Opening Statements…
Finally, I’m leaving Academia and going out into the Real World.
I went to college for 3 years at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. To be honest, Samford is more like a junior-high school than a university. I don’t mean to imply that the people are Samford are stupid, but they certainly are insulated. The students joke about the “Samford bubble”–I think they don’t realize how right they are. Samford-life is like a movie. The community reminds me of Pleasantville: perfect imagery, excessive happiness, and a suffocating drive for “perfection”. Most of the students come from a nuclear family–perfectly balanced and always content–and approach their daily lives that way. It’s literally like they’ve lived in a fallout shelter since the ’50s.
*Samford students are treated like a 15-year old would be. Teachers (I would usually say professors or instructors) have been known to call absent students on the cell-phones, show up at dorm rooms, even call home. That’s just ridiculous. It can’t be forgiven. Some say that they prefer to have a teacher who cares and “goes the extra mile” for their students — no, I think they’re just treating you like their kids.
I’m happy they’re happy. I’m just concerned that some of these kids–and they should be called kids, even though they’re mostly 18 and over–who study hard don’t understand why they are studying. The capacity for critical thought at Samford is unusually low. The instructors teach works from the literary canons that we’ve all been reading since 8th grade–and we’ve certainly never had an actual in-depth discussion about any of them. The focus is on exposure to important concepts, not their analysis. I hate that.
Maybe I shouldn’t rant. There are alot of good people that go to school here; alot of iffy ones too.
**I had fully intended on stopping my rant, but WordPress suggested this article to me just as I was about to go to sleep. That’s not funny. That’s stupid and counter-intuitive.
Leave a Reply