Month In Review

Education
July,1996

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How About "The Decline And Fall Of American Education?"

While many academics are calling for a return to a required core curriculum in which students study the classics of civilization, some U. S. colleges and universities are offering vacuous courses under trendy titles to lure students, according to educational experts.

Following their graduation, job applicants will be able to boast to personnel departments that they prepared for employment with courses such as:

• "The Souls of Animals," offered at Bowdoin College, which plumbs the question of animals' "thoughts and beliefs," and whether they have any "moral status."

• "Girltalk," available at Wesleyan University," which focuses on Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde and "the centrality of the discourses of fashion, fandom, gossip and shopping..."

• "Contemporary Hysteria: The Drama of Righteous Gullibility," at Bennington College, which argues that "the greatest period of hysteria and witch hunting in this country's history is happening now."

• When all else fails, there's always sex: "Sexuality in Global Perspective," at Duke University; "History of Sex," at Wesleyan; "Love and Sex in Japanese Literature," also Wesleyan; "Presentations of Sex and Sexuality in Spanish Novels and Films," at Bowdoin; "Renaissance Sexualities" at Swarthmore, and so forth.

Writer and emeritus professor Gertrude Himmelfarb at the City University of New York calls the courses "a terrible, terrible waste of time in a young person's life." She warns that the "use of irony and wordplay in these course titles is a post-modernist trick to suggest multiple meanings and complexity where, in fact, there is very little."

Source: William H. Honan, "The Dry Yields to the Droll, the Prosaic to the Provocative in College Offerings," New York Times, July 3, 1996.