As an attempt to procrastinate productively (I do realise that this is completely oxymoronic) I have, over the last couple of weeks, been taking a keen interest in what’s going on in the news.
Obviously I realise that knowing lots about the Leveson Inquiry, the Olympic Torch Relay and Kylie Minogue’s plans to move to Cannes (OMG!) isn’t conducive to knowing anything at all about Mrs Dalloway or Endgame, but I’ve managed to convince myself that it will add to my general air of worldliness and intelligence and this will, in some way, be communicated to the examiner through the medium of my handwriting or something. Somehow, in some way, it will.
More importantly, it has meant that for once I have been able to take part in, and even stimulate, interesting debates with intelligent friends about current affairs and the world around us (which is pretty much what I imagined I’d spend three years doing at university before I got here and discovered hangovers and eating dinner alone and, oh, the fact that this is York, not Cambridge in the 1400s). Inevitably, this has increased my already dangerously high levels of procrastination. Thankfully, it has also increased my productivity: look at me, writing a comment piece about it.
So the other evening in the J.B. Morrell (I wonder how many students are beginning their sentences like this at the moment), I broke the golden silence of the study room by asking the two friends I was sharing it with what they thought about the news that a top university in Milan announced last week that it will be teaching all of its courses in English. My friend who studies Politics – let’s, for the purpose of this story, call him Karl – was not at all surprised by this. Apparently, the Milanese university I had read about was not the first to make the transition from its local language to English and there are, in fact, over 4,500 university courses taught in English in continental Europe. Karl, who was proving to know far more about the matter than I did myself, claimed it was just another illustration of the way that the waters of globalization are rising, something he was beginning to understand increasingly well as a result of his study of Politics.
My other friend, who studies History – let’s call him Jean-Jacques – wasn’t surprised either. He said that the shift from teaching in Italian to English represented an international trend and was yet another reason to believe that English will one day become a truly global language, just as Latin was once upon a time. Jean-Jacques then pointed out the irony that English, which does seem to be emerging as a global language, was beginning to take dominance in Italy, home to the language which bears the most resemblance to Latin of all the Romance languages. Out with one world language and in with another.
By this point the vague semblance of cockiness that I had felt upon bringing up the matter was non-existent. My knowledge on the matter, as a student of English Literature, was limited to an essay I had read by Salman Rushdie in Term One, exploring the ways in which ownership and use of a national language is hugely important for people in allowing them to create their own national identity. Or something like that. I hadn’t considered the implications of globalisation or the spread of Westernisation, and neither had I thought about the history of the language.
Between them, Karl and Jean-Jacques had understood the news story and its importance in a way that I had not. And, if by some miracle you are still reading this because you have been able to tolerate my longwinded build up to the actual point of the story, then thank you for not giving up hope on me – I am about to put you out of your misery. As the conversation wound down and the room returned to silence I was struck with an epiphany: wouldn’t it be wonderful, albeit a little bit weird, if we had mixed-subject seminars twice a term?
I would jump at the chance, if it was presented. Give the same text to a History student, a Politics student and an English student or a Maths student, a Philosophy student and a Economics student and talk about it in classes of, say, fifteen, for a couple of hours. If my conversation with JJ and Karl was anything to go by then it would be an incredibly interesting way of understanding ideas.
This sort of thing happens all the time if you do a degree like PPE. Good departments allow modules of mixed subject students as well. There are a couple of Law/Politics bridges, and people can do electives – Physics students doing the Philosophy of Science for example.
You’ll also find there will be more dual honours students in your seminars than you realise, there are quite a few around.