She’s a single woman too!

(I have no idea if that is true.) You know how you’re supposed to go to college and get your head filled up with a bunch of loopy Marxist ideas that evaporate before your twenty-fifth birthday? That didn’t happen to me. Never even got through the Manifesto. But then computer science is in the School of Arts in name only.

None of my core classes were very communist either. First semester freshman year I endured a dreadfully arrogant honors seminar that officially had no focus. Unofficially it was the director of the honor’s program’s house of torture for smart people who still somehow believed in God at age eighteen. We read (as much as you “read” in those classes) God: a Biography, which analyzed the absurdity of the Bible with all the disinterest of an OSHA audit. As a foundation for civilization the Bible fell laughably short, which I had already suspected but finally knew.

Mostly the core curriculum was a waste of time. Particularly the honors classes I chose that had anything to do with the then-fashionable “study” of globalization. The horror. What the hell were we supposed to be learning in a class about that? We thought some benevolent corporation would hire us after graduation and fly us around the world in order to speak foreign languages poorly and recognize tropes or something. We can be forgiven for such childish fantasies, but our teachers should be flailed for promoting them. The pinnacle of this idiocy for me was a course titled World Political Economy that I foolishly took my last semester of college. It was taught by a friendly-seeming old gent named Edward Weisband.

Weisband was visibly invigorated by his made-up discipline, but not so much that he could be bothered to teach it more than one hour a week, prepare exams himself, grade anything, or resolve problems between his students and the legion of TAs he farmed them out to. Even his damn TAs thought they were the shit and made themselves as inaccessible as possible. These faults became apparent before the drop date, but you don’t drop a required course your last semester of college. The TAs bungled multiple exams in some shockingly bad ways, enough that I figured we would all get A’s just to keep us quiet. Nope. I made out with a C (my first and only), which required one Latin word to be struck from my diploma.

From this 2005 testimonial, it looks like not much has changed in Weisband land since my own detour there:

I have now taken roughly 35 classes at VT, and this class comes in second in worst classes so far. This class should be atleast a 3000 level class and not a freshman level one… If you like learning new words, that really do not exist take this class… If you like paying out $70 to Weisband, since he writes the book, take this class. By the way, the bookstore doesn’t buy back the book either, so this old guy gets even richer each semester with a new edition. Also, the TA’s are a little weird too. Avoid this class if possible.

I know that for some students this experience is typical, and to them I say, “Why would you pay for that?” For me, no other class was in the same ballpark of Marie-Antoinette-style aloof and destructive academic detachment as Weisband’s. He pretty much ruined my opinion of college education. Him and the non-stop money grubbing and growth mentality exhibited by the school’s administration. American universities must be the least efficient use of capital in the history of “world political” economy.

As for Judith Lorber, we’ll try to get to you in the next post Missy!