Gene Weingarten won the Pulitzer for feature writing? For that horrid Joshua Bell-terrorizes-hapless-commuters story? Gene Weingarten?!
And in the same week, Alan Rich is fired as the classical music critic of the LA Weekly.
I'll tell you this, folks. I'm going to guess that the distinguished judges of the Pulitzer went to college. And I suspect that the corporate types at New Times, the parent company of LA Weekly, also went to college. So in theory, the people that made the above decisions are well-educated.
This means that we, who are in the business of educating such people, completely failed.
2 months ago
6 comments:
Following from your last point, this is why general education classes in the humanities are so important!
exactly! no student of mine is ever going to grow up to give a Pulitzer to Gene Weingarten.
Sadly, I think your point is related to that recent piece in the Chronicle about tenure in the humanities. It sounds like everything wrong comes from the bottom-line approach of many higher education institutions and the intellectual community...
I hate it when I see such evidence of failure.
I heard a really great interview on a really bad local NPR show. It was the head of the business program at NC State (the Undergrad Business Major, basically), talking about how much more stake they wanted their students to take in their general education/humanities classes. They were restructuring the program so that some of the electives had to be taken Junior and Senior year, and making it clearer to the students what these classes would offer them in their lives as business men.
Apologies for the totally screwed up gender specificity of that post.
I am so glad to have such solidarity with you and these comments. To revel in more unbounded hate and sarcasm, please see my own post on this important issue: http://www.urbanhonking.com/regarding
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