Let’s be clear: Something is not right in the world of the BA and hasn’t been for a number of years. It could be who is teaching into the BA and the way it has become, too often, a degree of demanded, very limited ‘right-on’ orthodoxy in thinking and expression. It could be the limitations of many students who decide to do the BA and then, because of fears of funding cuts if numbers drop, are allowed to progress, often with inflated grades, in a number of departments, rather than being told that, for a number of reasons, they should not be at university. It could be that we underpay tutors and then expect them to hurriedly grade substandard, barely literate work and then also undertake tutorials of too large a size to effectively do anything more than have uninformed articulation of feelings and social media feeds masquerading as knowledge undertaken by (barely attempted) reading and thinking.
The trouble is the BA, as it currently exists, makes it far too easy for its critics to dismiss, disparage, demean and defund it. And yet, the BA, as the humanities broadly considered, was and is the basis of the university and should provide the skills and knowledge, in an undergraduate degree, for the best and brightest to make an effective and positive contribution across a whole range of work and activity for society.
For the BA to be effective it should not require a post-graduate qualification to make it meaningful, applicable, acceptable or the BA graduate employable in the sense that they can make use of their skills and knowledge in a graduate level position. Imagine if lawyers all had to do a post-graduate degree to be employed in work that made proper use of what they learnt in their law degree. Similarly, for engineers. Yes, the BA is not a vocational degree, but doesn’t that make it even more necessary for it to be able to offer the best outcomes for society and its graduates? The BA used to be the broadly vocational degree in the sense that a good BA would enable the possessor to undertake a wide range of roles and activities across many sectors of society, education, the arts, media, government, public service and business. That is, the BA enabled and facilitated social and cultural capital because the skills and knowledge it engendered were truly transferable into and across a broad range of graduate level positions and roles. Currently we have far too many BA graduates doing non-graduate role work; in effect loaning money and studying for a degree that does not get many of them proper graduate level work. If the degree was free there might be some argument for the current state of things, but it is not and that is a tragedy and a very poor investment both by students and the state.
Perhaps it is time for the BA to be rethought, repositioned, reworked and redesigned –and in the process make it a far more discerning and limited entry degree. Only then might we be able to save it. Of course this is unlikely to happen, the university and arts academics have far too much invested in the status quo… yet the status quo is not serving its purpose, function, role or graduates – let alone society.
But maybe it is time for an alternative new arts degree, an elite, demanding, concentrated, general studies arts degree to run alongside the BA and all the other ‘qualifications’ the university offers. This would be a limited entry, 4-year, small class, seminar-based arts degree made up of small block courses that were reading, writing and discussion heavy at an advanced level.
Ideally this could be done in 3 years, but if you are to have a limited entry degree then you need to make it 4 years to have the entry year at the end of the first year. Those who do not make the entry criteria can then transfer over to a 3-year BA of their choice. For those who do make the cut, their tertiary education in effect starts again in their 2nd year as there is no ‘major’, at the most there would be an endorsement or specialization. This is because everyone in the proposed degree would be doing primarily the same block courses as a cohort. The block courses at each level would be offered twice a year, in both semesters, so that numbers in each could be kept manageable. Different universities could offer their own block courses and versions of this new arts degree and this would provide both differentiation and competition between the universities – but numbers would be equally capped across all universities so to not flood the job market with such graduates. The cohort-focus of the degree also ensures cohort building and network building, those two essential elements of any functioning society. But in this case, what you know is as important as who you know.
I realize such a proposal is unlikely to gain support in New Zealand because we claim to be highly egalitarian, yet any true understanding of our society exposes this for the fallacy it is. Yes, the devil would be the detail, but as the great political historian J.G..A Pocock noted of the New Zealand education system back in 1960, New Zealand’s issue is that we don’t have a meritocracy, rather we suffer from a mediocracy.
The reality is, we do not need as many graduates in any particular subject or discipline in the BA as we currently have and the peculiarities of the NZ university system means we create too many graduates with neither sufficient disciplinary focus and knowledge, nor with sufficiently broad and detailed general studies knowledge and skills either. In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, we graduate neither foxes nor hedgehogs – that is those with a broad knowledge or a very detailed knowledge; rather we graduate far too many sheep who have over-cropped the same poor pasture. That’s why I believe it is time to try something new.
