The name of this game is to plan a course involving minimum effort and
minimum learning while “earning” a degree under the rules of the nation’s largest
and most prestigious state university.
To take care of “breadth” and also the American history your high school did
not require I recommend Science and Pressure Politics, The Phenomenon of Man,
and American Country Music. These three get you home free without learning any math,
history, or language that you did not already know .. . and without sullying your
mind with science.
You must pick a major.. . but it must not involve mathematics, history, or
actually being able to read a second language. This rules out all natural sciences
(this campus’s greatest strength).
Anthropology? You would learn something in spite of yourself; you’d get
interested. Art? Better not major in it without major talent. Economics can be
difficult, but also and worse, you may incline toward the Chicago or the Austrian
school and not realize it until your (Keynesian or Marxist) instructor has failed
you with a big black mark against your name. Philosophy? Easy and lots of fun and
absolutely guaranteed not to teach you anything while loosening up your mind. In
more than twenty-five centuries of effort not one basic problem of philosophy has
ever been solved .. . but the efforts to solve them are most amusing. The same goes
for comparative religion as a major: You won’t actually learn anything you can sink
your teeth into
but you’ll be vastly entertained-if the Human Comedy entertains you. It does
me.
Psychology, Sociology, Politics, and Community Studies involve not only risk
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of learning something- not much, but something-and each is likely to involve real
work, tedious and lengthy.
To play this game and win, with the highest score, it’s Hobson’s choice:
American literature. I assume that you did not have to take Bonehead English and
that you can type. In a school that has no school of education (UCSC has none)
majoring in English Literature is the obvious way to loaf through four years. It
will be necessary to cater to the whims of professors who know no more than you do
about anything that matters . . . but catering to your mentors is necessary in any
subject not ruled by mathematics.
Have you noticed that professors of English and/or
American Literature are not expected to be proficient in the art they profess to
teach? Medicine is taught by M.D.’s on living patients, civil engineering is taught
by men who in fact have built bridges that did not fall; law is taught by lawyers;
music is taught by musicians; mathematics is taught by mathematicians- and so on.
But is-for example-the American Novel taught by American novelists?
Yes. Occasionally. But so seldom that the exceptions stand out. John Barth.
John Erskine fifty years ago. Several science-fiction writers almost all of whom
were selling writers long before they took the King’s Shilling. A corporal’s guard
in our whole country out of battalions of English profs.
For a Ph.D. in American/English literature a candidate is not expected to
write literature; he is expected to criticize it.
Can you imagine a man being awarded an M.D. for writing a criticism of some
great physician without ever himself having learned to remove an appendix or to
diagnose Herpes zoster? And for that dissertation then be hired to teach therapy to
medical students?
There is, of course, a reason for this nonsense. The rewards to a competent
novelist are so much greater than the salaries of professors of English at even our
top schools that once he/she learns this racket, teaching holds no charms.
There are exceptions-successful storytellers who like to teach so well that
they keep their jobs and write only during summers, vacations, evenings, weekends,
sabbaticals. I know a few-emphasis on “few.” But most selling wordsmiths are lazy,
contrary, and so opposed to any fixed regime that they will do anything- even meet a
deadline-rather than accept a job.
Most professors of English can’t write publishable novels . . . and many of
them can’t write nonfiction prose very well-certainly not with the style and
distinction and grace-and content-of Professor of Biology Thomas H. Huxley. Or