Barely Containing My Righteous Anger, Education Style

Blogging is always tough when you're on vacation, even when it's a working vacation. In fact, it's even harder when it's a working vacation, because in addition to playing tourist and meeting new people and all that, I'm doing actual work nearly every day. Damn you graduate school. Gone are the salad days of my youth when summer meant 14-20 hours of television a day, and my only concern was baseball standings. Now, I'm actually filling my summer days with work and responsibility and I don't like it.

But that has nothing to do with this post, it's just an excuse as to why I've been shirking my blogging duties lately. The actual purpose to this post is to lament that final dying days of the liberal education. Today the strib is running a run-of-the-mill tight job market story. But what got my attention was the also (unfortunately) typical accompaniment to such articles, a poll question asking if colleges and universities put too much emphasis on liberal arts education.

To put it politely, fuck that bullshit. This is like asking if hospitals are putting too much emphasis on curing disease. The last time I checked, the very reason that colleges and universities exist is to provide a liberal arts education. If you just want some job training, go to a community college or tech school. They're fine places, and they'll certify you for a wide variety of careers without making you learn a bunch of stuff. But if you go to a liberal-fucking-arts university, I think you should expect to take some liberal arts courses. Because, you know, it does happen to be in the fucking title of the institution.

As a scholar of criminology, I think we get this a bit more than most other majors. A good chunk of crim students just want a piece of paper that will help them become a cop (though I must admit it's not as bad at the U as it was back in Ioway). But as is usualy the case, it's the people who complain about it the loudest who typically need it the most. Call me an old-fashioned sucker or a wide-eyed idealist, but I'd just like a police force (and citizenry in general) capable of rational thought. And that, my friends, is the purpose of the liberal arts university.

So if you're asking whether colleges and universities put too much emphasis on liberal arts education, then I'm afraid you're really asking if they're spending too much time doing their job.