Re: Drought! My ideas are all dried up...

In article <J3rCHI.GG6@xxxxxxxxxxx>, djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx says...
In article <12dl13vkal57udc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Patricia C. Wrede <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote:

The idea is that if you're going to a liberal
arts college, rather than an engineering college, you're supposed to get a
well-rounded education, and that means you have to have some science even if
you're an English major, and some of the art stuff even if you're a Biology
major, and probably some random P.E.

Cal did not require P.E., thank God.

Utexas required PE for anyone with freshman or sophomore standing. I had
junior standing by my second year, and so wasn't required to take it,
but there was no way you could have kept me out of the advanced fencing
class ...

And practically everyplace has had a
required Freshman Composition course to make sure the freshmen know basic
essay-writing stuff.

Subject A, or "Bonehead English." Hal had to take it. The
corresponding class on the other side of the College of Letters
and Science was Physics 10, or "Bonehead Physics."

All liberal arts majors were required to take 15 hours (4-5 courses) of
math/science; I was able to offer various math hours and two courses in
astromony.

A year's worth of American History and Institutions was also
required (I had taken that in junior college), and they've now
instituted a requirement for some kind of class on the culture or
experiences of non-whitebread-WASPs in the US, but I managed to
graduate before that went in.

The state of Texas mandated two courses in government (one of which I
placed out of) and two courses in American history (you could offer
upper-division courses and I did so, avoiding the large-bore survey
courses; the result, alas, was that I still know nothing about mid-19th
c history, and everything about New England towns in the 17th and 18th
c.)

At our college, the distribution requirements took the
form of dividing all the classes up into four areas -- IIRC, one was for
math and the hard sciences, one was English and history, one was art, music,
theater, etc., and one was for soft sciences like psychology and sociology
and political science and economics.

Ditto, except that history went in with psychology, etc., and the
English group also included philosophy, classics and foreign languages.

They do that *now*, but this was 1970, remember. What the housing cost
covered was "room and board," not just "room." And it wasn't much like a
high school cafeteria; it was a lot more like the office cafeterias at my
day jobs, except you didn't have to ring up a total at the end because you'd
paid in advance as part of the housing fee. There were choices; it's not
like they handed you a plate and said "Eat this."

The Living Units (=dorms) at Cal do that. And there was a
cafeteria on-campus when I was an undergraduate, where they
occasionally served a magnificent french-fried eggplant. The
area is now full of student counseling offices. The Golden Bear,
which used to be a high-class restaurant where you could take the
faculty (or the faculty could take you) is now a fast-food joint
and the faculty have all retreated to the Faculty Clubs.

At the time I was a freshman, many first-year students lived in the
campus dorms, a number lived in dorms just off-campus, and there were
also any number of apartments and shared houses and co-ops a few blocks
from campus. There were also apartments on well-defined shuttle bus
routes, so that there were several student mini-neighborhoods several
miles away. It's still all like that. I lived in a dorm on-campus my
first two years, and then in apartments either within walking distance
or right on a shuttle route.

Combine Dorothy's and Patricia's remarks about food for my experience. I
spent most days on campus even after I moved off-campus, and got all too
familiar with various Student Union eating places as a way to get my one
big meal of the day.

The problem, of course, with the faculty retreating to the faculty club
is that there was no place on campus for grad students to give the
traditional lunches for visiting speakers and hiring prospects. One
ended up in some cavernous hall with a lot of other people yelling while
dreadful sandwiches are consumed. Or eating outside, attacked by
grackles and watching wrappers blowing away in the breeze while
competing with traffic noises. No, I don't sound bitter at all; it's
just that I was never able to actually talk to any of the persons who
were imported, at great expense to somebody, for just that purpose.

--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton

Joann Zimmerman jzimm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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