I just returned home from doing a presentation before a group of students at CSUN. They’re all McNair Scholars, which means they’re pointing their ambitions toward graduate school.
What I love about McNair Scholars: they hang out. They talk. I love it when students stay in a classroom after class just to pasear.
That for me was the best part of college. We used to get together with our professors after class. Back then you could have a drink with your teacher, which, for us was usually scotch. Today you can’t do that, and it’s not important because it’s just being there that matters.
Everyone agrees that colleges today are regressing into vocational technical schools, especially with for-profit shams of universities raping students’ checking accounts with empty promises of employment. Bad times.
Mine is a very strong liberal arts college (Mount St. Mary’s in LA), but we also get the pressure to quantify our disciplines. You know, such as “Quantify the essence of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and show its practical influence upon the Dow Jones.” Show that, with an English degree, you will definitely get a good-paying job. Or better, screw English & become a business major. No offense, business majors; but as the cancer of marketing roots itself in the nation’s universities, the capacity to think in terms of philosophy, literature and art, turn flaccid. Desiccate. We’re dropping in the civilization polls. Philistines. Scratching our asses with a stick.
So here are these tremendous young men and women in a small classroom at CSUN, talking with professors and other students about U.S. politics in Central America and how we’re pushing our Manifest Destiny hegemonic-erection into every crevice of the globe. Even without the scotch, it just don’t get no better than that.
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