Monday, March 3, 2008

The decades come and go, but some things on college campuses never change -- certainly not complaints about classes.

In the November 1944 edition of the Journal of Higher Education, Richard Stephen Uhrbrock discusses the attitudes of 60 graduates toward their colleges' curricula in an article titled "College Courses in Retrospect." Twenty-six schools are represented, including Cornell, Columbia and Princeton universities; Yale University had the most respondents, 11.

Here is what some graduates, all of whom were unnamed, said about courses they disliked:

¿ Anthropology was "a complete waste of time. . . . I think it would have been a good course back in 1890. By the time 1935 came around it was a little old and out of date."

¿ Analytic geometry"was a puzzle if there ever was one. Sometimes you had to work hours to get answers to problems."

¿ Principles of teaching"appeared to me to be too simple. The things that they discussed in class always grated on my nerves as being something that a second grader should have understood."

¿ Economics"became very dry and dull. You learned it by rote and you passed the examination and that was that."

¿ Social science was taught by a professor who "was very disgusted with college students."

¿ Trigonometry and simple calculus were "just plain drudgery for me."

¿ Journalism"was about the most worthless thing I ever had."

-- Valerie Strauss