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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
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Number Six: Don’t Go to Duke. Or, If You Do Go, Stay Off the Roads. Jay Mathews at the Washington Post has an amusing discussion of a recent bloated edubook which includes activities seeming to correlate with graduating from college in a reasonable period of time and not dropping out. Despite its absurd price and thick-lying statistics, the book, says Matthews, …turns out to be a page-turner, at least for those of us worried that nearly half of students who start college still haven't graduated six years later. [The chapter] "Pre-College and Institutional Influences on Degree Attainment," uses some of the survey data, and research by others in the field, to identify factors most likely to lead to failure to get a bachelor's degree. I know this may offend these fine scholars who have done all this hard work, but I think the clearest way to present their most intriguing findings is to render them as a list. The list of do's and don'ts includes: Go to a Catholic college, don’t smoke, don’t read for pleasure, and don’t major in engineering. I want to talk about number four, though: 4. Don't consider yourself artistic, creative or understanding of others. [A] rigid focus on your upcoming exams and papers seems to improve your chances of getting a degree. Being aesthetic and empathetic does not. …[S]uch results have been noticed by other researchers. All I can say is, try not to go overboard with the watercolor painting and song-writing when you get to college. Before I get to this intriguing entry, I’d like to add a sixth of my own: If you go to Duke University, stay off the roads. They are swarming with drunken sportsmen. You can’t graduate if you’ve been flattened by a guy like basketball star J.J. Redick as he’s performing his U-Turn to Avoid a Checkpoint maneuver [thanks to Mike for sending me this story]: Life after Duke has turned infamous for J.J. Redick. People say that the Duke lacrosse story is breaking up into a bunch of hopeless tiny bits and it’ll all be over before we know it. Fine. But you can’t say Duke doesn’t keep ‘em coming. Longtime readers know that UD considers Creative Writing majors to be major wastes of time for anyone serious about a college education. The injunction up there against thinking of yourself as artistic if you want to graduate amuses and gratifies UD. With certain really remarkable exceptions like Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, you are not an artist -- probably not even a fledging artist -- in college. The aesthetic imperative in college is to learn about the work of people who are artists, not to read the stuff your classmates write. |