College


From vander44@student.msu.eduThu Mar 30 13:24:58 1995
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 1995 17:43:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Thomas Edwin Vandervelde <vander44@student.msu.edu>
To: GHChat <GHHS.CHAT@umich.edu>
Subject: college

> > Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to
> > college.  (That is, of course, a lie.)
> > College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two
> > thousand hours and try to memorize things.  The
> > two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of
> > the time sleeping and trying to get dates.
> >
> > Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
> > 1.  Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
> > 2.  Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
> >         These
> > are the things you learn in classes whose
> > names end in -ology, - -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on.  The idea is,
> > you memorize these things, then write them
> > down in little exam books, then forget them.  If you fail to forget them,
> > you become a professor and have to stay in
> > college for the rest of your life.
> >
> > It's very difficult to forget everything.  For example, when I was in
> > college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why --
> > the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne.  I have
> > managed to forget one of them, but I still
> > remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw.  Sometimes,
> > when I'm trying to remember something
> > important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna
> > packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just
> > pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket.  It's a terrible waste
> > of brain cells.
> >
> > After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose
> > a major, which is the subject you intend to
> > memorize and forget the most things about.  Here is a very important
> > piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that
> > does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.  This means you must not
> > major in mathematics, physics, biology,
> > or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.  If, for
> > example, you major in mathematics, you're going to
> > wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine
> > integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary
> > axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you
> > don't come up with exactly the answer the professor
> > has in mind, you fail.  The same is true of chemistry: if you write in
> > your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine
> > to form oak, your professor will flunk you.  He wants you to come up with
> > the same answer he and all the other
> > chemists have agreed on.  Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
> >
> > So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and
> > sociology -- subjects in which nobody really
> > understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
> > virtually no actual facts.  I attended classes in all
> > these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
> >
> > ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read
> > little snippets of just before class.  Here is a tip
> > on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything
> > about a book that anybody with any common
> > sense would say.  For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick.
> > Anybody with any common sense would say that
> > Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to
> > it as a big white whale roughly eleven
> > thousand times.  So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the
> > Republic of Ireland.  Your professor, who is sick
> > to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think
> > you are enormously creative.  If you can
> > regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you
> > should major in English.
> >
> > PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there
> > is no such thing as reality and then going
> > to lunch.  You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of
> > drugs.
> >
> > PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.  Psychologists
> > are obsessed with rats and dreams.  I once
> > spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a
> > certain sequence, then training my roommate to do
> > the same thing.  The rat learned much faster.  My roommate is now a
> > doctor.  If you like rats or dreams, and above all
> > if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
> >
> > SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away
> > the number one subject.  I sat through
> > hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology
> > writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent
> > statement.  This is because sociologists want to be considered
> > scientists, so they spend most of their time translating
> > simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code.  If you plan
> > to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do
> > the same thing.  For example, suppose you have observed that children cry
> > when they fall down.  You should write:
> > "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of
> > prematurated isolates indicates that a casual
> > relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or
> > 'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up
> > for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.