Blog #12: The Ideal College Experience

This is a difficult question to pose: what is the ideal university? Perhaps I suffer from gross ignorance of how an administration runs their colleges, because I'm not sure I would change anything. I understand the importance of having liberal arts classes in a science degree. We can't have students submerged in a one sided curriculum. It is, after all, the job of college to prepare you to be the every bit of the person you could be. There are colleges that essentially allow you to choose your curriculum as you see fit: Brown University is one example, from the ivy league no less, that will not force you to take 3 credits of humanities, 3 credits of the arts, 3 credits of history, etc.

But I feel that it detracts from the college experience. How can you be certain you don't absolutely love a subject until you took it. Things like art history may not interest you at all, until you delve into it.

People would rather get distracted. We don't have Renaissance men or women anymore. You know why? Because people would rather bitch and moan about the fine arts elective they have to take in the summer and go play their xboxes than value a complex, multidimensional curriculum.

Rant over.

My ideal university is a simple one. I don't think allowing students to teach themselves is the best solution-- kind of like letting the patients run the hospital or the animals run the zoo. Strong professors need to be present, to present their knowledge in the best way possible to the students who are trying to learn.

The professors would be closely monitored by the administration, however. A lot of professors gain tenure and then have a free pass to do whatever the hell they want, which is a crime. A teacher who fails to actually teach their students, who is despised by the people that are supposed to look up to them, should be fired, and in my ideal university they would be.

Textbooks should mostly be written by the faculty so that they can eloquently relay what they want the students to know, and they should be cheap enough that it doesn't set every student back seven hundred dollars per semester.

There should be a lot to do on campus, a wide variety of club and divisional athletics, bars on campus open to people 18 and over (18 should be the legal drinking age).

The students should be challenged no matter what their major is. They should have writing intensive courses in all aspects of school life, so that when they leave college they are capable of properly communicating in the real world.

The dorms should be large enough to give adequate space to study and sleep and enough space between roommates that they don't get into each other's ways. Or, better yet, build the dormitory buildings twice as high and have everyone in separate rooms, then students won't have to worry about how much they hate their roommates.

Classes should actually be able to fit into a predefined schedule. I don't understand why sometimes there is only 1 available time for a class and it conflicts with another class that a student in a certain degree track is supposed to take the same semester. And classes should be easy to sign up for. Making class registration painless and easy should be a top priority for any college. If a student is majoring in Computer engineering, and they HAVE TO TAKE linear algebra, differential equations, etc, then the computer system should automatically allow them into those courses. When a student goes to sign up for a class that they need to take, and they are denied and have to get an override issued in order to register, it is frustrating to the point that it makes certain people want to transfer from the offending school.

Students should take a wide variety of courses, to make themselves multidimensional. Someone who spends their entire adult life focusing on one specific topic tend to be anti-social or at least lack true people skills, so forcing students to take a wide range of topics and expose them to people unlike them will ultimately benefit most.

Every building should have solid wifi internet access so that students can go anywhere on campus and work on whatever they need to work on. Campuses with low connectivity in important meeting places are a sad affair.

A rigorous interview process would be conducted to determine who is accepted. It isn't enough for someone to have straight A's, play sports, and be in clubs. The administration needs to know more about their students so that they may properly handle them once the student enters college. People are not their grades, or their clubs, or their athletics: they are much more than that.