I have a response to Smith Lilley’s Tuesday column that is neither against Lilley nor Barbara Streisand. It is against the academic mindset of a nation that cares nothing about literature, authenticity or individual study. OK, so my harangue isn’t really that huge, and it isn’t really challenging the up-and-coming young minds of our nation.
I am an English major, and I am currently studying Shakespeare, so I have been paying more attention than usual to his writings and to his influence on literature. Even though I’m currently focusing on Shakespeare more than the average American, I still believe that something is devastatingly wrong when a national celebrity-one well-versed in theatre, at that-misquotes one of Shakespeare’s most important plays (Julius Caesar) at a large political event.
The problem, however, isn’t in the misquotation, but in the idea that it is OK to misquote one of the most quoted playwrights ever. Furthermore, the idea that it is OK to get quotable information from emails is ludicrous.
I think that this problem stems not from the failure of Streisand to run around looking up Shakespeare references and finding correct line notations and references. I think that the problem does stem from a lack of seriousness and independence in regard to education.
It seems that most people in this country want an easy way out of real, logical thinking. We want to take the easiest professors in our majors and scrape by in classes that neither challenge us nor force us to learn anything for ourselves. We find workable formulas for success and reuse them and the professors that gave us those formulas ad infinitum.
I thought that college was supposed to teach people to form factually-based ideas concerning their areas of study. I thought that I was supposed to be an expert in my field (or closer to being an expert in my field) when I graduated from college.
Yet I meet people who have no idea what they’re talking about in relation to their chosen studies. I meet people who do not do required work for their classes, but rather find notes off the Internet.
I do not expect for everyone to be a Shakespearean scholar. I do, however, expect a public figure who has spent the better part of her lifetime as an actress to know a little something about Shakespeare. I expect her to require referential proof of her quote’s origin before she spouts it out in public. Not to do so shows fallibility and a lack of effort on Streisand’s part.
How easy is it for us to quote something our friends have told us and take their words as the truth? We allow ourselves to glean information from people who may not know what they’re talking about and let the emotional attachments that we have to these people influence the amount of credibility that we allot to them.
Living in an age of “if it feels good, do it” may be liberating for the soul, but it imprisons the mind. It forces us to depend on someone else who “knows more than I do” on some subject rather than researching the subject on our own.
I understand that I am young, and my classmates are young, and that we are not supposed to know everything about our majors at this point in our lives. I think that we should always strive to learn, though, and that we should search for authenticity and proof rather than hearsay.
I don’t want to be inspired by some misquotation of Shakespeare. I want the Streisands of the world to either write their own poems or to give me a line of poetry that actually exists.
Joy Murphy is a senior English major.