From The Canadian Press:
After months of balancing a woman’s religious beliefs with her desire to learn French, the Quebec government stepped into her classroom to offer an ultimatum: take off the niqab or drop the course.
The woman opted to keep her Islamic face-covering and has filed a human-rights complaint against the government.
In a province where the government frequently faces accusations of doing too much to accommodate minorities, these actions have prompted a fair bit of praise. [In Canada, as in Europe and much of the Middle East, opposition to the niqab and burqa is strong. These identity-annihilators are outrageous anywhere, but they’re real insults in university settings.]
The woman began taking a French course designed for immigrants at a Montreal college in February but she refused to remove her niqab while men were present . [As you read, note that the woman’s motives, as presented here, have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with hatred and fear of men.]
The college was initially willing to accommodate her, but eventually balked as her demands escalated.
According to a report in a Montreal newspaper, she was allowed to give an oral with her back to the class and asked men to move so they wouldn’t face each other. [Wouldn’t face other men? Wouldn’t face her? Whatever.] [Update, from another source: “[S]he demanded that male students who were sitting around her move their places so that she could sit surrounded by women. That was accommodated by the school.” … Good morning, class. Okay, ladies! Form your phalanx!]
The breaking point occurred when the woman again refused to take off the niqab, though teachers had stressed it was essential they see her face to correct her enunciation and facial expressions.
In what appears to be a highly unusual move, provincial Immigration Minister Yolande James intervened. Officials from her department, acting with the minister’s knowledge, met with the woman to discuss her options.
“The government has specific pedagogical objectives in its French courses,” said James’s spokesman, Luc Fortin.
“We couldn’t accept that these objectives, or the learning environment in the class, be compromised.”
Several groups, including several teachers’ unions, applauded the government for drawing a line in the sand. So did moderate Muslim groups…
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UD thanks David.
Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.
This part of this business has been bothering me. If this were a 21-year-old man, would the police send him home for over a week to get over his emotionality?
What, for that matter, did Buker mean by too emotional? If a suspect in a murder is emotional — I’m sure they often are — you bring in a psychiatrist to talk to them for awhile I guess… I don’t know. I’m not a policewoman. But you don’t send them home so they can work on their story. You keep them at the station and you talk to them when they calm down.
If they don’t calm down, you tell them they can stay in a cell until they calm down so that you can talk to them.
“If you eliminated everyone from an interview that was emotionally upset after a shooting death, you’d have no one to talk to,’’ [Norfolk DA William R.] Keating said.
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You don’t say to the 21-year-old man Oh! I see your mom’s here. Why don’t you go home with her? Do you? But you say it to the 21-year-old woman?
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Also find myself thinking about Bishop’s parents. What’s up with them? They’ve known, I guess, for decades, that their daughter is mentally ill. They’ve known she killed their son, possibly intentionally. They must have suspected she was involved in the bomb plot. There were probably other things.
What was their thinking in (perhaps) covering up the murder of her brother? That rather than lose both their children — one to murder, the other to prison — they would try to hold on to one of them, try to treat her illness… ?
But think of living with the murderer of your son!
UD thanks her old friend Jonathan Freedman for this amazing bit of sleuthing from Daily Kos, which reviews Bishop’s publication record and concludes:
The tenure system in the U.S. is already under attack. Perhaps there are ways it could be improved. But this Alabama case has about as much to do with problems with the tenure system as the O.J. Simpson case has to do with problems with waiters.
From an email one of the professors in the University of Alabama Huntsville biology faculty conference room sent to a friend:
“[Amy Bishop] started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head,” Ng wrote. “Six people sitting in the rows perpendicular were all shot fatally or seriously wounded. The remaining 5 including myself were on the other side of the table (and) immediately dropped to the floor.
“During a reload, the shooter was rushed, and we pushed her out the hall way and closed the door. Thereafter we barricaded the door and called 911.”
He talks like mad to the press although lawyers have told him not to.
He lies. First he said this:
The New York Times reported that Anderson said he did not know his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting Friday at the university. “I had no idea,’’ he told the paper. “We don’t own one.”
Well, but you have one. And you and your wife have taken it to shooting ranges very recently. From The Chronicle:
… James Anderson, told both The Chronicle and The New York Times on Sunday that the family did not own a gun. But in an interview with The Chronicle today, he acknowledged that she had borrowed a gun, though he wasn’t sure from whom. “She was very cagey and didn’t say,” he said.
