"The rise of the teetotal student," and what Mencken might say about it.

H.L. Mencken once commented on teetotalism.

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.

H.L. Mencken, "Alcohol", Damn! A Book of Calumny, 1918

Concurrently there's nothing surprising about the rise of the teetotal student, and I've no criticism to make of it. Abstinence absent compulsion (for the rest of us to do the same) is just fine, and those who choose to drink should so so responsibly. Cohabitation is good.

Period.

'I'm not spending money on that': the rise of the teetotal student, by Suzanne Bearne (The Guardian)

Universities are seeing an increase in teetotal clubs and alcohol-free accommodation. Why are students drinking less?

... A rising number of young people are abstaining from booze, with 36% of 16-24 year-olds in full-time eduction not touching alcohol, according to a survey by University College London. Dr Linda Ng Fat, lead author of the study, believes that an overall decline in drinking has made it more acceptable for young people to shun alcohol. “It seems that non-drinking is becoming more normative, which could make it easier for more and more young people not to drink, should they choose to.”

Paging Wendy Dant Chesser: "Students At Most Colleges Don’t Pick ‘Useless’ Majors."

Vile humanities major. 

I'm never, ever going to let this one drop. Wendy Dant Chesser is One Southern Indiana, and 1Si's operating philosophy of "What's Good for Our Oligarchs Is Good for You, Peasant" will never be my cup of tea.

Hello Wendy, Part One: In which we are properly warned not to heed the oligarchs' call to discount the value of liberal arts degrees.

Hello Wendy, Part Two: "Are dissidents born or made? A humanities major examines his life and locale."

Here's some refutation for Dant Chesser to enjoy with her morning Starbucks. For as long as she's over there and I'm back here, this will continue to be grist for the mill.

Students At Most Colleges Don’t Pick ‘Useless’ Majors, b Michelle Cheng (FiveThirtyEight)

.. The vastly different college paths that Mehta and Speers took illustrate an obvious point that is nonetheless often overlooked in discussions of higher education: Students attend college for different reasons. Some, like Mehta, see college primarily as a financial decision, an investment that they hope will have a relatively short-term payoff. Others, like Speers, may hope that a degree will bring financial rewards, but their focus is more on the intellectual and social aspects of the college experience. (Others, of course, seek both.) Those different goals affect where students go to college and what they do once they get there.

These varied approaches to college are clear from the fields that students at different colleges choose to study. According to data from the federal Education Department, students at elite universities are more likely to pursue degrees in the humanities, arts and social sciences than students at less selective schools, who tend to choose majors that are more likely to lead to an immediate, well-paying job.1
The most popular fields of study among students at the most selective schools are the social sciences, with 19 percent of degrees awarded in majors such as political science, economics and sociology. The next two most popular groups of majors are the biological and biomedical sciences and engineering. At less selective schools, the most common fields of study are related to business (the Education Department calls this category “business, management, marketing and related support services”), with 19 percent of degrees awarded in those majors. The next most popular group is “health professions and related programs.”

Career-focused majors — such as business, education and journalism — are more prevalent at less selective schools than at top-tier schools. Education ranks as the fifth most popular major at less selective schools but is the 21st most popular major at the most selective schools. Other vocation-specific majors such as law enforcement are also more popular at less selective schools.2 In total, more than half of students at less selective schools major in career-focused subjects; at elite schools, less than a quarter of students do so.

These numbers run counter to the common stereotype of students majoring in “useless” subjects and complaining when they can’t find jobs. In fact, comparatively few students at less selective schools — the vast majority of U.S. college students and the ones most likely to be pursuing degrees primarily for their career benefits — major in these less practical fields ...

THE BEER BEAT: Your brain on coursework, or expanding the mind one pint at a time.

Just a few weeks ago, I happily contributed a segment to the IU Bicentennial Oral History Project.

I am the student worker of Dr. Elizabeth Gritter. Dr. Gritter is a Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Local and Oral History at IU Southeast. She is also supervising the IUS Campus Oral History Project, which is a part of the larger IU Bicentennial Oral History Project that is being done as a way to commemorate IU's upcoming bicentennial in 2020. For this project, we are conducting oral history interviews of faculty, staff, and alumni who have been a part of the IU Southeast community to learn about their experiences at the school. These interviews are then archived at the libraries at both IU Southeast and IU Bloomington.

