A Quick Reply to Ari on College Classes

The University Is About A Little More Than Job Training

I began reading

Ari Shtein

’s recent post about weird descriptions of college courses really wanting to agree with it, but unfortunately I can’t.

My Context

I graduated college about 9 years ago at a liberal arts college in the southern United States. I double majored in English and Philosophy, with a minor in Religious Studies.

When I was a young undergraduate like Ari, I was coming from a completely different perspective. I considered myself a Marxist, before it was cool or a social media fad outside of Tumblr.¹ Keep in mind: I was from a rural southern town with literally no connection to the ideas other than being contrarian and having access to the internet. I wanted to take all the edgy classes on post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and post-whatever because it had this vibe of edgy, forbidden knowledge.

I also wasn’t a good student in the phase of my life. I didn’t know how to study, I wasn’t great at organizing my thoughts, and unbeknownst to me, social media was toxic for my attention span (no one knew it was that bad yet!). Taking humanities classes were a good pro-tip because it was really hard to fail. At the same time, these classes were hard to excel, to get A grades (I want to say most of my English class grades were in the B- to A- range).

Anyway, I became a good student my senior year for various reasons. I actually did most of the readings, did better at organizing my thoughts, and all that good stuff.²

Why I Wanted To Agree With Ari

One thing about getting older is that you come to slightly regret things you did when you were younger, especially when it comes to consequential decisions and life phases. I regret being a bad student for most of college,³ but I’m okay with it because life right now is good, and I wouldn’t be here or learn the lessons I did about myself without being a bad student.

The fact is, many college classes kind of suck!

Some college professors (though I couldn’t guess the proportion) are easy graders because they are so post-structuralist-pilled that they sort of don’t believe in grading. If you do the assignment, stay on topic, give it a try, that’s good enough.⁴ Such professors enable people like me to coast by and not really get our cognitive house in order.

Some of these liberal arts classes don’t really stand up to scrutiny with any degree of rigorous examination using data or otherwise. When I was in college, the Ferguson riots happened, and I remember everyone just casually assuming the police officer was lying. It wasn’t until literally this year when I read Huemer’s book Progressive Myths that I learned about all the forensic evidence vindicating the official story.

Some of these classes and professors casually throw around terms like capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, and others. From the outside, they are cringe! From the inside, they’re less cringe, but I can say from experience, the worst thing about them is that they mislead students about how the world works. In five or ten years, these students will be like me and look back at their beliefs as just a phase. But the professors (at least at the bigger universities that proliferate the most of it) seem to self-select to be the kind of people who don’t go out of this phase.⁵

But Ari’s Still Wrong.

It’s Not Just About Jobs

At one point he asks the rhetorical question about college being about job training and that’s not what college is for. Many colleges, especially liberal arts colleges, have mission statements about preparing students not just for the job for, but also to be good global citizens (or similar nomenclature).

Now, I am not an anti-capitalist, but criticism of capitalism and markets are pretty common throughout history, just as criticism of political institutions, race relations, gender relations, and religion are. Even if it’s almost certain we will not abolish capitalism, our political institutions, conceptions of race, and so on, the legitimacy of these institutions is still an open question, because as soon as we start treating these things as closed issues, that’s where we shut down our collective brains and let bad things happen without questioning them.

In short, these classes exist to make students better citizens, more critical of institutions. For myself, even though I disagree with much (but not even close to most) of what was taught of me as an English student, the fact that I was exposed to it improved my ability to see the middle path between extreme radicals and unquestioning conservatives. From that experience, a critical mass of students/graduates can find ways to improve and reform culture and institutions in a productive way.

You Can’t Have a Survey Class Without Including The Cringe Views

I think it’s a good criticism of academia to say that most of the professors seem to push one-sided views of these issues (capitalism bad!), but many of these classes will surprise you. Just because a class has “post-structuralism” on the syllabus doesn’t mean you’ll be reading only post-structuralist thinkers or that you won’t hear the other side.

