Academia is only one step away from a degree in basket-weaving!

A few years ago, when enrollment was beginning to rapidly increase at the university where I work, my fellow faculty got excited enough to begin to offer bizarre courses, and academic majors and minors.  After I realized that the "process" to review proposals was nothing more than "you scratch my back, and I will yours," and more so after learning the hard way that raising questions only made me the enemy, I started disconnecting, as much as possible, from the campus committee processes.

A tragic contrast to such an approach to crazy curriculum?  Way back, when I was still involved in the committee "process," I argued that we needed to offer courses for students to understand Islam and the Middle East.  We had practically nothing on these, even a couple of years after the events of 9/11 and the wars we had launched.  One would think that these topics are far more important than "sports management."  Yet, "sports management" sailed through, while my proposal was severely criticized and shot down even within the Social Science Division!   

If one is willing to overlook the ideological framework of the host-source, then it will be difficult to disagree with the following comments:

Degrees in sports administration and pop culture? Higher education seems to have drifted so far from its fundamental charge that, today, apparently anything can qualify for degree status.

What an injustice this is to students, who innocently believe that if a university thinks a subject important enough to make it into a degree, then they will be well-served by enrolling in it. There are those who blame such students for their bad choices. I am not one of them. I taught in universities for many years and I know the deference paid by most students to the standards articulated by their institution. After all, these are still kids, for the most part; offering them degrees in “pop culture” is perilously close to child abuse. Any academic or administrator who truly believes in both the employability and intellectual respectability of a degree in pop culture is both deceived and deceiving.

There was a time, not that long ago, when universities had a proper reverence for the life of the mind, a reverence that would have made them ashamed to offer such empty-headed degree programs to their students.

Apparently, that time has passed.

Faculty, who are in charge of the curriculum, cook up whatever fancies them, and most administrators do not care to raise tough questions as long as there is enrollment.  Nobody cares whether any of these shenanigans serves the cause of educating students.  For way too long, students have come to be treated as ATMs, and finally the public is beginning to wake up.  The unfortunate part though: as far as I can see from the inside, well, it is business as usual :(