“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
You were saved a genuine Jeremiad this morning, when this awful blog editing page failed to autosave and deleted an entire post as I was writing the last sentence.
What would I have harangued about? For starters, this story in the paper a couple days ago, trumpeting the creation of aerospace manufacturing facilities at ECP financed, in part, by an investment of nearly $60 million by FSU:
It's corporate welfare, of course, the only kind the reactionary party approves. But it also has virtually no plausible nexus with the supposed educational mission of the institution.
Which led me into a rant about how Division One college football, rock-climbing walls and first-floor espresso bars have turned our major research universities, particularly in the South, into one vast amusement park where they can't afford tenured faculty or a gender studies department, but boast a 24,000 square foot fitness center lauded as "one of the coolest college recreation centers in America."
You can't make this stuff up.
Next I considered this thought piece from yesterday's NYT, by the poet laureate of Mississippi who also serves as a writing professor at Ole Miss:
As usual, the South leads the way to the bottom by gutting its state research universities of any meaningful pedagogical content that teaches how to think and write and reason, rather than some vocational skill the chamber of commerce values. Since the days of Henry Grady, we've always had as our North Star this hucksterish boosterism that places economic activity above everything else. Now our schools will reflect that even more clearly, turning out good corporate drones who can read a spreadsheet and tell you their alma mater's 2024 football schedule by heart, but don't know the context of "Remember Pearl Harbor" and never heard of Chaucer. It's more Huxley's dystopia than Orwell's, but it's a dystopia all the same. Enjoy your soma.
And if you had to look up the allusions, I'm thinking you may have graduated recently from one of those football schools.
A professor (university not named to protect the guilty) for whom I regularly guest lectured, took great pride each semester in the number of students he had "dissuaded" from remaining in a media track. His was an intro class, filled with the smell of extra bold hair spray and shoes which could cause minor ankle sprains should a high heel encounter the many dips and drops on campus sidewalks (concrete, not students). The students had not yet encountered any of the weed-out classes, so they could still live in the world of pretend. "So what are you going to be when you're old, fat, and bald?" I would inquire in one of the first sentences of greetings. No on…
As a History major whose been told by society for the last twenty years that liberal arts degrees are a waste.... I feel ya 🤣