportive.”

“When my mom asked me what I was studying, I sent her the Wikipedia page,” Mickey said. “It took them a while to understand what I was doing.”

Despite the stigma attached to concentrations like performance studies and literary arts—how do those aspiring novelists in that writing seminar really hope to make money?—students continue to pursue these “non-lucrative” concentrations with aplomb. When Zach Schlosser ’10 replied to an e-mail about his thoughts on concentrating in religious studies, his response was indicative of the passion and time students bring to these “softer” concentrations. “Too busy,” he wrote.

There have always been questions surrounding the value of a liberal-arts education—and the gloomy economy is just enhancing that longstanding argument against learning for learning’s sake. In a December column written by Wesleyan president Michael Roth for Huffington Post, he writes, “Given the pace of technological and social change, it no longer makes sense to devote four years of higher education entirely to specific skills.” And Brown students and professors seem to have a similar view—a liberal arts education allows for freedom and creativity that ultimately provides a better foundation for future success, whatever that means to them.

Loving what you learn is part of Brown, and the decision to study a “non-lucrative” subject seems to be as common in Brunonia as a spicy with outside Jo’s on a Friday night.

“I actually thought I wanted to be a lawyer,” says Hector Ramirez ’12, a literary arts concentrator. “But I realized if I’m a starving artist, at least I’m a happy starving artist.”