An intrinsic part of my English degree, and humanities degrees in general, is constantly grappling with huge concepts like colonialism, systemic racism, or misogyny. My second year dissertation, for instance, is about the destruction of the Black male body in African American literature, and just last week I was comparing the origins of feminist writing with modern day perceptions of sex work. As part of my course, I regularly attempt to articulate, interrogate, and do justice to subjects which have plagued certain cultures for centuries, and which continue to resonate with us today, all packaged neatly into a 2,500 word essay. This boxing up of buzzwords into pretty sentences, as well as the increasingly casual nature with which such terms are being thrown around essays and lecture halls, are symptoms of a tension at the heart of all humanities degrees; between the student, and the weight of the subjects that they are writing about.

“The moral alarm bells that should be ringing”

Of course, phenomena like racism and misogyny are not theoretical academic concepts. We must remember that for many, they are everyday experiences. Part of the reason for their inclusion in university curricula is to increase awareness and education, and therefore combat the advances of prejudice. But when students are asked to churn out an essay once or twice a week attempting to encapsulate the weight of this lived experience, such concepts lose their significance. The moral alarm bells that should be ringing whenever one reads about topics such as colonialism fade into the general mental noise generated by workload stress and are drowned out by the constant Cambridge pressure to produce quantity, not quality, essays. Saying that Cambridge students work a lot is not a revolutionary statement, but it takes on a new pertinence when these are the topics being studied. Statistics about racialised policing in the United States or reports on conflicts like in Israel-Palestine should not be considered only as a useful word filler for essays. Instead, attempts should be made to understand the gravity of the concepts that such words represent.

‘It is particularly disconcerting and uncomfortable to see a big green tick and a “Good point!” from your supervisor next to your analysis of police brutality’

Undoubtedly, this is much easier said than done. One of my friends described how colonialism has become a buzzword in their lectures, drained of its meaning by a dull academic. However, universities can’t go around exposing students to real-life examples in order to press home the reality. As well as inevitably running into content warnings, academia runs the risk of fetishising the suffering of others, seizing with subconscious glee at the devastation of some of humanity’s worst practices like war, racism, or slavery because they present the student with an easy way out of their essay conundrum. We experience a type of compassion fatigue, where the increasing exposure to human suffering leads to a decrease in empathy. Morality is numbed to a constant bombardment with descriptions of horrible events. The first-hand trauma of the victims of history is lost behind the words of an article or vanished into a Word document. It is particularly disconcerting and uncomfortable to see a big green tick and a “Good point!” from your supervisor next to your analysis of police brutality.

One possible answer, but not necessarily a solution to this difficult situation, is for the student to actively engage in the matter surrounding their essay subject, in an attempt to understand as closely as possible the lived experience of those being read about. However, there must be an acknowledgement that co-exists with this search, that complete empathy for that lived experience is pretty much impossible. This gap cannot be traversed, and to attempt to do so is to reduce and undermine. The people that were the sources and inspiration of so much that we read at university are in danger of being trapped within the two-dimensional space of the article, the page in the book, the Powerpoint slide in the lecture (I also recognise the irony in criticising such practices in a 700-word Varsity Comment article…).

As such, one of the great paradoxes of undergraduate education is this impossible reconciliation between a student’s weekly essay and the enormous subject matter they are attempting to control. In the end, students must not be blamed, and efficiency must not be mistaken for flippancy. Navigating such difficult topics with sensitivity under such intense workload is one of the skills we develop as undergraduates, and is vital not only to our academic, but also our personal and social development as a whole.

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