Mr. Anderson said he had told his wife he didn’t want the gun around the house because of their children, who range in age from 8 to 18. “Get rid of it,” he recalled telling her. “I didn’t want to have it. I didn’t feel we needed it.”
Ms. Bishop, according to her husband, had borrowed the gun and was considering buying it. Last summer, he said, someone followed her across the campus. “She was worried about crazy students,” he said.
… Mr. Anderson said he had gone with his wife to an indoor shooting range once, a couple of weeks ago. He said she had been there at least once before with a friend.
Don’t believe any of the bullshit coming out of the husband.
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Update on the century’s great psychotic romance:
She’s on suicide watch. This was predictable, since now that her brilliant scheme has been carried out, she doesn’t feel better, but worse.
Not only did she fail to kill everyone. After ditching the gun and going out to dinner with her beloved, she was supposed to go undetected as the author of the crime.
But she got caught, and now it looks as though the state’s going to hold and then execute her! How dare they! Crappy little state! Absurd little Alabamians! She is so far above them all. And yet they seem to have some legal right to continue to hold, and then execute her. Why go on.
And how will she end it all? In the great Wagnerian tradition of their long love affair, she will do it with the help of her adored James. She will stage a liebestod. He will smuggle in the drugs that will dispatch her before she has to undergo the degradation of being handled by people so contemptibly beneath her.
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Some speculation about future events.
Bishop may ask her husband to kill her children. He is almost as crazy as she is. They should be in protective custody.
UD‘s friend and editor, Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, alludes to UD‘s most recent IHE column – which includes criticism of an article in the Christian Science Monitor – in a piece this morning in USA Today:
… Almost as soon as word of the Alabama murders spread came the news that [Amy] Bishop, who has been charged in the killings, had been denied tenure and that an appeal of the denial had been rejected. This news prompted some media speculation that tenure stress may have led to the killings. The Christian Science Monitor ran with this theme, prompting criticism from academic bloggers (including one on Inside Higher Ed) who have noted that people are rejected for tenure all the time and don’t kill anyone.
Scott quotes psychology and security experts “dismiss[ing] the idea that the shootings could be blamed on a recent tenure denial.”
Likewise, in Psychology Today, the president of the American Psychoanalytical Association, Prudence Gourguechon, writes:
Stress, disappointment, PTSD, frustration, burnout, loss, shame and humiliation DO NOT LEAD A HUMAN BEING TO PICK UP A GUN AND START KILLING HIS OR HER FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS. Not having examined them, I can not know what is wrong, psychiatrically, with these killers, but I know that something is. And it’s not these human difficulties I just listed that are constantly referenced in the media stories.
It is important to distinguish between triggers–what might light the fuse–and the explosives that lead to the catastrophe.
Getting it wrong in the media does us all a disservice. If true but irrelevant facts are continually referenced, we start to think these things (eg stress) are relevant and truly causal, as opposed to possible triggers. And the media rarely or never mention the factors that are more important to consider: Delusions. Paranoia. Major Mental Illness. Schizophrenia. Psychosis. The vast majority of human beings who suffer from these symptoms or disorders are not violent or dangerous and can do very well with appropriate treatment. But these might be the things that lead a few human beings [to] pick up a gun and shoot their colleagues. That, plus easy availability of firearms.
Why have we substituted “stress” for psychosis as a causal concept? Why have we confused triggers for causes? What is the consequence for our society? One consequence I fear is that there will be a continually diminished tendency to consider and diagnose and treat psychosis and major mental illness, and therefore there will continue to be undiagnosed and untreated disordered minds picking up guns and going to a meeting to kill.
Society needs to know and be reminded that people can– in rare but significant instances– lose touch with external reality, and substitute a dangerous irrational inner world where, for example, they feel persecuted and terrorized.
With her long history of violence, paranoia, and cold-bloodedness (After the massacre, Bishop’s husband told a reporter, she phoned him, and in a perfectly calm voice said to come to the building and pick her up for their dinner date.), Amy Bishop is a poster child not for tenure unattained, but for psychosis misperceived.
Boston Globe:
The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.
… [Dr. Paul] Rosenberg was opening mail, which had been set aside by a cat-sitter, when he returned from a Caribbean vacation on Dec. 19, 1993…
Opening a long, thin package addressed to “Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D.,” he saw wires and a cylinder inside. He and his wife ran from the house and called police.
