“Mickey Mouse Degrees”
I heard the above term a lot when I was growing up. I thought it had slowly leaked out of discourse because I hadn’t heard it in a while. Apparently not. I think the reason I thought this idea had died out is because I grew up, left education and haven’t been around other people’s parents in a long time.
Currently there’s a general election going on in the UK and given our conservative government is almost certainly going to lose and lose heavily, they’ve been desperately searching around for opinions long-held by right wing reactionaries. Apparently appealing specifically to people who are already guaranteed to vote for you will increase your vote share…somehow.
Last week their idea was “bring back national service!”, this week its “INSERT ACADEMIC SUBJECT HERE is worthless and not worth bothering with”.
I have seen some people say that by this they may mean degrees like Gender Studies. Gender studies is not my area of expertise, so I won’t be talking about it here because to me it doesn’t really make any sense to dismiss a subject out of hand if you don’t know what you’re talking about (stupid I know). So I’m going to talk about my specialist interest and the subject that the term ‘Mickey Mouse Degree’ was designed to apply to: media studies.
I understand why the argument that “studying media like film and TV is easy and for people who just want to lie around watching television instead of doing any actual work” has SEEMED reasonable to people when its been put forward by Conservative politicians and tabloid newspapers. Watching films and TV is a hobby people typically enjoy in their downtime, and if you’re too busy to actually think about it that hard, it does take someone to point out that one of the main purposes of studying a subject at university is because you want to engage with it in your career. The argument that states that students shouldn’t be studying media is rooted in the idea that it won’t lead to a steady career, but film and TV IS a career for some people, right? Its a multi-billion dollar industry. And its not just populated by writers, directors and actors. There’s camera-people, sound recordists, lighting techs, researchers, editors, colour graders, press, copy editors, there’s about a billion different potential jobs I could think of under the umbrella of “media”. So surely students going to study media studies ARE thinking about their career just like any other student, right?
So then you get to the fatalist portion of the argument that media studies isn’t worth your time. “Its not likely to happen, is it?” And yes, there is some truth to that as well. The film and TV industries are notoriously exclusionary and hard to break into and if you do, they’re difficult to make any money out of them. But then, if something’s hard to break into and difficult to make money from, why does it then follow that its not worth studying? And didn’t we start this argument with the assertion that media studies is the easy option? Now its hard? How did we get from one extreme to the other?
Okay, now let’s tackle the assertion that its easy. Typically when people sit down and watch a film or a TV show they relax, turn their brains off and don’t have to think too deeply about it, so a lot of bigger practical questions get missed. You don’t do this in media studies. The way you watch something in media studies is completely different to the way you watch it in your downtime.
Let’s take Mickey Mouse from the term “Mickey Mouse Degrees”. I’d like you to watch the original Mickey Mouse cartoon ‘Steamboat Willie’ right now. Go on. Its down below.
Right, now answer me the following question:
What made this successful?
There were a lot of cartoons that came out in 1928. Wikipedia’s helpfully made a list of them. Why did Steamboat Willie lead to the rise of a media empire and the others didn’t? What elements in this cartoon did Walt Disney isolate and then refine in future productions? It wasn’t JUST inspiration. Clearly something worked that it was worth him repeating.
Someone studying this subject would go and track down those other cartoons that didn’t see Steamboat Willie’s success, watch them, compare and contrast, look at the background of Steamboat Willie and those other cartoons, the cultural context of 1928, and isolate the elements that meant Steamboat Willie was successful. They would then look at animation in the modern day and see if any of those elements are still concurrent with modern animation. They would see if they can learn anything by looking at Steamboat Willie in a modern context, maybe they could use what they’ve learned to create a new work that would see success.
Alright, but THAT was Mickey Mouse. Some stuff is just guaranteed success by birth right, isn’t it? And then we get to the argument that some people are just born better than others and talent can’t be taught, but then why do some people who large swathes of the general public perceive as being untalented end up with multi-million dollar careers? I may not LIKE Michael Bay’s films, but there are clearly appealing elements in his films that made them massive commercial success stories. There is theory in ALL of this. There’s thousands of books on this stuff. Its an entire area of academic study with vocational prospects. Film and TV don’t JUST HAPPEN. A film or a TV project is essentially a business like any other and a business needs to know who its product is designed to appeal to and why. That is practical. That IS vocational. Like any other industry.
You also end up with transferable skills. Like studying History or Literature, you end up with analytical skills that can be useful elsewhere in other industries because you’ve been trained in asking WHY things work, WHY they don’t and HOW problems could be resolved.
I understand why people hear the opinion that Mickey Mouse degrees are worthless and agree because when they watch a film its something they sit down and turn their brain off to. Tabloid journalists and Conservative politicians who proliferate this opinion should know better.
