By Professor
Doom
Admin: “You want to offer that course, you
need to have ‘Women’ in the title.”
--why “Women and The Works of
Steinbeck”, “Women in Shakespeare”, and “Women in Western Civilization” are college
courses, among many examples.
One of the many problems with higher
education is the “student as customer” paradigm that has really warped
what goes on in our schools. No longer are courses designed in terms of “this
course has things students need to know”. Instead, courses are designed in
terms of “this is a course students will sign up for.”
Yes, in times past, professors built
courses around student involvement, but it was so different. For example, when
I wanted to learn about coding theory, the professor built a course around it,
and put it on me to get four other students together to make a formal class.
Why 4? Because that’s what the minimum class size was like in “the olden days”
of the late 20th century, unlike classes today with hundreds of
students.
The pandering towards the
student/customers just seems to get more and more blatant. It started with
courses with “And Women” stuck onto the title, with an obligatory few weeks
spent pandering to the current fad in societal norms. Yes, those might well
have been wasted weeks, but at least there was reason to believe the “normal”
part of the course still met the usual requirements of being education.
Then there were courses on Lady Gaga’s social impact. While I certainly have my doubts
about such courses, I know that it’s possible to take methods of analysis and
apply them to new things. There’s plenty of analysis of Shakespeare; I can
accept that maybe changing to a more topical subject might keep students’
attention long enough to help refine their critical thinking skills. Or so I
tell myself.
Then came the flurry of sex courses. I’ve
written before of the wildly popular “Deviant Sex” courses…which went too far only in
the sense that administration got afraid that someone might get offended. It’s
tough to find a campus nowadays that doesn’t have half a dozen courses with
“sex” in the title. Even a tiny community college I know had several courses,
probably one per hundred students…literally the whole campus taking the
classes. No, not much education in those (as the well below 5% graduation rate
of that campus can attest).
So, we have courses based around popular
media, and courses based around sex, all in the name of finding something that
will help the students part with their sweet, sweet, student loan money.
Why not combine popular media AND sex?
Yeah, it takes a lot of creativity to come up with that, I know. And, here we
go:
Now, don’t get me wrong, Harry Potter is
decent enough mental bubble gum, but I found one of the better highlights of
the Harry Potter phenomenon was the LACK of sexuality. Seriously, I’m so tired
of the cliché “young female uses sexual assets to distract ridiculously stupid
male guard while her associates do something” scene that I’m rather impressed
that Rowling managed to have characters do more clever things than abuse
sexuality (even if it often took polyjuice or magical spells).
“We'll be casting some sensual spells in CAS room 313. Hope you can
apparate there.”
--“apparate” is Harry Potter-ese for
“teleport”
Now, I am glad that this isn’t a formal
course for credit hours, just a workshop to teach students about safe sex…but
wait a minute here.
These students are adults, high school
graduates at the very least. They’ve already had sex-ed in school whether they
wanted it or not, in formal classes that did take weeks to go over every detail
(whether their parents wanted that, or not).
During World War II, we taught our soldiers
about safe sex pretty easily, it really only takes a few minutes at absolute
most to explain how to use a condom, after all.
“…at the university’s Wellness and
Prevention Services program…”
And here we have the university fiefdom,
Wellness and Prevention Services, responsible for this foolishness. When people
finally start waking up and looking into why higher education is so bloody
expensive, they’re going to see that universities are overrun with fiefdoms,
populated with highly paid administrators doing things that are completely
irrelevant to higher education.
These kids may not be adults in every
sense of the word, but seriously now. They’ve already been told about this sort
of thing many times, and even if they haven’t, you could hand ‘em a 25 cent
brochure with all the relevant information…rather than hire a dozen or more
$100,000 a year Vice Presidents of Wellness and Prevention to help plan
once-a-year “Harry Potter and Deathly Burning of the Venereal Phoenix of
Azkaban” parties.
--or maybe the author deliberately
chose not to associate sex with her characters? The fan fiction is bad enough…
I’ll grant that this isn’t the worst
sexual-themed attraction administration has put on campus (I won’t even link to
the worst of it), but realize, if a great number of students showed up at this
Harry Potter-themed Sex Ed class, it wouldn’t take long for administration to
think “Hey, this will sell…”.
And then yet another bottle of academic
snake oil will be for sale on campus, at $3,000 a semester. Thanks to
completely bogus accreditation, the Federal government has no choice but to
provide those sweet, sweet, student loan checks so students can drink this crud
down. It’s a shame accreditation can’t force the cancellation of “courses which
are obviously straight pandering to students, and of minimal educational
value”, but accreditation doesn’t care about education any more than
administration.
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