Our Troubled Campuses
THE colleges are back in the courts, and an unfavorable verdict in one particular case could threaten the very heart of campus life. Someone (Ilene Ianniello, to be exact) is suing the University of Bridgeport because she feels a course for which she paid $200 was worth neither her time nor money, and did not "substantially comply with the course description." Classroom time, she says, was "devoted to the instructor reading aloud pamphlets and other materials he had already distributed to the class."
I'd like this busybody to visit Hanover and repeat her charges. It would be a close race to see who drove her out of town first, the students or the professors, for both have a stake in maintaining the comfortable working relation that has been shaped over the decades, and that Ms. Ianniello now challenges. In this system, which I believe to be accepted at all institutions of repute, professors are free to teach whatever they wish, and students are free to pay attention whenever they choose. If the professor wants to discuss last Saturday's game instead of giving a test, no one is expected to talk him out of it. Or if he wants to rip apart the administration's policies in his field, the students give him every opportunity - as long as he doesn't run overtime.
I doubt that either the students or the instructor know what the course has been advertised as containing, and even if they did, there could be no recourse as the descriptions are typically so vague that Ulysses could be read backward in class and shown to be relevant to the matter at hand. (Now that I think of it, one professor did just that in an early Saturday morning class. It was the clearest explanation of benefit-cost analysis I've ever come across.) If the University of Bridgeport produced a catalogue that led students to believe they would learn something specific, they all must be new at the game.
For instance, here is the catalogue description of a business management course I narrowly avoided: "The theory of models is used to show that the business phenomenon varies in accordance with the economic and social system implied, and that there is an economic model where the phenomenon cannot exist, at least not in the form that we know from the history of modern capitalism." Now that is catalogue writing at its finest. Perhaps the author was a trifle careless in using as specific a term as "modern capitalism," but I would still defy you to produce a topic that I can't tie in somewhere to that description.
The class Ms. Ianniello describes resembles what was known at Dartmouth as a "gut," a course that could be passed, to put it kindly, with a minimum of effort. Specifically, if you turned in your blue book at the end of the term, and had remembered to put your name on it, you were assured a B. If you bothered to attempt some of the questions, an A was practically guaranteed.
One course, affectionately known as Stars 2 (more formally, Astronomy 2), was so popular that when the registrar saw the huge numbers that signed up for it each year, he invariably scheduled the class for Spaulding Auditorium, which held something like, 900 people (and still does, I presume, if the laws of physics are anything to go by). I don't think he ever quite understood what was going on, for attendance was always such that the class could have been held in the professor's office.
The bookstore usually took a beating, too, as no sober student ever invested in the texts. For some reason, the Stars 2 texts were second only to the history of art texts in lavishness and expense, and their purchase would have involved the cancellation of several road trips. Since the whole idea of taking a gut was to leave you free for more important things such as road trips, even the slowest student could figure out that it would be self-defeating to buy the books. Fortunately, almost every fraternity and dormitory had at least one Stars 2 text to its name, the gift of some frivolous graduate, and that was more than enough to go around.
As I recall, the hardest question on the final exam was, "Estimate the number of planets in the solar system." Even though such a direct question did not permit the long, equivocating answer all students learn to master, most of us scraped through. It was a sad fact of life that Stars 2 could only be taken once in one's college career, and few students had the self-discipline needed to save it for their junior or senior year, when it could really help the term average. The saddest cases of all were those who held it until their last year and then found they couldn't fit it into their timetable. Weeping and gnashing of teeth barely describes the reaction.
I certainly don't want to give the impression that we were only looking for easy courses. They were taken to produce a balanced workload. For example, if you had two tough courses for the next term, it was perfectly acceptable to hunt around for a third, such as "Principles of Addition," that would leave you time to concentrate on the others. Or if you had one truly rigorous class, common sense dictated that the remaining two be less demanding. Or if you had fallen in love with a girl 300 miles away - well, what the hell. These were to be the best years of your life, right?
So let's stop this lawsuit nonsense before it spreads to other campuses and makes scholars out of innocent students everywhere. U. of B., I'm with you all the way.
Hold that line!
Block that suit!
Bridgeport! Bridgeport!
See you in court.
Terence Parkinson puts his knowledge of the solar system towork as a columnist for the Derry (N.H.) News, where some ofthese musings first appeared.
