It’s true: there are still some professors and students who choose fields of study and complete majors that don’t solely open career pathways. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors must withstand the relentless and usually unsophisticated pressures from parents and peers to resist academic preparations aimed primarily at a short-term return on economic investment. It’s true: faculty and students in these majors feel marginalized and devalued for their calling, which is viewed as irrelevant and archaic, or worse, irresponsible and regressive.
For mentors and advisors in these areas, the challenge remains: how does one begin an effective conversation with students who are interested in educational opportunities outside the narrowing focus on career preparation?
As an academic advisor in the fine arts, I can remember earlier in my career frequently coaching students who were going to talk to their parents about choosing a major not linked directly to careers. Those opportunities have dried up now, in an environment where many expect a college education to be closely linked to a desirable menu of career options. However, it is still not rare for students nearing graduation to admit to me that they regret for their choice of major and wish they had pursued something that more genuinely reflected their personal interests.
In the past, I began these kinds of vocational conversations with questions that explored issues that students often have trouble talking to others about, for example, their intuitions and impulses. I also asked them to look out into the future and imagine themselves looking back on the college years and to imagine what it would feel like to manage potential regrets about the “couldas” and “wouldas.” The psychology of choosing tells us that managing regret is an important consideration for making any choice, as Bonnie Miller-McLemore powerfully explores in “Missed Callings,” a chapter from her recent book on the double-edged nature of vocation.
I have never shied away from the realities faced by students who pursue majors that do not immediately lead to a job. It’s not surprising that students and their parents are often scared away by the likelihood that pursuing such degrees means it will take them about ten years in the workforce to realize career satisfaction commensurate to their college preparations. Let me be clear: their major does not disqualify them for a broad range of options in the workforce; they are employable. However, their employment usually doesn’t fit neatly into metrics for “securing-a-job-related-to-a-graduate’s-major.”
As I head into retirement from higher education, I’ve been going through old folders in my office. Recently, I recovered one that included photo-copied poems that I have used to teach vocation. In it, I found a poem—Czeslaw Milosz’s “Craftsman”—that I haven’t used in a long time, because most of my mentoring and advising in the past decade have been with a mix of first-year students from all disciplines (with a heavy concentration of pre-business majors). But I was struck by the poem’s helpful insight into a future maker’s calling. By “maker,” I mean a serious artist or craftsperson—a musician, writer, or performer. By “serious” I mean people who will pursue their forms of expression with discipline and professionalism for most of their lives, whether or not such pursuits are their first means of making ends meet.
“Craftsman”appears in Milosz’s New and Collected Poems: 1931—2001. He wrote this poem near the end of his life, and it has a different character than his earlier poems about being a poet. The ten-line poem opens with these two lines:
“Craftsman, prepare your instruments.
A tall echo comes down the mountain; you hear the roaring of spring torrents.”
In what follows, the poem’s main idea emerges: makers live to hand off their craft, as a legacy or as heritage, to others who will follow them. For Milosz, a maker’s two great virtues are “resignation and persistence”; when makers leave their craft at end of life, they do so without regret, a “master of vanquished despair.” The strength of Milosz’s truth about being a craftsperson is that he distinguishes the maker’s vocational experience from many other callings. Makers experience certain difficulties internally, no matter the external noise. These challenges include the grief of heightened consciousness or awareness, and the unrequited love of “unwelcome knowledge.” Makers spend their lives regarding themselves and others with a “pity and wonder” that can be overwhelming.
The poem “Craftsman” ends with encouragement. Where one maker finishes the necessary labor, the next maker takes it up and begins anew: “Praising, renewing, healing. Grateful because the sun rose for you and for others.” This confession testifies to an ultimate faith in the lifelong pursuit of a calling that pays itself forward. That’s quite a leap, especially at a time and in a culture where discernment gets narrowly defined in terms of economic opportunity.
Let me concede that the kind of advising and mentoring I’m advocating is at the bottom of a small funnel. A relatively small number of potential students are at the top of it; a smaller number consider a major in a craft-based discipline; and an even smaller number are open to declaring a major for which the craft’s economic prospects are—well, not what our culture validates.
But let me claim that these students deserve our attention and support. As students, they are good for our programs; as emerging scholars, they are good for members of the faculty; as graduates, they are good for the institution; and as citizens, they are good for the prospects of a free and vibrant society. In fact, their presence alone, in any of these realms, is a sign of good health within these realms. Milosz wrote that these soon-to-be craftspersons will build the stars “that will journey in the sky of those now being born.” They will take up labor that is only complete when others take up the labor after them. Against all odds—and against the advice of contemporary, short-sighted agencies—the craftspersons we are mentoring will contribute meaningfully to legacies of renewal and healing.
Paul Burmeister is a recently retired professor and administrator at Wisconsin Lutheran College; his career in higher education spanned more than three decades. Paul is a regionally-exhibited painter, a project management consultant, and a NetVUE Faculty Fellow. For other posts by Paul, click here.
