‘Twas the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 23 when a young lad logged onto his personal PC, awaiting Binghamton University Brain Portal’s reopening to the student public. 2:29:58 p.m. … 2:29:59 p.m. … Bam! The lad quickly signs in, entering his PODS user name and password before you could even say “Bam!”
On a campus as large as Binghamton’s, getting into classes is extremely competitive. There’s nothing more brutal than over 11,000 students thumb-wrestling BU Brain for entry into any given course. The interesting thing is, however, hundreds among hundreds of students are battling it out for classes that they probably don’t even want to take, but have to.
I was there for half an hour, patiently waiting for a spot in MUS 115 to open up. Needless to say, I didn’t even want this class; I am merely fulfilling a general education quota for Harpur College. I’m a chem major, for God’s sake. Did the Beatles perfect the quantum theory of the atom? Did Led Zeppelin balance chemical equations?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against the class. It’s nothing short of fascinating and I would gladly recommend it to anyone interested in pop and rock music. However, there will be many people enrolled for entirely wrong reasons and I can’t blame them.
Harpur College prides itself on being a liberal arts college, but anyone who refers to it as such has clearly never seen the list of required, lettered attributes, which are utterly repulsive. To make a liberal arts college require its students take specific classes completely perverts the original intentions of liberal arts education. Students are attending Harpur to pursue and strengthen their interests, not Harpur’s.
If Harpur College officials think that without requirements, students would not want to venture off and experience new fields, they could not be more wrong. We aren’t robots; we do have interests, so as long as there are courses, we will take them. Do you think us that helpless and immature that we have to be blackmailed into taking your courses?
I, hereby, propose a change in motto from, “From breadth through depth to perspective,” to “Take our general courses that have nothing to do with your education or interests, or don’t graduate.” All I’m saying is, if you are artistically inept, you shouldn’t have to take an art class. It’s only logical. You don’t try to make a dog meow, do you?
Honestly, how many times have you asked a friend about a class that offers an easy “A.” That’s because you aren’t interested in the subject matter and, as a result, you want a high grade with the least amount of effort. That is precisely the gaping, festering pothole of Harpur College’s GenEd requirements.
They think, “If we make them take so-and-so classes, we coerce them into taking all kinds of classes and they will have no choice but to get interested. Muahaha.” We’ve been exposed to enough, in our entire lives, to know that we simply are not interested in certain areas; college, ideally, is supposed to be a haven for your academic choice. With a program like Harpur College’s, it becomes more about getting grades than learning. We busted our asses in high school after being promised that we’d have more opportunities to explore the fields we wanted in college, only to see more of the same.
I don’t know about any of you, but I certainly don’t need any opinions about the courses I take. If I wanted to learn more about Shakespearean plays, then I would have taken ENG 245, but that’s of my own will. Thank you very much, Harpur, but I don’t need your input.