Hollensworth, Lilli: Paglia

Camille Paglia makes her opinion of today’s college education clear in her article, “Revalorizing the trades.” She believes that colleges are reprogramming their curricula in order to spit out professional class drones and that any student who has dreams of becoming anything else has little hope of making it in the real world. While this may be somewhat true for the more elite schools, there are plenty of colleges still out there where students don’t have to sacrifice their individuality to impress the higher ups.

Paglia states, “But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career?” This indicates that she doesn’t believe that colleges offer enough to students who don’t take the professional track. This is untrue seeing as most colleges offer just as much to the arts as they do to the sciences. Most universities have entire colleges dedicated to the liberal and performing arts. The courses they offer would be more than enough to prepare a student for a career in that field. There are also numerous clubs and other activities offered in that field of study that a student can get involved in. Just from personal experience, I get more e-mails to my student account about writing clubs, drama performances, and art gatherings than I do about anything else. Southern Arkansas University isn’t even known as a liberal arts school so I can only imagine the numerous activities that go on elsewhere. Clearly, colleges offer just as much to the non-professional degree seekers as they offer to those on the professional track and therefore the blame should be placed elsewhere.

In another section of Paglia’s article she refers to today’s college curriculum as, “Bearing little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.” Of course Paglia got a liberal arts education; that was popular then. The 1960s were a time of human discovery. Now we are in a time of advancing technology so how can we not expect to see universities reform to meet the needs of today’s students? When placed in a large group of students for freshman orientation we were all asked what fields we planned to pursue. When the College of Science & Technology was called more than half of the people in the room raised their hands. On the other hand, when the College of Liberal and Performing Arts was called, the turnout was far less. This shows that it’s not the University that’s swaying students away from liberal arts; the students are making that decision on their own. So it is natural for a school to make decisions based on what the needs of their students are. It wouldn’t be a wise move for a University to hire more art teachers, or build a brand new art building when less than ten percent of their incoming students are going into that field. This disqualifies what Paglia claims about the education system, it’s not the college persuading students away from liberal arts, but instead is just the opposite.

With her opinions of liberal arts in today’s colleges, Camille Paglia makes it clear that a personally fulfilling education experience isn’t available anymore. However, whether or not students find their college years to be personally fulfilling or not is entirely up to them. Colleges offer all the necessities in order to shape a student into a successful individual, which path they decide to take is entirely up to them.