Ladies and gentlemen of The Minaret audience, I find myself in a situation unlike anything that I could have imagined in the three years I’ve been a student at the University of Tampa: My summer vacation has begun a month and a half early, and I’m already complaining.
I’m not doing any work. I’m getting eight hours of sleep a night. I can no longer taste bile in the back of my throat at the looming thought of upcoming exams, papers or newspaper-inspired riots. I haven’t had a steel cage death match with a 4.0 student in who knows how long, and I have to take all of them out before graduation.
In short, I have no idea what to do with myself.
This has left me with a lot of time for intellectual discussion and emotional bonding’-with my TV. For example, only a few hours ago my TV, while helpfully indicating an upcoming episode of the Fox stress-drama ’24,’ declared, ‘This is the moment no one could have predicted!’
Whatever you say, Mr. Television, sir, but could it possibly be that Jack Bauer is dead again? This guy respawns like he’s in a game of ‘Half-Life.’ Instead of sleeping during these heroic day-long stints, he catches a couple minutes of death then gets up good as new and ready to storm a hostile embassy without so much as stopping for a pee break beforehand.
Another brilliant innovation lurking in the shadows of the Fox Network is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader.’ Proving forever that most Americans are closet masochists, the show was the biggest television premier in the U.S. in eight years.
I had to watch an episode for the same reason people stop in traffic to look at flaming train wrecks. Theoretically, someone at the Fox Network’-not an establishment known for its unbounded faith in the human race’-has to actually interview contestants and think, ‘You know what, I’ve seen 10-year-olds smarter than this.’
Within 15 minutes I was engaged in a spirited debate with my television over the appropriate spelling of the word ‘mastodon.’ It soon dawned on me that the only time in my life I’ve been smarter than a fifth grader is in fifth grade, and that’s only because some of my classmates were a little slow.
Then it struck me, like in that commercial where the guy is sitting in the bathtub, contemplating innovative new cottage cheese. As an experienced hand in the UT game, I can state unequivocally that the best thing we can do for academics at this stage is make ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader’ part of the admissions process.
Granted, this could be harsh. I doubt that I would’ve made it in if I’d had to answer a fifth grade science question or, for that matter, a second grade math question. Perhaps the Honors Program should be the vanguard of this change, just to be safe.
But if Oxford has taught me anything, it’s that the secret of success for great liberal arts scholars is argument by analogy. On a good day, we can successfully assert that democracy is like a banana, human social behavior is similar to a fish bowl or possibly an ant farm, and any work of fiction from The End of the Affair to The Cat in the Hat is responsible for all the overarching trends in western civilization.
If you ask a question that has a wrong answer, we might have a serious problem.
This is why, in lieu of running for Grand Moff of The Minaret, I have decided to become more involved in the Honors Program. I have been thrilled by everything I’ve experienced there, including outstanding courses, Oxford and the finger sandwiches at the symposia. But, there is always room for improvement.
There is a certain contingent of Liberal Arts students who are fond of taking shots at the Business school, but all of us, working together, would probably still have difficulty labeling the entire world map unless it happened to be in the form of a Risk board. If there was a time limit, forget about it. The more people learn, the more we forget ‘- so, by the time we reach our senior year in college, we have one sphere of knowledge we know a great deal about and a third grade education in everything else.
I will push for greater awareness of how many sides a trapezoid has, who the first president to be impeached was (hint: not Bill Clinton) and how many years a U.S. representative serves for one term. Changes won’t stop there. Eventually, there will be a senior capstone course entitled ‘Do Polar Bears Eat Penguins?’ Under no circumstances will this title be prefaced or followed by the phrase ‘The Debate Continues.’
That was a lot of thinking for me to do considering I’m on vacation. I need to cool off by dunking my head in a bucket of ice water and then watching six hours of network TV. I’m hoping I might be able to write a doctoral thesis using my TiVo for research. I’ll call it ‘Mass Media and Western Cultural Archetypes in Context: From Homer to Jack Bauer.’
Just don’t ask me what the largest Eastern European country is. This isn’t a senior seminar!