Hate

I Hate the Honors College

Do twisted ideologies and slanted assignments mar an already lacking program? Yes!

Maybe I'm naïve. When I was in elementary school, suffering such civilrights violations as mandatory Christmas concerts and the D.A.R.E program, I was promised that middle school would be different--challenging, more mature. I was greeted with mandatory pep rallies and an encore of D.A.R.E. And again they promised that if we just hung on, we'd reach high school, a golden land where children become young adults and are treated as such. Bullshit. For four long years I waited for freedom. College had to be different. After all, I was applying to the Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. Surely here I would find an intellectually stimulating atmosphere, cultivated by critically minded students and professors. Fool me twice, shame on me... yes. More bullshit.

Among other things, the Honors College (the HC) requires its students to complete one-year sequences in history and literature. The classes are typically small and the curricula are often coordinated between the two subjects.

The evils of the HC didn't hit me right away. It was only fall term. The socially unstable HC freshmen didn't want to alienate their peers with one wrong opinion, and the material wasn't easy to politicize. The works of Marx and Engels are excellent springboards into Nike bashing; the Gilgamesh is not. But, as the HC students formed their cliques in class and outside ("You were hot shit back in high school? Me too!"), they began testing the waters, beginning every comment with, "Um, I was just going to say that..." (And if you do this, you are evil. I hate you.) By winter term, I found myself surrounded by the same old attitudes and behaviors I endured throughout high school: the recycled tirades, the faulty logic, the hypocritical condemnation of anyone who does not subscribe to the ideology of moral agnosticism.

The false sense of security I experienced during fall term, though, only highlighted the brazenly contradictory doctrines cultivated within the HC. For example, even on the third floor of Chapman hall-the Eugene branch of the politically correct Ivory Tower-some religious beliefs (namely, those of the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans) may be pronounced Categorically Wrong. Of course Zeus and Apollo are phonies, but Ra save you from the Sensitivity Police if you try to analyze post-Jewish/ Christian/ Muslim history from an atheist perspective. For example, the Holocaust was a morally reprehensible atrocity, but what about the Crusades-the senseless slaughter of entire societies at the hands of rampaging Christians? A student in my winter term history class provided the prototypical answer on the class e-mail list: "It is really pretty presumtuous [sic] to impose our moral standards on those people. Yes, what happened was bad, but you have to look at it in context."

Oh, okay: "God told the Pope to tell me to annihilate the infidels whowrongfully inhabit the Holy Land." Yes, now I see. That's far more sane than "The Führer told me to annihilate the non-Aryan people who wrongfully inhabit the Fatherland."

The only thing more mortifying than sitting through such pseudo-academic circle jerks was watching the professors invariably respond with not only approval, but praise for students' histrionics. Spring term, for instance, my history professor had a particularly infuriating policy regarding weekly student presentations: Failure to attend two such presentations earned you an F in the class. Now, the professor himself is a paid professional with a Ph.D. in his field, but students weren't punished for missing any number of his lectures. But if anyone had had the audacity to skip out on the half-assed presentations of half-interested students, that person would have flunked the class.

This enthronement of mob rule only encouraged the class communists.Former ASUO vice president Ben "Bunger" Unger demanded that our historyclass divide into halves, by his number assignment, then argue forcommunism or capitalism based on the assigned number. Upon my refusal to defend communism, an ideology I find morally corrupt, Bunger branded me an "ignorant fool." I've been shoved by a high school teacher, but I would call this encounter with Bunger the greatest abuse I have ever suffered during my career as a student. Not because of Bunger's comment, but because the HC embraces and practices an educational philosophy that makes such situations possible.

The only thing I hated as much as class participation was its bastardoffspring, compulsory e-mail list participation. National studies areunderway to determine what it is about e-mail that makes people turn into such blithering assholes. But the answer is simple: E-mail lists allow the weak-willed to indulge whatever irrational argument springs to mind without having to look their opponent in the eye. And there's nothing like retreating to your room after a long day of pointless class discussions only to find a flood of equally pointless e-mails to which you are required to respond. My winter term history class e-mail list was filled with wonderful insights like: "It's hard to figure out what's right and wrong all by yourself," and, "It seems to me that most of the wars we have studied have been between people who were different." Yes, you learn all this in the HC.

My single most vivid memory, however, is not any particular insult to my intelligence. No, I most vividly recall the expression on my spring term history professor's face while observing the student presentation that covered the Nazi era. It was a contorted expression of surprise, even shock, and confusion. And his confusion disgusted me. His confusion disgusted me because, after a year of teaching these students not to pass judgment on other cultures, not to impose contemporary moral standards on historical societies, he still couldn't understand why the students in front of the classroom were expressing sympathy for the Nazis, saying that their perspective is understandable when you "look at it in context," and saying that all of us would have been Nazis too, had we been born in Germany at the time. This was the only time I ever saw a professor interrupt a group of students to tell them they were wrong. Too little, too late.

All of these memories are depressing. Maybe I'll just kill myself.Whoa! Hold on, where did that come from? Once I regain my composure, I think I should try to figure out the origin of such a negative thought pattern. Was it a dysfunctional family? Nah, everyone's got one of those. Was it violent movies like Heathers, which makes teen-age suicide look like a game? Nah, that flick is all about the futility and insanity of self-destruction. But there must be some amoral force at work here.

Oh wait. Now I remember. It's the Honors College--spring term literature class. Exhibit A: In Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," Werther blows his brains out. Exhibit B: In Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," an executioner commits suicide with his own horrible killing machine after a visitor disapproves of the device. Exhibit C: In Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," Okonkwo hangs himself from a tree at the end of the story. An honorable mention goes to "Maus," a comic book about the Holocaust authored by a man who penned in an interlude about his mother's suicide. Material like this can do only harm unless professors feel it is their responsibility to guide students toward the proper interpretation of the text. But "proper interpretation" implies that one opinion is more validthan another. And that notion violates one of the most sacred tenets of moral agnosticism. Material like this can do only harm unless the reading audience has a well-established set of values and a mind skilled in the art of critical thinking. Most students possess neither.

I'm not implying that anyone will commit suicide because of the HC curriculum. But places like the HC produce the counselors, professors, and other social crusaders who will continue the cycle of unwittingly inundating untrained minds with nihilistic dogma.

Most high school graduates have had their minds abused all their lives.They've been taught throughout their years of public education that allopinions are valid (i.e. that nothing is true), that the only morallyproper acts are abstaining from making moral judgments and condemning those who do make them-despite the obvious contradiction this entails. College is the place where they are taught to direct this convoluted philosophy out toward the real world. And the Honors College is an accelerated training ground.

I spent a year in the HC literature and history sequences and I learnedonly one thing: The next time I want to pay $10,000 to see a room full of lower primates spewing forth piles of worthless drivel, I'll buy some lobotomized monkeys from the Neuroscience department and inject them with rabies.

Jason Lewis, a sophomore majoring in journalism, is Online Editor for the Oregon Commentator