Debunking the ivory tower

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat Tom Collins

"Take your chances win or loser."

As students enter their junior and senior years, all of a sudden choice, and not the mandates of the general education, minor and major programs, is the operative component in deciding what course one takes.

Which is to say, you get to take electives.

Entering my second senior year, all of a sudden the world is my oyster. If it's upper division, I can take it. And I don't want it.

I don't want to compare public policies and socioeconomic success indicators of Scandinavian countries. I find the study of bureaucracy fascinating, but only in the Rush Limbaugh whipping boy kind of way. And contemporary American history? I have three words: Oliver Stone films.

Like Kurt Vonnegut said, "And on and on."

Indeed, I feel no particular need to write a 20-page research paper. I'm a student at the University of Arizona and like my mom once told a dean at the University of Texas- "This isn't fucking Harvard."

After all, aren't I done becoming well-rounded? After 48 months at this university, I'm smooth as a riverbed stone, round as Rerun, the fat guy from "What's Happening."

I've spent most of my available cash and, to be sure, I've spent a considerable percentage of my future earning.

See, it's like the General Catalog says:

"Taken together, the experiences of general education encourage the student to develop a critical and inquiring attitude, an appreciation of complexity and ambiguity, a tolerance for and empathy with persons of different backgrounds or values and a deepened sense of self."

As a university community, a state and a nation, we are constantly faced with the ongoing problem of preparing our young for the future. General education science courses, for instance, are abandoning lab work in favor of discussions and incorporating basic technology skill into the curriculum.

I recommend we abandon this foolish notion of elective credit. Nobody wants it. What the students of the UA want, or at least what I want, as the real world rears its flaming, Damaclean sword of consequences, is an "A." Or two.

Yes, and the world is complex and interdependent, and the global economy takes no prisoners.

I, for instance, was informed yesterday that the bear of Russia has not died, but rather will rear its head in my lifetime.

By the by, I dropped the class. I'd had the professor before and he seems to think this isn't Harvard, but it should be..

Only in a world divorced from the Dickensian human condition by minions of office assistants and a predisposition in favor of ties, does this "science" work.

Yes, and one more semester in the ivory tower, and I believe I'm liable to start writing songs about super-fast, futuristic race cars.

Tom Collins is a journalism senior and a special projects reporter at the Arizona Daily Wildcat.