How do we hate thee, Binghamton English department? Let us count the ways.
As an editorial board composed entirely of English majors, we have undoubtedly learned a lot here at BU, but we can’t say much of it has been because of our major. We doubt we are alone in feeling that we have graduated without much knowledge or preparation for the real world, not even graduate school.
It’s unfortunate, really. They tease us English majors for being lazy, having few assignments and skating by unscathed by the brutal schedules and workloads of the engineers or biology majors. This doesn’t have to be the case, though. In an ideal liberal arts education, English majors would leave college with critical reading and writing skills far surpassing those they possessed when they enrolled.
Much of the problem with the Binghamton English department is the lack of structure. None of the English classes have prerequisites, and half of the 10 classes English majors are required to take are electives. How much will you really learn if your entire education is Shakespeare, British literature, literary theory and five Ryan Vaughan classes? That’s not to say that Gaming as Literature is alone in deserving criticism — many classes in the department are comparably … less than strenuous.
The sad thing is, many classes could be really enlightening if taught properly, and in a more logical order.
There is no sense of progress, building or accomplishment in the department. In political science or psychology, for example — really, most of Harpur besides maybe history — students are expended to take an intro-level class in order to qualify for the more difficult upper-level courses.
And those upper-level courses are, in fact, more difficult than the 100-levels. By the time you get to a 400-level seminar in political science, you know a hell of a lot more than the introduction to global politics class you took on a whim as a freshman.
This method serves two purposes: first, it ensures that students are learning and building as they go through their field of study, and prepares them to enter that field or continue their education once they graduate. It makes sense to make classes more difficult for seniors than for freshmen, right?
Second, it helps students to figure out if that’s even the field they want to study. If you take an intro biology class, you probably have some sense by the end of it whether you really want to study biology.
No such logic exists in the English department. We’ve all taken difficult and thought-provoking lower-level classes, and jokes of upper-level classes. Remember, those Ryan Vaughan classes count toward our upper-level English electives requirement.
Beyond macro-level structure, class structure is also incredibly inefficient in the department. Most classes have upward of 40 people; some classes have over 100. How are we expected to discuss literature in a setting that doesn’t facilitate any sort of conversation? A lecture is not an appropriate venue for such content. Most voices aren’t heard, and it’s easy for people to hide and underachieve, and never be noticed. And professors can’t assign substantial papers to classes that large because they would be unable to grade them.
In fact, it is unusual for English majors to ever have to write more than six pages during their college career. There aren’t any required senior seminars as there are in most other liberal arts majors. The overwhelming majority of classes don’t even require any independent academic research. And because the curriculum seems to be determined at the whim of individual professors, it’s probably possible to graduate without ever having to write a real academic paper.
Binghamton University was originally founded as a small liberal arts college. It seems that it’s strayed too far from its roots.
Correction: April 5, 2013
An earlier version of this editorial contained an incorrect spelling of the surname of a professor in the English department. The correct spelling is Vaughan, not Vaugn.