… without a stop at Communications.
Lucas Hanft, a Yale Daily News writer, complained as far back as 2003 that Yale had no Communications major:
We were watching the NCAA tournament when we happened to notice that (surprisingly) the majors of most of the players were stuff like communications, marketing schemes, or hotel management.
These are not majors offered by Yale College. Could Yale’s inability to recruit big-time athletes be the result of their now-seemingly narrow curriculum? Could this bastion of educational superiority be behind the times? Cornell has a school of hotel management, human ecology, and according to some, pharmacology. We can’t be left behind, sucking at the winds of change…
Yet nothing’s happened in all that time to change the majors at Yale. You still can’t major in communications.
Hanft is right to notice its popularity among big time college athletes. In an opinion piece about the big academic scandal going on at UNC Chapel Hill, Bomani Jones counts “seven communications majors” among the athletes being investigated:
When will more athletic departments uphold their end of the bargain and stop shielding athletes behind easy majors and preferred professors? When will they challenge their players to do things they never thought they were capable of scholastically, the way they do athletically?
… As long as education is treated as something to fit in around football, those people use the kids just as the agents Nick Saban so famously referred to as “pimps” do.
… Two and a half years ago, the Ann Arbor News published a damning series about the University of Michigan that detailed a patronizing system in which athletes were encouraged to take “easy” majors and shuffled into independent-study courses that sometimes involved as little as using a day planner. (And this was before Rich “‘Round the Clock” Rodriguez showed up.)
If the series made a ripple, the waters have long since stilled.
Majoring: It’s all about teamwork.
September 1st, 2010 at 3:28PM
“communications, marketing schemes, or hotel management”…I’ve interviewed many people with degrees in *marketing*, but don’t think I’ve run across any with degrees in *marketing schemes*. I *thought* the general level of raw cunning was a little low…must have been looking in the wrong places.
September 1st, 2010 at 3:43PM
david: lol
September 1st, 2010 at 4:19PM
I think that we have four different communications majors.
WE MUST BE BETTER THAN YALE!!!
September 1st, 2010 at 4:46PM
tp: lol
September 1st, 2010 at 6:37PM
An acquaintance of mine attended Cal Poly (SLO)where there were no liberal arts majors; Shakespeare was taught in the Communications program.
September 1st, 2010 at 8:28PM
I think a real test of whether you have some attempt to maintain the idea of a scholar-athlete or are just a minor league football team is the major concentration ratio, based on how economists measure market monopoly. If 100% of your football team is majoring in the same field, this ratio would be 1, while if each player had a different major, it would approach zero.
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:58AM
Back in the days when Rice regularly won the South West Conference title (pre-1957) there was a major for athletes only: Commerce. Gentlemen majored in sciences, engineering, or the humanities.
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:27PM
And yet, one can major in Film Studies at Yale, which they define as “an interdisciplinary program that focuses on the history, theory, and criticism of cinema and other moving image media.”
Communications by any other name doesn’t smell as rank to you?
Or is Film Studies more legit somehow?
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:29PM
Apologies for dead link above.
This link should work.
September 2nd, 2010 at 11:36PM
Cassandra: I think Film Studies (which certainly can be taught in a trivial way) is indeed usually more legit than Communications. Film is a specific genre, with a history, established criticism, etc. Communications is no such thing, and the course offerings at Chapel Hill reveal exactly the sense of randomness you’d expect, given this. I doubt the football team at UNC would be drawn to anything like a serious film major.