Yeah. Heaven forbid people with different interests behave differently. Especially college kids, who are generally the paragon of virtue. But more to the point, that is so completely different from the claim made in the OP as to be a non sequitur.
I’m interested and surprised by the ranking. That bread video seemed a bit over the top but it did look like a nice spread of food and a decent time.
A lot of the time, the go to professional school–law, medicine, business. If you come from a background where that’s just assumed, you look to your undergraduate experience to do more than make you employable. Others are building a career path through internships and the actual degree is less important than work experience plus maybe some targeted courses.
And some are just cluless and don’t have any plan at all. Sometimes that works out really well and sometimes it doesn’t . . .but for the cases where ot doesn’t, it’s not clear that That Particular Kid wpuld jave done better trying to cram themselves into an engineering mold.
I suppose so, that 30 years ago something like this would be a local-to-the-college-town story, with maybe some ever-more distorted myth version spreading through the collegiate grapevine over the years. It would be something of a “oh, look, those crazy moonbeam granola schools, hahahaha, damn probably they get the good weed”.
Now it gets put in a dozen different feeds, used as some example of how terrible things have become, and we get questions about it “foretelling the death of higher education”.
This is incredibly rude and insulting to those of us who majored with liberal arts degrees. Also inaccurate. Ask me how fucking sensible the engineers in my family are.
Bread video?
The ranking shouldn’t be surprising. Evergreen focuses on teaching, not research, and takes pride in having zero classes taught by grad students. Professors team-teach most classes, using an interdisicplinary approach; thus a class on human and natural regional history will be a 16-credit class taught by an historian, a mycologist, an ecologist, and a poli-sci. Students either earn or don’t earn credits for a course, but in addition to finding out how many credits you get, each student, for each course, gets an extensive narrative evaluation of how they did. These evaluations can be very useful for serious students who want to improve their academics. There are lots of student support services.
One of the things that goes either very well or very poorly for students, depending on their inclinations, is the emphasis on independent study. It’s fairly common for students to design individual (or small-group) courses of study and to find a sponsoring faculty member who will meet with them and guide their work.
For students who are self-motivated learners who don’t like being a cog, it’s a perfect environment for conducting focused learning with professional assistance.
The Residential College at the University of Michigan does something similar, particularly with grading. There was a big kerfluffle because freshman year was the first year where students received grades in addition to narrative evaluations. No discussion classroom had more than ten students; no lecture had more than thirty. Part of the graduation requirement was to pass a six-hour proficiency exam in a second language of the students’ choice; I chose Spanish. Spanish class was not graded. Spanish class made you cry because there was no feedback whatsoever other than, ‘‘you need to improve this thing.’’
“Right, but am I passing?”
“Don’t worry about that. Improve this thing.”
And only about 2/3 of students passed the proficiency exam on the first try. There was also a heavy emphasis on the arts; the dorm, which also housed classrooms, had a theater and music practice rooms, and there was a lot of independent study particularly around creative endeavors.
The Residential College was known colloquially as ‘‘freaks and geeks’’ because we were more liberal than even the liberal student body at a liberal school. More stoners than you can shake a stick at, and extremely insular. But when I passed my proficiency in Spanish, and went on to the upper level Spanish courses within the broader college of LS&A, I kicked those classes’ asses all over the place. Plus, I met my husband in the RC, as he was a fellow Spanish nerd.
Cool stuff.
To clarify a thing for octopus, people who major in “_____” studies often do it on purpose, because they want to become social workers, activists and policy wonks and work in non-profit organizations and legislative offices. These are people going on to get MSWs or degrees in nonprofit management or public health. I went the nonprofit management route and got an MSW. The people I graduated with, who have undergraduate degrees you find useless, are doing things like: counseling in inner city schools, working as lobbyists and legislators in DC, founding their own nonprofits, fundraising for hospitals, implementing community strategies to ameliorate HIV/AIDs, running political campaigns, and on, and on, and on. I write grants for one of the most comprehensive domestic violence and sexual assault organizations in the state, which means I’m responsible, in conjunction with my team, for ensuring the long-term fiscal sustainability of an organization that serves about 20,000 people annually. It’s basically business management, but with warm fuzzies. Many of my teammates majored in Women’s Studies, or African American Studies, or whatever (in case it’s not obvious, I majored in Spanish.) They didn’t learn the concrete skills they would be using until graduate school, but the undergraduate education laid the groundwork for understanding just what in hell they were getting themselves into.
Radical students annoy the shit out of me sometimes, and occasionally, as in this particular case, even horrify me, but it’s them who will be feeding and clothing the hungry, and they will be shaping public policy and community advocacy for years to come. It is my hope that these students can temper their laudable passion for serving the disadvantaged with an equal passion for setting pragmatic, realistic goals and treating everyone with respect.
Alright, how sensible are the engineers in your family, if you don’t mind me asking?
Thanks for the detailed response in your other post.
UCBerkeley is an engineering school.
UC Berkeley is totally trébuchet. Catapults merit only disdain and contempt.
I played varsity soccer against Evergreen in the 2002-2005 era and they were extreme good. I think we only beat them once 3-2, and even other times when then beat us by a landslide I have nothing but respect for that school. The players displayed a very high level of sportsmanship, and we always looked forward to playing against them. +1 from me to the school
Well, this is my mother.
