Why Can't Johnny Read? Because he doesn't have to!

He can major in Education, Social Work, Business, or Respiratory Therapy. If those aren't easy enough, there's more lite majors a-comin'! See ya' at the party Wednesday, while those nerds are reading, writing, and laboring over math and science problems.

(And whatever happened to the departments of Literature, Philosophy, History, and Biology, anyway? How can we resurrect them?)

You guys have all chided me for asserting leftist Prof. Tom Philpott, Sr's view that Universities should confine themselves to producing degrees only in the classic intellectual subjects, such as the various natural sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, anthropology, etc.), humanities (literature, linguistics, philosophy, language, history, economics, etc.), and engineering, math, architecture, and perhaps computer science. This view would cast out of the academy the majority of majors now declared by most university students:

Business
Education
Journalism
Social Work
Criminal Justice
Health Sciences (Respiratory Therapy, etc.)
Engineering Science
Pharmacy
Accounting
Nursing
Communications

Most of you advance the view that "anything worth doing is worth doing at a university", and that excluding these "non-academic" majors (as I call them) constitutes denying that these subjects have value and warrant respect and esteem. I reject that view (that to respect those subjects requires incorporating them into the university's mission), and hold that subjects that don't qualify as appropriate "university" majors certainly may qualify for adulation and respect.

Here are some studies showing that people with degrees in my "real" majors dominate the upper echelon of post-undergrad standardized testing, whereas people with degrees in what I call "non-academic" majors exclusively compose the bottom rungs.

http://ace.acadiau.ca/arts/phil/why_phil/scores.htm

http://www.mansfield.edu/~philosop/performance.html

One of the studies only shows the top-performing majors, as not to embarrass the poor-performers, and the other study only examines some of the majors on my lists.

One of the problems I see with stuffing our universities with an ever expanding menu of junk food is that these empty intellectual calories attract growing fractions of university students into their fold. This enables high school students to work less hard and take fewer true intellectual courses, because they know that even the best universities have majors that can accommodate their under-developed brain mass. I believe that universities are pandering to their paying customers, who increasingly comprise people who want the easiest effort to a "university degree" (whatever such a thing means any more).

You will notice that as the schools of business, journalism, nursing, social work, education, etc. swell, famine languishes in the halls of the majors that formed the very basis of universities in the first place: philosophy, biology, linguistics, math, history, literature. If you want the core intellectual fields to survive and flourish, you really must support my call for universities to limit themselves to those majors.

Many professors in those fields now have to create watered-down courses on behalf of the popular non-academic majors! Some biology and chemistry departments draw most of their "customers" for such courses for nursing and health science majors (students who, if such opportunities didn't exist, might have studied harder in high school and endeavored to take authentic bio and chem courses in college).

Do any of you imagine that our US businesses might be more clever and efficient if instead of a uniform managerial cadre of "business" majors (quick, list the 10 most influential "business" people of the last century; how many had such a degree? Gates? Walton? Ford? Jobs? Dell? Ikea?), their managerial cadre instead comprised a diverse intellectual background in the humanities and sciences?

How about the quality of our print journalist and televised news readers? What if they had diverse intellectual backgrounds, rather than all of them with "journalism" degrees?

How about the quality of our school teachers? Do any of you think "education" courses in the absence of mastering any intellectual subject can really produce academic excellence?

Why force nurses, repertory therapists, and pharmacists to attend school for four years? Since these people are determined to acquire specialized trade skills, why not return to the days when they acquired these trade skills in trade schools better suited and devoted to such worthy pursuits? These fields have shortages. Wouldn't those shortages shrink if interested parties could get certified in two years... and have two-years' less of school loan dept (and probably a lower annual tuition)?

As you lament the decline of academic performance in the US, take a look at the nations whose students perform well. Notice how their high schools restrict themselves to core intellectual subjects, unlike US high schools, which follow their lead from universities. When those students come to the US and pick their majors, they nearly exclusively pick core academic fields, especially in the sciences and engineering.