For example, what makes Ari’s complaint more confusing is he gives a screenshot of an American studies class that actually looks pretty good and comprehensive! I don’t really know what his complaint is here. If I were talking about 21st century American views of the past, I would talk about the 1619 and 1776 projects, as well as originalists and the weirdos who influence JD Vance, and from that point dive into the history, as that class does appear to do.

Neocolonialism and Foreign Language

What’s more, there are functional reasons why there’s critical theory gobbligook⁶ in these classes. He inquires why they have to learn about neoliberalism in a Portuguese class. I’ll admit that this is a good criticism on the surface, and not a bad criticism when going deeper. But it’s still not a great criticism!

This is like complaining “Why are you pushing socialism on us in this 19th century English literature class” because you have to read Charles Dickens. In a foreign language context, colonialism and the other buzzword -isms have a more substantial role in intellectual life than in America, and that’s what many writers who speak these languages talk about in their writings.

So, when you’re learning a language in an American university setting, you’re learning it to be proficient, and that entails being able to read high-level books. It’s like if you’re learning English, you should learn with the intent of being able to read Charles Dickens or any other classic. It helps to understand what’s going on in these books if you understand the social history that informs them.

Obviously, professors are going to be sympathetic to more left wing ways of teaching, and they are likely pushing this sort of thinking because it’s what they believe in. That’s why I think this isn’t a bad criticism - all of these cultures and languages have things to offer that aren’t complaining about capitalism.

But there are still many functional reasons to think the left wing perspective is at least permissible or advantageous. Anecdotally, high literature seems to be more progressive than conservative, and the biggest literary figures and elites in these non-western countries are likely also left wing.

So, again, I get why it’s annoying and frustrating if you’re not sympathetic to these leftist positions, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

Functional Limitations To Holding Some Classes

One last, minor point is that the number of classes here is going to be misleading to how important to the university or even the major department. Core classes are going to be held more frequently than elective classes. Many of the classes that invoke the most annoying wokeness are going to be higher level, not taught as often, and maybe even taught by the same professor every time.

In my case, my college was really small, and sometimes they’d only teach one class listed on the website every three years or so. I remember going through the course listings and really wanting to take specific classes, but never getting the chance because they were never really taught that often. In big schools, that’s probably less of a problem.

College is where you get down to the fundamentals

If I were a patronizing person who didn’t absolutely know that Ari is both really smart and more curious than I am (because he is!), I’d say he’s looking at classes and hoping they teach him what he thinks is important.

But what’s fun about college is that you learn along the way that you’re wrong about what’s important.

It is true that there are way too many contrarian college professors who hate capitalism and exaggerate real world problems into appearing as malevolent supervillains, and that maybe sometimes they inject that viewpoint in too many things.

But overall, some college classes should be radical, provocative, and inject random theorists in domains you don’t expect. A big component about college, especially the liberal arts and humanities is to examine the things we take for granted, dissect them, put them back together, and ask questions about them you otherwise wouldn’t have time or money to ask.

For young people going to college, I’d advise them to inhale as much knowledge as you can (as cliche as that sounds), get as drunk as you can (safely), attend as many athletic events (unless your team sucks), make as many friends as possible, and don’t take most of this way too seriously.

College is awesome, have fun.

1. For perspective, I was a socialist before Bernie made socialism cool among young people. I supported Bernie before people knew him much on a national level. And then…I voted for Hillary because I was persuaded by pundits like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias.

2. The inhibitions on this were personal. I was very unhealthy both physically and psychologically for the first three years of college. I lost 25 pounds, learned to “let things go,” and relieve my social anxiety, and thrived.

3. I want to emphasize that my GPA was 3.25 and in grad school it was something like 3.7, so I’m being a little humble here. I am/was a good writer and above average intelligence, so I did earn the many good grades I got. My school was not easy, even if I make it sound like I gamed it here.

4. I had one professor like this, and I will admit I gamed my GPA by taking at least 2, maybe 3 classes with them.

5. To be clear, I’d say my professors were more resist libs who like to problematize everything. I don’t think many or any were socialists.

6. I’m saying this in an endearing way!