LOUIS MENAND was at UCI the other day but I missed him so I was glad to find him lurking in the pages of a recent New Yorker. Now that the long weekends of summer have offically begun to roll in, I can catch up on my reading, the aforementioned New Yorker, various issues of Harper's, Nation and Gourmet, two tabloid size reviews, the New York Review of Books and the Women's Review of Books and then those oddly soothing lifestyle catalogs that arrive without fail featuring happy calm people lighting scented candles, making large beds with organic 3,000 thread cotton sheets and generally floating around their spacious uncluttered lives which are all vaguely tinted the color of peppermint teabags. Ah, soothing.
Louis Menand's essay, "The Graduates" (May 21, 2007) doesn't soothe really, but it does make one think, a good thing:
The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States today is business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Eight per cent are awarded in education, five per cent in the health professions. By contrast, fewer than four per cent of college graduates major in English, and only two per cent major in history. There are more bachelor’s degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which classifies institutions of higher education, no longer uses the concept “liberal arts” in making its distinctions. This makes the obsession of some critics of American higher education with things like whether Shakespeare is being required of English majors beside the point. The question isn’t what the English majors aren’t taking; the question is what everyone else isn’t taking.Check out the rest then break out the accordion. There's a song in there somewhere...
—by Mona Lisa Quesadilla