The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.
[Investigators] focused on Bishop, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow who was working [with Rosenberg] in the human biochemistry lab at Children’s Hospital at the time, and her husband, Anderson.
Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986…
The Globe interviews a woman who worked with Bishop at the time:
… Bishop had been in a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were discovered.
Shortly after the attempted bombing, [Sylvia] Fluckiger said, Bishop told her she had been questioned by police one day in the lab. According to Fluckiger, Bishop said police asked her if she had ever taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.
“She said it with a smirk on her face,” said Fluckiger. “We also knew her husband was a tinkerer. We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs.”
Sergeant Mark Roberts, a spokesman for the Huntsville Police, said today that police in Alabama had been informed that Bishop was a suspect in the 1993 mail bombing case…
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We need to proceed with caution here.
But – let us assume that Bishop is guilty of non-accidentally killing her brother, and of trying to kill Rosenberg. There seems no doubt at all that she just killed three people and attempted to kill — I think there were sixteen in the room.
UD is now prepared to say something about Amy Bishop, and it’s got nothing to do with tenure.
When Amy Bishop perceives a problem in her life, a quandary or annoyance of some sort, she kills it. She takes it out. Bullets or bombs.
So… How does it come about that a veteran killer — if Bishop is indeed a veteran killer — has so thoroughly eluded capture?
Capture? How about thoroughly eluded being charged? In 1986, the Boston police let the little wisp of a twenty-year-old go home with Mommy the same afternoon she killed her brother. No charges. They can’t even find the case file. There probably isn’t one.
In 1993, authorities were apparently unable to make a case against her, their prime suspect.
No wonder Bishop ended up in Alabama. In Massachusetts, at least, she was beginning to gain something of a reputation… Prime suspect in a bombing… Shooting of her brother…
Poor University of Alabama. This isn’t a story about tenure. It’s a story about background checks.
Let me say something else about Amy Bishop. I think the reason she was denied tenure was that her colleagues were afraid of her.
It hasn’t appeared on the site yet, but should soon. As always, check the LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE column on the right of this page.
It includes this latest piece of information:
University spokesman Ray Garner said Saturday that the professor had been informed months ago that she would not be granted tenure.
He said the faculty meeting where she is accused of gunning down colleagues was not called to discuss tenure.
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Mug shot. That’s a bullet-proof vest she’s got on.
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More details. Husband was not on the scene.
A professor used a 9 mm pistol to shoot six people, killing three, before ditching the weapon in a second-floor bathroom at UAH, police say. She then called her husband for a ride.
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Blog, AL.com, Huntsville Times:
A Massachusetts police chief is now saying that UAH shooting suspect Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother during an argument, and the case may have been mishandled by the police department more than two decades ago when the fatal shooting occurred.
… Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier is now offering a different account of the shooting to The Globe: “Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the police chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother,” the paper reports on its Web site. Records from the case have been missing since 1987.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘coverup,’ but this does not look good,” Frazier said.
Another newspaper, The Boston Herald, is reporting that Bishop also pointed the gun at a passing car after her brother’s shooting.
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My Inside Higher Ed post is here.
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Update: More on the tenure-made-me-do-it thing:
Even without tenure … Bishop would retain a share of the fruits of her research. [The CEO of the company promoting her work] said whatever happened on Friday wasn’t related to financial concerns.
“My opinion is no,” [he] said, “and that’s an educated one.”
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Yet more on tenure-made-me-do-it. This is from a Decatur Daily interview with a psychology professor who was also a friend.
… “It’s not like she would never have another job,” [Eric] Seemann said. “With the research she did, there are other universities that, if she threw her hat in the air, they’d be lining up to hire her.
“She’s not some random schmuck. She’s Harvard educated. She could have doubled her salary going to these other schools. For whatever reason, she was so ego-invested that not being here was intolerable.”
I’ve already written a long post tracking the Amy Bishop story. As more details emerge, I’ll post them. Here are a couple of things worth noting.
The first isn’t about her, but about her university. Just last year, another UAH professor was convicted of murdering his wife.
As to Bishop: The Boston Globe reports:
The University of Alabama biology professor accused of slaying three of her colleagues fatally shot her brother in an apparent accident in Massachusetts more than two decades ago, a local police chief said.
Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed the 1986 shooting in his town and slated a news conference this afternoon to discuss the incident.
She was twenty, he eighteen. While trying to “unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun,” she shot her brother in the abdomen.
The Globe article comes close to suggesting it might not have been accidental.
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As details of Bishop’s earlier killing emerge, things get a bit stomach-churning:
The Braintree police chief said today the woman accused of gunning down three in an Alabama shooting rampage shot and killed her brother during an argument in 1986 – but no police report exists and she was never charged.
Chief Paul Frazier said Amy Bishop shot her brother in the chest, fled the house, pointed the shotgun at another car, then fled into woods.
Police found her and arrested her, but during the booking process the former police chief called and interceded, Frazier said. No investigation took place after that and the incident report was lost or discarded.
“This would never happen in this day and age,” Frazier said.
Frazier has forwarded the case to the Norfolk DA’s office for investigation…
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Another account:
She fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall, before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.
Before Bishop could be booked, the police chief back then told officers to release her to her mother, Frazier said.
[Please note: This is a big, quickly moving story. This post contains many updates.]
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UD reader David sends this to UD. It’s from the Associated Press, published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A woman opened fire during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus Friday, killing three people and injuring at least one more.
The shooter was in custody, but university spokesman Ray Garner said he could not identify her or the victims. Local television stations reported she is a faculty member.
Garner said three people were dead and a fourth injured. Trent Willis, chief of staff for Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, said several other people had been shot, but he did not have an exact number or their conditions…
The university’s home page.
Faculty member Amy Bishop is in custody. Her home page has been taken down.
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I’m passing this along, but I’m skeptical:
WAFF also is reporting that law enforcement sources say a female faculty member learned during a Biology faculty meeting that she would not receive tenure. She then pulled out a gun and started shooting.
Since when are you informed you’ve been turned down for tenure in a meeting, in front of the faculty? I have trouble believing any department is this nasty. It is, on the other hand, possible that she had, maybe this afternoon, received a letter or phone call telling her she’d been turned down… And after thinking about this for a while, she decided to pack a gun.
UPDATE: From a National Public Radio blog:
The accused shooter was denied tenure by the university Friday morning. According to the reporter, the woman then returned to a biology faculty meeting this afternoon and allegedly started shooting her colleagues.
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The blog Media Elites
provides this picture.
Taken into custody.
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Live local coverage.
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Her archived web page.
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UD‘s sister sends her this detail from Britain’s Daily Mail — not an impeccable source, so make of it what you will:
The neuro-scientist’s husband opened the door for his wife before she started shooting, according to local reports.
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Names of those shot, from the Huntsville Times:
G.K. Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, all three faculty members at the university, died shortly after the afternoon shooting at the Shelby Center.
Joseph Leahy is in critical condition at Huntsville Hospital. Stephanie Monticello and Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera are now stable, officials said.
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Update, Saturday morning: If the details in this Daily News piece are correct, we can begin to suggest a few things about this event.
As one might imagine, there’s now evidence that the shooter was known to be unstable. The husband of one of the killed “said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as ‘not being able to deal with reality.'”
If he is also correct that his wife “was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of a faculty member who got angry,” then presumably this was a meeting to which Bishop had not been invited, because her tenure status was being discussed.
In which case, the detail from the Daily Mail (none of these details is yet confirmed) about Bishop’s husband (not a faculty member) opening the door for her before she began shooting suggests that she crashed the meeting — with his help.
It’s not clear whether Bishop had already been notified of denial of tenure, went into a rage, got her gun, burst into the meeting… Or whether this was the meeting during which faculty would discuss and vote on her tenure (but there were assistant professors there, so this seems unlikely), and she, knowing the likely outcome, attacked them before it could be reached.
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According to this NYT account, published an hour ago, she did not storm the room.
On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular class before going to a biology faculty meeting where she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama faculty member who had spoken to people that were in the room. Then, she pulled out a gun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said.
… to have to close up shop altogether.
It has been, almost from its inception, so spectacularly corrupt, that the government can’t see funding it anymore. Its board of trustees is so suicidal that UD concludes no one on the board understands what a university is. They are utterly, utterly lost.
Senior officials from the embattled First Nations University of Canada begged for patience Friday while the school works through its problems, but students say they’ve waited long enough and are ready to take action on their own to save the institution.
