MICHAEL CUTHBERTSON
Opinions Writer

A new school year dawns, and with it come new classmates to ogle and a chance to revive your zeal for learning.

But not so fast, for I have travelled back from the future to bring you a prophecy chilling as the faces that haunt the mid-morning December bus stop. Woe to you, keeners of campus! Take heed of what this jaded cynic reveals unto you: a list of jabs aimed at the department of arts and sciences. I speak most authoritatively, having dwindled my youth away in these fields.

May my words disillusion you to Academia at large and offer no real proactive solutions otherwise. 
 

Philosophy

My ninth grade English teacher put it best: “The only job you can get in philosophy is teaching philosophy.” It is the textbook ivory tower discipline, populated by over-contemplative worshipers of logic.

And that’s a fact, modus ponens.

English

You want to write about the meaning of great literature? Too bad, because English papers usually revolve around verbosity and awkwardly linked themes only vaguely related to the material at hand. Aspiring authors beware, you shall not write about issues that move authors to write in the first place. Nay, you must contribute to an already bloated body of academic analysis on the great works. 

Religious Studies

One can not study faith and spirituality from the outside, reading scripture but not experiencing it. I recommend a more devious substitute: infiltrate the churches, temples and mosques directly, studying undercover as a “believer.” Once inside, make sure to take notes on what God says because it will be on the final. 

Psychology

Save for neuroscience, a whole lot of folk wisdom and “well, duh” theories about the human psyche can be found in this field. I argue that Jerry Seinfeld offers more insight to your absurd human behaviours than psychologists can. That is unless you have an oedipal complex. 

Sociology

The younger, weaker sibling of psychology.  Pepper your sentences with words like Jungian, anti-positivism, and dramaturgy, and you won’t come out with a mark lower than 80. That is, unless you are part of a socially-stratified subclass, in which case you will find yourself trampled by the hierarchical structure of modern capitalist society, left in the gutter without so much as a means to satisfy your functional prerequisites.

History

Tutorials: students who have no interest or knowledge in history eat away the oh-so-long hour by repeating verbatim what the last kid just said. Personally, I feel history is taught in a way that glorifies civilization, as though all the warfare, colonization and industrialization were actually good for something. 
 

Political Studies

The only people you will find here are angry Marxists or opinionated debate-types with ambitions of Law School. It is a hazy, dark blot of an academic discipline, which simultaneously claims to teach you “everything ever” while teaching you absolutely nothing whatsoever.

But hey, at least the faculty of the U of S doesn’t have the audacity to call themselves “scientists.”

Of course, not all of you will be swayed by this heathen’s words. Thus, let it be known that having penned the above vitriolic text, I nevertheless endorse learning for learning’s sake, revolution from within the system and never taking what you are taught as the whole truth.

Well, except this of course.

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image: Robby Davis