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Friday, July 23, 2004
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BAD UNIVERSITY DAY
UD went to Bad Hair Day, a salon in Rehoboth Beach, for a cut and color yesterday afternoon. While a man with rainbow tatoos on his arms put streaks in UD's hair, she watched a seminar taking place at the same time in the salon. A woman representing a beauty products company held up each of their offerings - sun lotion, aromatherapy ointment, wrinkle reducer, coconut conditioner - and, while student stylists took notes, she solemnly described the chemical and psychological properties of each item. Each item was scientifically designed, in accordance with lofty and complicated empirical standards, to produce youth and tranquillity in its users. The seminar leader's earnest pedantry was matched by the thoughtful, searching questions her students posed, and UD, witnessing all of this, wondered about universities. UD, you know, is University Diaries, a blog interested in what ails American colleges and universities. And in the definitive matter of what legitimate universities ought to teach, what ails them is not the curricular unrest that people have in mind when they talk about "canon wars," so much as curricular anarchy. Aromatherapeutics - along with anything else you care to think of - is, or will soon be, a degree program at an American university. Four-year research universities in America and abroad currently offer majors in scuba diving, spa management, catering, creative writing, and surfing. All sorts of upstanding accredited institutions allow you to major in dumb and dumber subjects. On your way to your degree in Spa Management at Arizona State University (known to its intimates as the Tempe Country Club, or the Spa on the Salt), you will need to satisfy the following requirements: Leadership Fitness Holistic Health Massage Therapy Healthy Cuisine. A college in Wales has a new surfing major. "Surfing is a hobby, not a subject," complains one politician: "I do believe these degrees are devaluing academia." A member of the Welsh nouvelle vague begs to differ: "We've nothing to be ashamed of here." UD wishes to be clear: As in her post on Harleys [UD, 7/8/04], she has nothing against junior colleges without pretensions to anything beyond vocationalism seasoned with a pinch of cultural literacy offering a vocational curriculum. And of course she has nothing against graduate schools in business, law, medicine, and other vocations. Nor does she have anything against schools giving people MFAs. What gets her facial in a twist is the hypocrisy of vocational schools presenting themselves to the world as universities and liberal arts colleges. What wipes her out is the cynicism of institutions that claim intellectual seriousness but allow some of their students to graduate having read little beyond their own and their classmates' poetry. The Welsh politician is right: This sort of thing devalues academia as much as the online degree mills, as much as the laughingstock leisure studies majors targeted at the school football team. In fact this new stuff is just the traditional leisure studies for athletes thing extended to the rest of the university. The honest thing to do is to take a very close look at your university and if it's not a university to stop calling it that. Of course the trend is entirely in the other direction. No university announces to the media that, having examined its vocational and/or vacuous undergraduate curriculum, it has decided that the decent thing to do is to rename itself the Arizona State Vocational Training Institute or the Welsh Surfmatics Certificate Center. On the contrary, every junior college eventually annoints itself a college, and a few years after that, a university. And as long as accreditation agencies don't give a shit what universities teach, universities will continue to look more and more like beauty salons. |