To The Editor:
I share Kate Obenshain Griffin's dismay at the gloomy employment statistics for college graduates ("Job Prospects for College Graduates," The Dartmouth, Sept. 21, 1995). She is right, moreover, to voice her disdain for curricula which do not prepare students for the world beyond the limits of the campus.
I wonder, however, if her indignation -- specifically against any course addressing class, gender or race -- is appropriate. Surely, if one carries her pragmatic and utilitarian thinking to its logical conclusion, it is not only gender studies but the Humanities in general which are unwelcome baggage to the graduate seeking employment. Does Shakespeare really help where bell hooks has failed? Perhaps Ms. Griffin ought to rail against all those useless disciplines in the academy: Philosophy, Literature, and, my own, Art History, etc. These areas cannot hope to offer the intellectual weapons with which Ms. Obenshain Griffin's academy is intended to arm the student.
Perhaps our educational principles have been misguided? Perhaps the pursuit of a liberal arts education and areas of study without explicit utility should be abandoned? I suspect that this is not what Ms. Obenshain Griffin was suggesting. Her comments were not, I would say, offered as contributions to a debate on the function of higher education within our society. Rather, she was railing against a manner of thinking with which she disagrees and embedding her polemic within a seemingly logical frame. Would the censorship of multiculturalist, feminist and Marxist though within the academy achieve the desired goal of 100% employment for college graduates? I think not. The problem is both larger and more complex than that.
