Recently, after admitting to having earned a bachelor’s degree in English, Mitt Romney waxed pontifical on the wisdom of studying literature: “As an English major, your options are, uh, you better go to graduate school, all right? And find a job from there. You really don’t want to take out $150,000 loan to go into English because you’re not going to be able to pay it back. You might want to think about something else that meets your interest.”

I agree that nobody should take out a student loan if they can help it (they rarely can), and I’ll also concede that English majors aren’t as highly sought after by employers as nursing or mechanical engineering majors, but I think Romney and English’s countless detractors are missing the point.

Majors like English, philosophy or history are valuable, not in spite of the fact that they are far-removed from immediate practical application, but because of it. As Alan Liu and others have argued, the humanities’ withdrawal from present professional concerns allows it to act as a kind of storage mechanism, analyzing and archiving seemingly useless documents of the past that would otherwise be obliterated. Without the training required to read and understand it, our record of historical experience would disappear along with our critical understanding of the present.

We can see this in a very real, material way in publishing. How many presses would go out of business and how many books would cease print if universities did not create a constant demand for them? Modernist scholar Lawrence Rainey is correct in suggesting that college is the new patronage system for daring, experimental literature. Though it’s certainly true that many authors hold an ambivalent, if not hostile, relationship to the academy, humanities programs are critical in redistributing money to a chronically underfunded cultural sector.

Humanities departments therefore play a vital role in the artistic life-support system. But for people like Mitt Romney, anything without market value is utterly worthless — just ask a former Bain Capital employee. In the spirit of preserving past culture, and with no offense intended to the Iron Age people or their descendants, I think we should resurrect a long disused term for Romney: He is a philistine.

Goethe, an outmoded humanist, defined the philistine as one who “not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.” Contracted into an impoverished present, unable to see beyond the horizons of his or her own situation, the philistine cannot imagine the other worlds and other systems of value that art and literature represent. While the opportunist and the cynic at least have scrap and strategic vision, the philistines are uninspired, utterly incapable of thinking outside whatever small con they’re running at the moment. From the philistine, we only get the interminable repetition of the same and a few self-satisfied anti-utopianisms.

While the term “philistinism” has been tarnished from naive and condescending misuse, there are ideological philistines from every class and background. Romney is a bourgeois philistine whose every comment presupposes that we share his outlook and privilege. He therefore imagines young people to be junior plutocrats running cost benefit analyses on their majors. If you already expect to lead an entire lifetime of luxury and culture, it is easy to forego a few years of curious inquiry and self-exploration to learn Excel spreadsheets.

And soon, even the sensible majors join the frivolous ones on the unemployment lines. Even professional labor is becoming increasingly automated and deskilled. When there are hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants for each remaining job, the English major at least has some good reads to show for her education.

But the philistines are winning. Because most humanists choose aesthetic over exchange value and because the capitalist state can no longer pay for more than its barbarism, humanities programs are slowly being liquidated. The university becomes job training for careers that won’t exist in four years and soon only the children of wealth will afford the chance to dabble in cultural studies.

While the humanities preserve oppositional energy and a critical distance by maintaining their autonomy from the rest of the capitalist economy, our alienation means that we have little say in the wasting of our profession. It should come as no surprise, then, that professors and graduate students are becoming radical and turning to direct action, as they should. Our training has taught us to see past the present crisis and to know there’s something on the other side.JORDAN S. CARROLL, who would also like to point out that a graduate education in English is not a fast track to a job, can be reached at jscarroll@ucdavis.edu.

Adam Yauch, also known as MCA of the Beastie Boys, died this weekend and since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to process his death as well as the end of the Beastie Boys. I was too young to really grow up on any of the pantheon albums or remember specifically where I was when I first heard Ill Communication for the first time. For me, the Beastie Boys were just there.

I was very aware of the band and their existence. Although I had no idea what it was like to fight for my right to party and couldn’t spot Brooklyn on a map of New York, I knew that the Beastie Boys were a group of rappers that I liked. It’s still tough to tell whether I made the decision to like them or if others made it for me.

