Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [55]
The bourgeois tuition-paying businessperson thinks all learning institutions should be glorified trade schools. If you aren’t learning how to redesign his or her favorite widget, or become a useful bean counter, you’re wasting your time, and ultimately, his or her money. Being proudly obtuse, the conservative minority boastfully excoriated anything with the “L” word in it, unaware that they pledge allegiance to what is technically a “liberal” democracy. They then set about destroying the liberal arts schools in America by transforming them into business schools. They also stripped the K-12 grades of so much funding, those who could afford it were forced to send their children to private schools, most of which are religion-based. And now they learn the hard way that a Liberal Arts major can do something that most business majors can’t—i.e., write a cogent letter, analyze information, make an informed decision. Ask any corporate executive what he thinks of each year’s batch of new recruits, and he or she will tell you all he hopes for is someone trainable. Memo to business school majors: Don’t spend more than you take in—now go get yourself a life.
I know all this because your Reluctant Scholar toured American campuses as a musician during the 1980s and 1990s, playing to hundreds of schools a year. Our act involved political humor, and it was shocking to witness campus after campus go through a transformation from Liberal Arts to business right before our eyes. One semester, we would visit a campus that was famous for turning out intelligent history, English, and arts majors; the next semester we would return and find the campus bookstores jammed with accounting, statistics, and computer manuals.
On one tour through the State University of New York school system, we were awakened four nights in a row, at four different campuses, in the middle of the night, because someone had pulled the fire alarm. As the dorms emptied and the bleary-eyed students scrambled out into the cold night air, we discovered it wasn’t the fire department that went and checked out the buildings, but the local police, searching the students’ rooms for evidence of alcohol. Students found with a single can of beer, empty or full, in their rooms, were summarily expelled. The fourth night it happened, a fireman explained to me that it was the police who had in fact pulled the alarms; the fire department only showed up because the law requires it when an alarm is pulled.
The following semester, we returned to play those campuses again. When I asked administrators how their evil pogrom was working out, they replied that they had to cancel the program because, in the midst of the Reagan-Bush Recession, they simply couldn’t afford to lose all those tuitions.
As far as I was concerned, raising the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one had little or nothing to do with public safety, and everything to do with the Freedom of Assembly. The rathskeller at the average big university could hold a thousand or fifteen hundred students. They were all shut down as the new law was grandfathered in. I simply don’t believe that the government of that time gave a rat’s ass about traffic fatalities or the safety and well-being of the youth of the country. It’s about beefing up security, curbing dissent; it’s about budgets and finding ways to keep them growing. And it was about preparing the youth of the country for a war