Anecdotal commentary on university course requirements and alleged faculty lobbying

How the Best Universities Inadvertently Ruin Our Schools 197 In fact, diverting from that story for a moment, my secretary, who never went to college, insisted that her daughters go, so one of them found herself in an art history course that she hated and complained to her mother who in turn complained to me. Why does she have to take art history? She is a business major (at Hofstra), for God’s sake, said my secretary. Obviously, I replied, there are art history professors who are wor- ried that no one will take their course and they will be fired (tenure doesn’t apply in that case as tenured faculty can be fired if their de- partment is shut down), so they have lobbied successfully to require it. She thought that was stupid and so do I. Now back to Northwestern. Clearly the mathematics professors at Northwestern were simi- larly concerned. Of course, they made their argument, the same way the Hofstra art history professors did, one would assume, about these courses being necessary for a liberal education, but the real argument was about saving the department and everyone knew it. But at Northwestern, this math argument had been made a long time ago. What was new was that linguistics, at Northwestern, had been classified as a math course! The reasons are clear enough. No one was taking linguistics at Northwestern and the linguists were scared. How they won the argument that linguistics was math (and thus an alternative to the required math course) is anybody’s guess. Just re- member that none of this is being done with the interests of the stu- dents as the real agenda item. If you believe, as universities do, that the most important thing you can do as an administrator is recruit superstars to make your uni- versity great, then there is a consequence to all this. The students suf- fer. At first this seems an odd idea. How could a student be harmed by recruiting a superstar? Well, it depends on the university. At MIT, where students are different than they are at Northwestern by quite a bit, there are a number of superstars that I know quite well. Two of them, whom I will not name but are about as famous as a pro- fessor can be, are people I have heard lecture many times. I have never understood what they were talking about in any of those lectures. Now, bear in mind that I know their fields very well so I should have been able to understand them. Also, bear in mind that I was a terrible stu- dent, which means my attention fades fast when I am bored or irritated. Since I know these two men well enough, I can tell you that nei- ther is particularly worried about being understood. They have been HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023943