It might help to know that from 1978 through 1982, I attended IU Southeast in New Albany. Somehow I emerged from there with a Bachelors of Arts degree (majoring in philosophy) and an impending career of It's Anyone's Guess (majoring in beer).

Majoring in beer?

Evidently. At one point in the oral history interview, I paused for breath following a rambling recollection of perhaps ten minutes' duration, all of it spent detailing fake IDs, Mario's Pizza, the family room at Steinert's, 4-for-1 Thursday nights at the Troubadour -- though omitting the famous case of Wiedemann smuggled into (and out of) the fraternity office via a trumpet case during the campus chemical cloud lockdown -- suddenly aware of my inability to remember anything substantive about any of my classes.

Or what happened to the trumpet.

1981.

I'm exaggerating, but only because even with the widespread availability of dirt-cheap rotgut beer, I couldn't possibly afford to stay drunk my entire college career.

Look, I know there have been times in my life when I drank too much, and college was one of them. I'm neither proud nor apologetic about the daze back in those days. It just was. My grade point average was B-ish, and there wasn't going to be a lucrative tenure in nuclear physics or municipal economic development waiting for me. At times, maybe we all get what we need.

By the way, here's a link. It may even be relevant.

E = mc^2 … and make mine a pint while you’re there, by Tim Adams (The Guardian)

A Cambridge professor forgets that a glass or two can expand the mind with amazing results

Some university professors have always made it their mission to keep their students out of the pub. Professor Eugene Terentjev, head of science at Queens’ College, Cambridge, last week provided a spectacular example of this impulse, in a note sent to his new intake of undergraduates who, he had observed, like a drink.

Professor Terentjev’s letter ran as follows: “Please be careful how you handle yourselves here; remember you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’ – and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable. Physical sciences is a VERY hard subject, which will require ALL of your attention and your FULL brain capacity (and for a large fraction of you even that will not be quite enough)… People who just TAKE the course, but enjoy their social life, can easily survive in many subjects, but not in this one…”

Because: your damned brain. Skipping ahead, it's delightful to learn that contemporary studies provide support for the notion of working a bit, then relaxing with the gang at a clean, well-lighted place.

Another apparent misconception in the professor’s remarks – that any kind of enjoyable social life would make it impossible to survive his course – sounded even more wrongheaded. We live in a country high in European league tables for working hours, and low in terms of productivity. Those habits are often ingrained in an education and exam culture that prioritises grind over balance. Bertrand Russell’s famous contention that human brains are capable of no more than four hours a day of serious concentration, and that the rest is best spent idling, is borne out in much of the recent science.

Recent studies of work suggest that all productivity declines sharply after 50 hours a week and that the most productive brains need about 20 minutes of inactivity for every useful hour. Crucially, the longitudinal studies show that the single key component of an engaged and productive life is the ability to forge and maintain strong friendship groups. Everything else flows from that.

Perhaps college taught me lots about pub culture, even if I didn't connect all the dots at the time.

"Ignore the rhetoric — majoring in history is not a career-killer."

Nor philosophy.

As Dunman notes, Lt. Gov. Hampton's ignorance, while lamentable, isn't the most relevant point. Rather, it's about the value of education as a whole, and whether funding of it and access to it matter.

Commentary: Ignore the rhetoric — majoring in history is not a career-killer, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton recently caused controversy during an interview with the editorial board of the Eastern Progress, the student newspaper at Eastern Kentucky University.

While explaining Gov. Matt Bevin’s plan to force state schools to compete against each other for already dwindling funding, Hampton, unprompted, offered some advice to incoming students: “I’ll tell you, if I was a student, I would be looking for degrees where people are looking for employees, that’s what. I would not be studying history unless you have a job lined up. Unless there’s somebody looking for a history major.”

