Yes, we are going to stretch this “of the day” thing as far as we possibly can, goddammit. Anyway, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article about yet another series of rankings, which uses suspect methodology to grade colleges’ gen ed requirements:
Those rules were necessary, Mr. Azerrad said, because narrow and esoteric courses do not give students a solid grounding in culture. “Colleges pay lip service to the idea of general education,” he said. “In practice, however, when you look at their actual requirements, they’ll have very broad distribution requirements. If you look at Dartmouth, for example, they have a literature requirement. So you might say, Why is ACTA complaining? Well, it’s because there are 300 courses that you can take to fulfill that requirement, including ‘Digital Game Studies.'” (The Chronicle could not immediately verify that point. In Dartmouth’s online course catalog, “Digital Game Studies” appears to be one of the few English courses that does not fulfill the literature requirement.)
Reader, I lol’d.
I would also like to state, for the record, that I am on a bus in the middle of a torrential downpour on Route 1 somewhere in the vicinity of New Brunswick, NJ. It’s been quite the day, though admittedly made all the better for the above-quoted set of parentheses.
Emily Rutherford 