I was 1/3 of a Cultural Studies major. Specifically, I majored in an Independent Studies cocktail of English/ Journalism/ Cultural Studies, which I felt allowed me to study language in a way that would a) not restrict me to solely one language, and b) give me the opportunity to get out of the trap of becoming either a teacher or a struggling writer/ corporate proofreader.

In retrospect, I have many qualms with the cultural studies program. In many senses, I agree with points in Jay Gabler’s essay Cultural Studies, Kiss My Ass. Mostly, I agree that the field’s high-minded, inaccessible semantics can be training 101 in Sounding Like a Smarmy Douchebag, while not preparing you for the real world. Despite my post-college ire, I felt saddened to hear that my college’s Cultural Studies program might get merged into the vague but employable field of Communications.

While Cultural Studies is still a mishmash of many different subjects, it does act as a makeshift holding bin for many important areas of study that aren’t yet being recognized by traditional majors. The way I see it, we still need cultural studies for two main reasons:

1. English has not adapted to a non-Westernized world

English is called English because it’s the study of literature written in English. Having the primary field of study for people who want to become writers or scholars of the written word be restricted to one language feels downright old-fashioned and hegemonic. I signed up for cultural studies because I wanted to read literature in translation, from all over the world, and our comparative studies field was nestled in that department. Once English departments are reconstructed to be Global Literature departments, we might not need cultural studies anymore.

2. Cultural Studies preserves important texts that have fallen out of fashion in their field.

Like almost every other 19-year-old, I also considered majoring in psychology. Who doesn’t want to study how the human brain works, and how it motivates us to be the weird way that we are?

I wanted to study psychoanalysis and read Freud and Jung, but many psychology teachers laugh at the mention of their names. It was only in Cultural Studies that I got the chance to take classes in Freudian and Post-Freudian literature, which were some of the best classes I ever took. I would hate to see this field fold into Communications – someone has to teach kids that Freud did more than smoke cigars and make dirty jokes.

Cultural studies is rough around the edges in many ways. As much as it needs to figure out how to teach kids to translate their high-minded learnings to the average joe’s Internet-enabled publishing world, it’s still necessary for letting curious people have a critical view of the history of human thinking.

–Becky Lang