I knew I was supposed to like them, for whatever reason. And I did. By the Napster era I had the majority of the discography and I knew the lyrics to the important songs and some of the extra-illin one-liners from the less popular ones. I was a Beastie Boys fan first because they seemed cool then because they were similar to me and later because they were actually great artists.

I bring this up because since the news broke this Friday, I’ve received texts from numerous childhood friends asking my opinion on the subject. I don’t remember expressing any out of the ordinary support for the group, but for some reason people associate me with MCA, Mike D and Ad-Rock.  Which is like, awesome, but probably undeserving.

As a Jewish kid growing up with an affinity for rap, rap culture and comedy, it’s easy to see why I would be the target market for Beasties, but part of the allure for me was that I never really felt like I was the target market. They didn’t think about marketing or how to structure a demographic, and as a result one structured around them. Their demographic was themselves. Take a rapper like Mac Miller. Although he wouldn’t admit it, I’m probably his exact target market.  He wants me to be a fan which is perhaps why I am so repulsed.

It was unclear who the Beastie Boys were for. They were respected within multiple music scenes and carved out a certain aesthetic as white MC’s existing as themselves in a seemingly black space. They weren’t trying to act black, but they didn’t shy away from the culture ingrained in what they did either. It almost seems stupid to talk about race with regard to the group because it was such a non-story in respect to the band’s story as a whole. Their race was budweiser, rejecting authority and lackadaisical yet brilliant and self-reflexive rap lyrics.

The Beastie Boys have represented youth culture for multiple generations, something I don’t think any other artist has ever been able to do. If you consider that the group rose to fame on the curtails of Run DMC, it’s pretty unbelievable that their youthful, hedonistic messages are still reaching a relevant audience. They were illin before I even knew how much I would love using the term “illin.”

I think for the majority of my generation, we didn’t have much of a chance but to connect with the group. Growing up in the Bay Area, LIVE 105 still continues to play at least one Beastie Boys song an hour and DJs will still drop “Intergalactic” at a party if the vibes are right. I can tell you from experience that there is nothing better than excusing yourself from a conversation, putting down your drink and running into a venue just in time to yell, “Well, now don’t you tell me to smile / You stick around I’ll make it worth your while.”

With the passing of Adam Yauch, the Beastie Boys will probably cease to perform or create much new music. In their latter days, their sound became more mature, while still remaining relevant and experimental.

It’s a bizarre feeling knowing that a Beastie Boy is dead. I realize that they were significantly older than me, but I sort of always still envision them as their “Yo! MTV Raps”-selves. They were never the group that I listened to every day, but it was comforting knowing they were there.

ANDY VERDEROSA has performed “Sabotage” at most karaoke nights throughout the pacific northwest. Contact him at asverderosa@ucdavis.edu if you you do a good Mike D impression.

As everyone on campus knows, UC systemwide tuition has increased dramatically in the past decade, particularly in the last three years. In the face of that problem, one big topic of the month is protests that led to the closure of the U.S. Bank branch on this campus. The theory behind these protests is that banks are complicit in high tuition because they are greedy for student debt. After all, total outstanding student loan debt in the United States has reached a sobering $1 trillion. The protests and the bank closure have been controversial, mostly concerning whether they were a legitimate form of protest. The university administration does not think that the protests were legitimate, and neither does the Yolo County district attorney. Some faculty members and some students support the protesters.

Whether or not the protests were legitimate, as of the past several years, the underlying theory is wrong. Private educational loans have collapsed, leaving the federal government with a near monopoly. Private lenders still take payments on a lot of old student debt, but they make very few new educational loans. If anything, U.S. Bank would want lower tuition, because money that you don’t spend on tuition is money that you might spend with a credit card. U.S. Bank only issues Visa cards, but you can’t use Visa to pay tuition at UC Davis (or at any UC campus other than UCLA).

