Eulogy for the Religion Major
Summary
A student response to Miami University discontinuing their major
It is said one should not speak ill of the dead as to not disturb the mourners or summon the attention of an unquiet spirit.
Similar is said of a person in hospice. The gravity is slightly lesser, but one should be polite and let them have a good death. The time for grievance is gone. There is no expectation they can return to as they were, but at least something can be done. They can see in the end how much they meant to you at least.
I am not allowed to mourn the religion department thus.
They are slipping away – a glimmer beyond my reach – and that was true before they officially dissolved. The vibrant student community I saw as a freshman drifted away as if they were never present. My personal efforts to revive a departmental sense of unity via a club came to nothing in the end. The professors are still here, but they are tired, exhausted from fighting for all these years.
I understand why when faced with a slow death they would prefer if the university simply stopped playing games and moved them to other departments to wait out their retirement. It is a good personal calculation.
I do not understand where it leaves me as a student.
Am I supposed to be grateful?
I feel mocked.
Miami promised me a diverse liberal arts education where I could study any of their astounding array of majors as long as I worked hard and planned well.
I have worked, I have planned, and I have been left holding nothing, and the popular responses seem to spit in my face: “Religion? Who would study a silly thing like that?”
As if letting religious motives wear a mask dispels them. As if theories developed by scholars of religion cannot explain sociopolitical and economic choices throughout the world.
No, my degree must be useless. I must laugh with you and pretend that the “valuable analytical skills” I bring to any job are from writing R and not from learning history.
Of course, my mistake. Surely, you cannot be wrong.
I am sure that it is Python that enables an understanding of diet culture, not the underpinning of mind-body dualism.
Uh huh.
I once was hopeful and thought I could prove the merits of my study in time, but any insight I or any others in the field brings is attributed to something – anything – other than studying religion. Worse, they expect me to join and agree since I’m also a STEM major, so I must know how useless everyone else is.
What a joke. This response must belie my mirth.
Let me tell you a secret everyone knows: numbers are nothing without context. A workforce that can only calculate will find they know little at all about the world they live in. This pursuit of data for money without preservation of broader education is leading to ruin, but I have no desire to be another in a long line of Cassandras.
If the university is unwilling to invest in meaning, let it flounder. I am too tired and bitter to help much more.
Let me mourn the religion department in peace.