Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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