Student debt mainly means educational student loans rather than credit card debt. Student loans and grants are surveyed annually by the College Board, which is the same organization that writes SAT and AP tests. The main base of student loans in America has always been federal loans, which last year totaled $103 billion, or about $5,000 per full-time-equivalent student. Historically, these loans were divided between direct federal loans (FDLP) and privately administered loans (FFELP). In 2010, President Obama terminated FFELP on the argument that the banks were a wasteful middle agent. (The decision was announced in 2009.)  I have no particular devotion to banks and I agree with Obama. But that story is now over.

Banks also lend money to students through their own unsubsidized loans. This private loan market reached 23 percent of total student loans in 2007-08. Then it crashed. It went up and down with the mortgage market for houses. In the first half of the last decade, banks had an enormous supply of credit that supplied both home mortgages and student loans.  Then the credit bubble burst and both types of loans became hazardous to the lender. In 2010-11, private loans were only 6 percent of federal loans.

So that’s banks in general, but what about U.S. Bank? Besides the fact that you can’t pay tuition with their credit cards, a few weeks ago they stopped issuing student loans. That’s not just in Davis or in California, that’s for all 3,000 branches of U.S. Bank across the United States. This would have been a drastic step if the loans were highly profitable; I was told that they were not profitable. Actually, I do not know their specific motive. A business might well quietly end a marginal service in response to criticism, whether or not the criticism is correct.

With this backdrop of facts, I am left wondering whether the only way to make sense of the bank protests is not as resistance to privatization – since there have always been many private vendors on campus – but simply as retaliation for tuition increases. However, UC Davis does not control systemwide tuition. Even as systemwide tuition has risen, the educational grant that tuition supports has fallen. (That’s per student, adjusted for inflation; it’s easy to tell a false story using just nominal dollars.) The bank protests were a wrecking ball of misplaced blame.  They can only make UC Davis more expensive in the name of making it cheaper. Above all, for anyone who truly cares about higher education, it does not make sense to financially attack UC Davis in order to save it.

The ASUCD budget hearings are this weekend, and along with voting on the association’s $11.8 million budget, senators will have to grapple with a new tax to be assessed on ASUCD’s expenses.

Starting next year, ASUCD will work toward paying 1.52 percent of its expenses to the University of California Office of the President (UCOP). Before, each of the 10 UC campuses sent all its revenue to UCOP and UCOP would send money back to each campus while keeping a share for operating expenses. The new UCOP tax assessed on all UC campuses will change this system. All campuses will now keep revenue earned and instead pay 1.52 percent of expenses back to UCOP.

UCOP gave power to each of the chancellors to determine which sectors of campus will pay the tax and as of right now, ASUCD will be one of the organizations to pay. ASUCD will be eased into the payment with only 0.5 percent levied on the Association for 2012-13 before working its way up to a full 1.52 percent by 2014-15. However, because ASUCD’s $11.8 million budget is made up of many units and commissions, it will be these organizations that face the tax burden.

Therefore, the bigger the expenses, the larger the tax assessment. This means Unitrans and the ASUCD Coffee House (CoHo), ASUCD’s two biggest organizations, will have to adjust accordingly to cover the tax. The Aggie and its $200,000 expense budget will have to pay this tax as well. This could lead to cuts, price increases and loss of student jobs.

Every student on this campus benefits from the services ASUCD provides, whether it’s taking the bus to school, buying lunch at the CoHo or getting their bike fixed at the Bike Barn. And that is the job of a student government — to provide cheap services to its constituents. The goal of ASUCD is to minimize costs; not to make a profit. It is unreasonable to think that a 501(c) nonprofit like ASUCD could effectively face the burden of this tax.

Students give enough money to UCOP and administration as is. We shouldn’t have to suffer more through the services our student government provides. Beyond that, ASUCD will receive the same benefits as before, meaning this tax won’t add anything.

When the tax is fully assessed, ASUCD will pay over $160,000 to UCOP. The administration should exempt ASUCD from this additional expense and cover the total a different way.

In simpler terms, the UCOP tax is simply lost money for ASUCD. The Association will get nothing out of paying this tax and will simply struggle to continue providing affordable services to the students.