The University:
Who are these people and why are they messing with my mind?
Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
First - time Visitors: Please visit Site Map andDisclaimer. Use "Back" to return here.
Great Thinkers Comment on the University Experience
- A college professor is a person who talks in other peoples' sleep
----source unknown - "Next we'll tear down the dormitories"
"But Professor Wagstaff, where will the students sleep?"
"Where they always slept - in the classroom"
----Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers - Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: these are closely related to college.)
....College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates. Basically you learn two kinds of things in college:- Things you will need to know in later life (2 hours). These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas.
- Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.
-----Dave Barry in Dave Barry's Bad Habits
In the beginning there was LES (Liberal Education Seminar) and lo, LES begat USP (University Seminar Program) and USP begat AUR (All-University Requirements) and AUR begat General Education and Writing Emphasis and Other-Culture. And the wrath of the students was kindled against Senior Seminar, for they could not get in.
I arrived here in 1976 in the waning days of the LES program, and I have seen our general education programs evolve and mutate strangely, and I sat on, even chaired, the General Education Council. Finally, it occurred to me that you might go through four or more years here without anyone explaining to you why we set the requirements the way we do. (It only took about fifteen years for me to figure this out - the Ph in Ph.D. doesn't stand for phast!) So that's what I will try to do here.
Why General Education?
First, let's look at an example of what General Education is not.
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal and mineral
I know the kings of England and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical
I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot of news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
............
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
.............
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform
And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform
In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General[But.....]
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy....For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century
But still in matters vegetable, animal and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General-----Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates of Penzance
Give the General his due; he knows mathematics, history, languages and science. He just can't put any of it together or apply it. He collects facts like a pack rat collects tinfoil. As for his specialty, he's woefully uninformed. This is not what General Education is trying to do.
The Purposes of General Education
The roots of university curricula go back through the Middle Ages to about 400 A.D. The Roman Empire was coming unglued, and a Roman proconsul named Martianus Capella confronted the problem of how to cope. With central authority becoming fragmented and invaders sweeping in, there was every likelihood that a person might find himself carried off into captivity a thousand miles from home among people who spoke a completely different language. What did you need to know to survive in such a wildly uncertain world? Capella's answer: everything, or at least as close as you could come to it. Capella's answer is not all that bad in today's uncertain world because a lot of the purposes of General Education haven't changed:
- General Education prepares you for change. Time was, universities could go a century or more without updating their curricula - and sometimes did. We can't do that any more. The problem Capella addressed is with us today. Chances are you won't be carried off by the Visigoths. We call it a "corporate transfer" nowadays. You may find that the foreign language you didn't want to learn in high school or college is spoken by your boss or your best customer tomorrow. What do you need to know to survive in such a wildly uncertain world? Capella's answer still holds: everything, or at least as close as you can get to it.
- General Education gives you an overview of knowledge. Okay, you have to eat, sleep, and get a reasonable amount of recreation. You can't learn everything (which is not an excuse for learning nothing). But you can learn how everything is organized, so that you have a reasonable idea what scientists, social scientists and people in the humanities do. You can also learn enough about these fields to have some idea how they work so that when (these days, it's when and not if) you are thrust into the situation of having to become the group expert on some topic totally alien to you, you'll have a good idea how to go about doing it.
- General Education gives you a basis for making informed decisions. Gilbert and Sullivan's Modern Major General appeared on stage in the late 1800's. At the start of the century, wars were fought with sailing ships, muskets, and neat blocks of soldiers lined up on the battlefield. By the time Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, wars were fought with battleships, repeating rifles, and machine guns. The Major General was amusing in 1890, but in another two decades or so people very much like him would send infantry waves against machine guns. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916 the British and French lost nearly as many men in one day as the U.S. lost in Korea, despite the fact that the U.S. Civil War had shown - fifty years earlier - how futile frontal attacks on trenches were. Still think history is irrelevant? The U.S. Air Force puts the matter bluntly: "What you don't know won't hurt you - it will kill you."
- General Education lets you know what your options are. I got my first exposure to computers in the punch-card days of 1964. (For those of you who don't remember, once upon a time computer data was stored on punched cards. You can always tell someone who remembers those days if his face turns white when you say "shuffle the deck." This was just before I got drafted to help Hannibal attack Rome.) When my neighbors heard I was working with computers, they all said "That's great. You can get a job as a key-punch operator." Even with my rudimentary knowledge of computers, I wondered "Why would any rational human being with a choice decide to be a key-punch operator?" My neighbors didn't have a clue what computers were for except that they provided a (temporarily) secure, mindless job. They had no idea that there were any other jobs in computing.
You might make a good biologist, or historian, or psychologist, or something else totally outside your present horizon. You might be very good at something you now think you hate. You'll never know unless you get some exposure to the different branches of learning.
One Final Reason For General Education
 | Protesting the Beijing Olympics, 2008 Thanks to the Internet, we all live in a goldfish bowl. General Education can prevent you from looking like a complete idiot in front of the whole world. If you don't know what's wrong with the sign, take some history classes. |
Return to Professor Dutch's home page
Created 30 Dec 1996; Last Update 31 May 2020
Not an official UW-Green Bay site