That sparked harsh responses from former history majors, current history professors, newspaper reporters, and political cartoonists. Rightly so, because while engineering and business majors like our Lt. Governor may not realize it, majoring in history is not a career-killer.

The loudly publicized educational “Race to the Top” has merrily morphed into another “Slog to the Bottom”.

Or so Donald Barry writes, and I agree. This one's far too good not to reprint. I hope the Tallahassee Democrat doesn't mind this family-oriented reprint, seeing as Don is my cousin, after all. Here is his introduction

Relatives of Don Barry,

Your brother, cousin, and uncle Don has written an editorial for our regional newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat. The subject is higher education, and the article is a hard-hitting, curmudgeonly ballbuster that is guaranteed to alienate assholes, which is a true talent that he always relishes. The article will be easy enough to understand. The editorial won’t make any difference in the world, but it was hellacious fun to write. All the best.

Don

See, it runs in the family.

---

Won’t Know Nuthin’ ‘Bout History

By Donald H. Barry

William Faulkner, arguably America’s greatest novelist, once commented on the awesome power of History to shape our present and future world: “The past is not dead; the past is not even past.” Faulkner was merely explaining how our living experience is informed and impacted by long-ago events and developments. In the spring of 2013, however, the governor and state legislature of Florida, in their infinite yet predictable un-wisdom, abolished the requirement that college and university students study even one course of History. This change will be implemented in the fall of 2015. Thus, after one more year, most students in the state will study History, in the word of Poe’s Raven, “nevermore”.

That decision was incredibly thoughtless because the subject of History is the most important one for understanding the entirety of the human experience. It is the only subject, if taught competently, to cover everything—the political, social, economic, military, cultural, scientific, and athletic realities of the world as well as their inter-relationships. Elimination of History can only further dumb down and numb up the American mind even within its “educated class”.

The decision is disastrous also because many college graduates cannot gain employment in the field of their chosen major and specialization, which means that a solid general education becomes crucial in providing the knowledge and versatility to enable them to adapt to different professions and jobs.

Yet our politicians did not act alone in this debacle. Many educational administrators and “reformers” for four decades have presided over the replacement of broad, all-inclusive, comprehensive core courses with narrow, exclusive, popular-culture subjects that appeal to the child-like inclinations of our youths, lower academic standards generally, pass more marginal students, and manufacture more degrees while creating the fiction that America is a better educated society.

The mentality of some top-level administrators, especially at the community college level, was expressed to this professor a few years ago by a prominent dean and division director: “We must become more and more like McDonald’s. The students are our customers, and our duty is to give them whatever they want and to make them happy.” This preposterous notion insinuates that teenagers know what constitutes a good higher education better than professors with decades of teaching experience. Administrators still wield the authority to reinstate a required History course within the students’ choices of general studies in Florida, but so far they have adamantly declined.

Veteran professors with academic integrity often assert that education in America has been done to death by politicians, who insufficiently fund our public institutions, and by lofty college officials, who respond to financial shortfalls with strategies to “retain” more students by hiring easy-grading instructors, harassing or dismissing teachers with rigorous standards, introducing courses that entertain more than educate students, and pressuring for the classroom use of glitzy technological gizmos that dazzle the gullible over verbal articulation.

As a result, community colleges in Florida now annually grant degrees to some graduates who possess elementary-school-level capabilities in reading, writing, thinking, and calculating. Those persons who would challenge this claim lack this professor’s experience of teaching more than 12,000 students in three different institutions with a PhD for forty-five years. Meanwhile, some universities have sold their scholarly souls for big bucks to reactionary, elitist corporate interests by permitting the latter to dictate curriculum, book assignments, professorial hires, and even presidential selections.

The state of Florida has decreed the death of a study of History for most university students, and there is little chance of reversing such a stroke of splendid senselessness. The loudly publicized educational “Race to the Top” has merrily morphed into another “Slog to the Bottom”.

But there is a third culprit in this tragedy. The French political philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, wrote that, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” That comment is also true of educational systems. The fact is that most Americans absolutely refuse to pay the taxes and demand the high standards that could make us a well-educated society. Consequently, our blissful ignorance of the world is highly unlikely to pave the road to a happy future.