being contrary

I don't know what it is about me or about me in conversation with some people, but there are folks that just make me perversely contradictory. Today I was in a faculty meeting. Well, it's more complicated than that. I am the director of the program. All of these people are my employees, sort of. That is, I hire them, but given that we all teach the same topic, we're more like colleagues, but the fact that I chose them is always lurking in the background.

At any rate, there's a lot of tension around as I've written before and faculty in my program are particularly worried that the program itself is going to be eliminated. One of the proposals making the rounds is that all the university learning requirements (general education in the rest of the world) should be cut from four to three units. All the university learning requirements, except English Communication and Mathematical Communication. The people who wrote the proposal think, with some reason, that reading and writing are good things to be able to do, that it's good to be able to do some arithmetic, so these classes should have an extra hour to teach these useful skills.

No one has ever shown that the students here actually do learn better with four rather than three units in a class. Actually, there have been complaints since the very beginning that students get to their senior thesis without begin able to write. (It's true. I've read some of them.) But there's a sort of fetishism going on here.

At any rate, one of the faculty starts in on this rant about how cutting the arts and emphasizing English and Math is just another one of those Republican attacks on civilization. Now I hate the Republicans as much as any progressive, African-American lesbian living in the Bay Area could, but wait a minute. I started back at her with some rant about how it shouldn't be an either or sort of thing, how schools just needed more support to do all the good educational things they did when I was a kid (cheap instrument rentals, free lessons, art programs) blah, blah, blah.

But the thing that really bugged me? She actually does think that art is more important than mathematics and that's just wrong. In a perfect world, people wouldn't fear mathematics; every one would love reading; they'd be able to play an instrument; they'd be able to write what's in their hearts and heads with clarity and eloquence; they'd be able to make visual arts; they'd be able to fix a car, and cook, and sew, and who knows what all? But in this imperfect world, what should someone coming out of a four year university be able to do?

At the very, very , very rock bottom least, they should be able to read critically, write clearly (passion is a plus), and understand something of the abstraction that mathematics embody. To do these things, they should know some content too, but I'm willing to leave the content wide open.

The contrary part? I actually do think that knowing how friggin' hard it is to make art should be part of undergraduate study. But I know that this woman has remarkably low standards for art from her students. All expression all the time. Anything she says about art, holding herself as an exemplar of course, just turns me into a Philistine or forces me to point out to her that I started out as a painting major, ended up with a doctorate in ecology, and basically see art and science as co-equal in the realms of human achievement.

In short, being a jerk