(Who has since been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, and who I no longer have a relationship with. And that is an old thread, so it’s hopefully obvious that I didn’t go the counseling route.) She is unemployed and on disability and married for the fifth time, but by all accounts, happy enough.
My grandfather is a bit of a different story, I didn’t know him when he held a knife to my grandmother’s throat or broke my uncle’s arm, I have only ever known him as a very even-keeled person, but people tend to mellow as they age. He believes very much that he is a sensible person, but he is so bizarre about human relationships it’s genuinely frightening. I don’t know exactly how our relationship works so well, but he’s the closest thing I have to a father who protected me.
Both of them are more the mechanical engineer type. My grandfather has retired but his latest hobby is learning how to take apart computers and put them back together.
My uncle through marriage is a computer engineer, and I love him. He is pretty sensible and brilliant and funny, though he was a mess before he met my aunt, and that is because his father was very similar to my mother so he had a lot of emotional problems. But we also bonded on that level.
I know a lot of engineers, friend and family members, and I am used to them, and for the most part I enjoy how their brains work so differently from mine. Though with some degree of consistency, particularly with mechanical engineers, I have found they have difficulty understanding how humans work. It’s almost comical or would be if, as in the case of my mother, for example, it didn’t cause so much hardship. They don’t seem to know what to do with their emotions or how to relate to the emotions of others. I have one friend, who works on jet engines for a living, who is trying to learn how to relate to other humans now, at the age of 33. She… has a ways to go.
This is a generalization. I’ve certainly had engineering friends who did not fit that stereotype. But it has become something of a stereotype in my mind because of how many engineers I know who fit it. Emotional problems aside, it was really challenging growing up with a mother who didn’t understand me at all. I am about as head-in-the-clouds idealist creative as it gets – the practical and analytical side of me really only came out in my adulthood. So I felt oftentimes like an alien in my own home.
Just to be clear, your statement was inaccurate to me not because I believe engineers are not sensible, but because I believe that engineers are not necessarily sensible. Your statement just pissed me off because I feel like I’ve spent a lifetime being treated as if my interests, and my career, are somehow inferior.
My degree is in mechanical engineering. Perhaps I have a bit of the crazy.
Eh, sometimes it’s easy to forget that people reading these posts may be members of a group being painted uncharitably with too broad a brush.
I lived with two engineers once in college. One of my fondest memories was when they got plastered and tried to figure out if sex involves torque.
Probably triggered by the word screw. 
I didn’t realize we were in Great Debates. I might have reined it in a bit, if I had known.
Which would be “cowgirl”?
What, you mean Tucker Carlson wasn’t entirely honest about how things were going at a liberal school?
Really?
Whodathunkit! :eek:
I kind of wish republicans would stop acting like college liberals are a separate species whose ways and logic are utterly foreign. Nine times out of ten, stories like this involve some form of misrepresentation or misunderstanding, almost always on the part of the hack pundits like Tucker Carlson.
I have to admit, that piece gave me pause…for about ten seconds, then my bullshit meter began pinging like crazy.
I’m reading along and thinking, “Hmm, okay. So this Day of Absence thing has been going on since the 70s. Up to now the minority participants gathered off campus while the white participants gathered on campus, and now this year the decision was made to reverse the order and have the minority participants gather on campus and the white participants gather off campus. So far, so good, everything’s reasonable and kumbaya. Especially upon learning that participation is purely voluntary and only about 200 people of the college’s 4,800 population was affected.”
But then, DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! All of a sudden, out of the blue and for no apparent reason that we’re given, professor Weinstein starts firing off angry emails criticizing the fact that white students, faculty and staff were being asked to leave the campus. He then further characterized this “asking” as being a “show of force” and “an act of oppression”.
Now, if all this swapping of participants was purely voluntary, what on earth set the professor off? Was he just having a bad day? Did he not get his morning coffee? What? Clearly, he must have felt he had more than a sliver of justification for this outrage, you know, given that he was a faculty member of the college and easily proven wrong if everything were as reasonable and voluntary and kumbaya-ish as Powers claims in the piece linked by LHoD.
So, what happened as a result of this professor sending out these allegedly (and oddly, given both his position and location relative to the goings-on in question) misinformed emails? Did anyone say, “Oh, no, professor, you’re mistaken. No one is being asked to leave the campus who doesn’t want to. The parties involved have previously and voluntarily agreed that this year our 200 participants will switch locations for our participation and everything is hunky-dory. No one is pissed in the slightest. I’m afraid that whatever you’ve heard is in error and everything is fine.”
No, they didn’t say that, did they? What they did instead was launch into the exact kind of hateful and intolerant and accusatory behavior and attempts at intimidation that is perfectly in keeping with the allegations the professor made in the first place!
Do you really believe that the account of events put forth by Zach Powers bears any semblance to reality? Can you not see the nonsensical disconnect between the peaceful, voluntary and previously agreed upon background Powers alleges vs. professor Weinstein’s complaints, whose only refutation came in the form of attacks, accusations of racism and demands that he be fired? Can you not see how Powers glosses over and minimizes the over-the-top and hateful reaction of the students in this case, paying lip service only to it being “a flawed approach” and “not particularly pretty” or “constructive”?
And you think Tucker Carlson wasn’t being entirely honest about the events there? Where is your critical thinking ability?
In 20 years of his being a public figure, I have never seen any reason to believe Tucker Carlson to be entirely honest about anything.
Why start now?