Clarence Bellegarde, chairman of the university’s board of governors, said in a brief statement that people need to wait for the outcome of a financial audit and a governance review.
… The university has been under a cloud of controversy for five years and students, who met with Bellegarde on Friday afternoon, say they’re unhappy.
… The meeting came one day after the Saskatchewan government warned that it could cut off funding to the school.
Advanced Education Minister Rob Norris said Thursday that he expects a decision within days about whether to continue supporting the aboriginal university in light of the ongoing governance problems and allegations of financial irregularities.
Complaints about governance have centred around the size of the school’s board, its political makeup and its closeness to FSIN.
A governance review was due last fall. It was pushed back to the end of this month and now won’t be ready until mid-February.
The audit is to be completed by March. It was ordered after a former financial officer at the university made allegations of questionable travel expenses and paid vacation time.
… $675,000 in conditional funding won’t flow to the school until the allegations are resolved. But the big debate is around funding for the next school year – the province provides $4 million to $5 million in annual support.
The federal government provides the aboriginal school with about $7.2 million annually. However, there are conditions on a portion of that funding – including the submission of the governance report – and Ottawa is still holding back $1.2 million.
There have been longstanding concerns with how the Regina-based university is run and questions about political interference from the FSIN.
Problems erupted in 2005 when a federation vice-chief who was chairman of the board of governors suspended several senior administrators, seized the university’s central computers and copied the hard drive with all faculty and student records.
The federation set up an all-chiefs task force that recommended proper governance and operating procedures be restored at the school. The recommendations were never implemented.
That prompted the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada to put the university on probation in 2007. That probation was lifted in 2008 but later that year, the Canadian Association of University Teachers voted to censure the school for “its ongoing failure to resolve the serious problems with the governance of the university.”
A provincially funded operational review said in January 2009 that the struggling school needed a smaller, less politicized board and called for changes.
The ongoing problems have led to a drop in enrolment and the dismissal or resignation of more than one-third of academic staff and about half of the administrative, professional and technical employees.
A letter sent Friday to the Ministry of Advanced Education from the chairman of the university’s academic council also showed frustration among faculty.
“What has become clear … is that our administration is incapable of responding to the recent and rapidly unfolding developments in any meaningful manner,” wrote Randy Lundy, chairman of the academic council who is also the head of the English Department.
“For five years now, since February of 2005, the board and administration of the university have had every opportunity to enact the changes that need to be made at the university, and they have consistently refused to do so and have done nothing but fight an ongoing delaying action,” he wrote.
Lundy said the board and administration are in “no position to enact any form of damage control because there is no controlling the damage” that has been done.
James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, was more grim in his assessment.
“We’re now at the point where there’s a very good likelihood that the institution is going to go under …”
According to the Senate Council’s Resolution of Early Dismissals of Classes, the Faculty Senate “stands in strong opposition” [to] professors canceling classes prior to holiday and semester breaks for the purpose of accommodating early departures from campus. The resolution starts that such conduct is “professionally inappropriate” and “demoralizing to other members of the teaching staff.”
This description of a recent resolution passed by the Penn State faculty marks a small moment in a much larger story University Diaries has been chronicling for years — the physical disappearance of the American university, and various forms of resistance to this process of disappearance.
Physical classrooms with human beings looking at and talking to each other retreat from the national university scene a little more each day, as downloadable lectures, PowerPoint séances , and personal laptop play either empty classrooms altogether, or people them with mentally absent students and robotic, slide-reading professors.
Add to this, at a sports-mad school like Penn State, plenty of skipping for games, and there may not be much going on in some of its classrooms…
So what the hell. Might as well add more room-emptying, and cancel classes three, four, five days before each holiday….
The results of these industrious efforts to make rooms, students, and professors disappear must indeed be demoralizing to the losers on campus who actually schedule, hold, and teach classes. They are the Left Behind, a thin, ragged cohort at the end of days…
… have been sending UD novels set in universities. UD‘s been reading these novels and thinking about them, and she’ll be posting soon, probably over at Inside Higher Education, about these and other academic novels.
UD‘s friend Tony Grafton sends her a letter the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici recently wrote to the Times Literary Supplement.
Josipovici is angry about various moves on the part of the British government to shut down humanities departments at universities and prop up career-oriented programs.
The question this raises is: Are universities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, English, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages.
