It's a question I hear whenever I talk to mere mortals about my studies in college. I tell them that I'm majoring in history and English literature, and they say, "What are you going to do with that?" or some variant thereof. The second-most-popular response is, "Are you going to teach?" I feel like I'm being patronized, as the person pats me on the head and says, "Of course your degree is useful."

It's only in the last forty years that college has become an expensive vocational school. The rise of the business degree has turned some institutions into business mills, churning out half-prepared business students who wait eagerly to enter the echelons of middle management. Miami University is such an institution, with Miami graduate, billionaire, and founder of the company Cintas sitting on the Board of Trustees. His name is Richard T. Farmer, and they've named the School of Business after him. None of our other colleges are named after people. You might think that even Miami's most famous graduate, William Holmes McGuffey, author of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, might have the school of education named after him. Nope. He's too old and too dead. Give him a building and a street.

Only in the last forty years have students gone to college hoping to get an education that trained them for the "real world." Students in the humanities have dropped as students in business have climbed. The United States is an economic society based on money. What better guarantor for making money than getting a degree in which you're taught how to make money?

But what are you getting? I like to joke that business majors at Miami University go to King Library to use the study rooms to do their group marketing projects. I wonder how much of that is true. White boards in the lobby tell people from various groups that they are to meet in such-and-such a room. The group names begin with "ACC," "FIN," or "MKT," which stand for "Accounting," "Finance," and "Marketing." One day I want to do an informal survey of the abbreviations on the white board and see what percentage of students in study rooms are business students. The thing about the group projects is true, though: business students don't write papers and they don't take tests. They do group projects. Good for them, I say as I pat them on the head.

But what about learning? It used to be that learning for learning's sake was enough. You didn't go to college to necessarily do something with your degree. You got a degree and then studied your subject. There will always be doctors and teachers; those fields are prosaic enough. But philosophy? History? Literature? What does one do with such things? How does one make money?

Well, a person studies such things, of course. History is probably the most utilitarian of all of the liberal arts. An historian looks up new information in archives, or goes around the world, digging up artifacts that tell us more about times long past. The historian writes books about these things to let us know what happened in the past. I don't mean, of course, the obligatory biographies of founding fathers that appear every other year. That's intellectual chump change. A book about Benjamin Franklin contains no newer information about him than the last book that was written five years ago. People are suckers for biographies, for some reason.

The philosopher thinks about the nature of the universe and deals with the tough questions about our existence that we either don't want to deal with, don't care about dealing with, or are too dumb to know exist. "What is reality?" is pretty heady stuff. It's also a valid question that some of us don't care about. Answering the question "What is reality?" may not net you a job as CEO of Cintas, but it will make you a better person for knowing the nature of the aether in which you float every day.

Matthew Arnold was a nineteenth-century British essayist who foresaw a coming war between knowledge for itself (what he called "culture") and knowledge for utility (what he called "anarchy"). Fittingly enough, the work which dealt with this culture war is called Culture and Anarchy.

Culture and Anarchy came about because of a speech made by Mr. Frederic Harrison, a member of Parliament who suggested that

the man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories.

First of all, cultural is impractical. Second, culture has no place in politics, a practical trade which demands common sense, something which Harrison suggests that people of culture lack. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold mounts his defense of culture.

Arnold distinguishes good culture from bad culture, the latter being a "culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin" in the denigrating words of John Bright, another member of parliament who had nothing but contempt for intellectuals. "Bad culture" is "a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it."

"Good culture" is "the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent." Culture also concerns itself with "the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it."

In Arnold's time, as in ours, there was an obsession with the accumulation of wealth. Wealth, he says, is not an end unto itself, but "machinery" used to acheive some end:

the commonest of commonplaces tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time. Never did people believe anything more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so.

Freedom is the same. Freedom is not an end unto itself, but "machinery" that we use to acheive some end. In talking about freedom, Parliament has cleverly disguised the purpose of freedom: freedom for the aristocracy and the middle class, and that's about it. The aristocracy and middle class design a state structure that serves their own interests, and their own interests only:

Our leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-lieutenancy, and the not in print version posse comitatis, which are all in its own hands. Our middle-class, the great representative of trade and not in print version Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which might somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own decorative inutilities of vestrymanship and guardianship, which are to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are to the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either take these functions out of its hands, or prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as at present.

But above all, culture -- rather than politics -- is most suited to solve problems, since it constantly strives for perfection. Culture "enables us to look at the ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred and without partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all round."