Readers with insanely long memories will remember that these were the founding questions I asked when I began this blog. On the very first page of University Diaries, I quoted James Redfield, from the University of Chicago [scroll down]:
The problem with universities is that universities are not operations which are constructed for making money. They are operations which are chartered to spend money. Of course, in order to acquire money to spend, they do have to acquire it. But their job is to pursue non-economic purposes. Or, to put it another way, their job is to pursue and, in fact, to develop and shape purposes within the society in some specific way. They are value-makers. They are not supposed to be pursuing the values of the society by responding to demand; they are supposed to shape demand, which is, in fact, what education is all about.
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An economics major at the University of Oklahoma writes an opinion piece which makes absolutely clear why the university – British and American – is becoming a sort of first-responder unit to socioeconomic emergencies (UD‘s comments in response to his argument are in blue):
The core curriculum is an inefficient model of education that keeps students in universities much longer than is necessary. It is absurd and childish to force adults who have chosen to major in economics to study cell structures, just as it is absurd to force biology majors to understand the Keynesian national income model. [See how Redfield’s whole idea that universities are about creating values, shaping demand, is DOA here? Redfield regards the university as intellectually transformative: It takes young people who are not yet liberally educated in a serious and disciplined way, and it trains them in rigorous forms of thinking even as it introduces them to the best which has been thought and said. But this model assumes an open-minded person, eager to uncover, grapple with, and organize the profoundest historical, aesthetic, philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific material. This student regards freshmen as adults infantilized by an institution which thinks they have something more to learn than a trade.]
The rationale behind the liberal arts model of education is that “the whole individual” should be educated. This of course is simply an impossible goal, for there are endless academic pursuits necessary to educate “the whole individual,” from ethics to ballet to ancient French. [The liberal arts curriculum has an ancient and well-elaborated character and rationale which has nothing to do with pablum like ‘the whole individual.’ But one can forgive this student for thinking that the term ‘liberal education’ refers to mush, since many universities have so compromised this curriculum as to make it look way random.]
The core curriculum, aside from forcing us into several classes we simply do not care about, also makes classes less valuable for those who are genuinely interested in the topics discussed. One only needs to peek at the masses of freshmen texting and doodling during their introductory lecture halls to see that this is true. [The coercion principle is of course a problem here too. What a liberal arts student would consider a well-considered requirement, the trade school student considers arbitrary authoritarianism.]
… The reason this model still exists is an entire college degree is still worth the entire cost of tuition to students. We’ve all heard the numbers about lifetime earnings for those with degrees rather than only high school diplomas, and that’s why most of us are here. [Most of the students at the University of Oklahoma, in other words, jolly along the university for most of their years there, only in order to get a higher salary when they finish.]
However, it would be much more cost-effective to shave off the useless requirements of our liberal arts degrees and only require students to take those classes which are relevant to our chosen major or majors.
For many students, such as my fellow economics majors, this would shave as many as two full years off the time necessary to complete our degrees. This creates two additional years to pursue internships, travel or gain real work experience while we’re still relatively young. [Time-managementwise, who could argue with this? But he could save even more time and money doing an online course in accounting, macro- and micro-economics. He could even do it on the weekends, so that he could take that full-time job he’s panting for.]
For others, such as Petroleum Engineers, abolition would probably not save them an extra year in college, but would allow them to focus more heavily on their career-oriented studies.
One effect of the core curriculum many people ignore is it can actually prevent students from truly delving into a second or third subject. Because we are required to meet so many different requirements, students may find they do not have time to pursue a minor or a second major. [Again, from the start, it’s about picking and choosing.]
Even if the core curriculum were abolished, there would still be students who choose to pursue minors and dabble in other subjects. Some would even choose a liberal arts education, pursuing many tracks. [Dabble says it all, eh?]
To these students, additional classes are worth their tuition. Many of us, however, would choose to explore other topics in our free time (as most of us already do) and focus our time at the university toward our future careers.
Abolishing the core curriculum forever would allow students to earn their degrees in less time. It also would allow them to customize their education to their own goals and desires rather than requiring them to satisfy some administrator’s definition of “well-rounded.” [Just some damn administrator, after all.]
Do you suppose anyone at the University of Oklahoma will think it worth their while to respond to this student’s polemic with a defense of the university as a liberal arts institution, rather than a trade school?
