Editorialiste touches on something else that I was meaning to talk to in regards to Alana’s post yesterday. Namely, from reading those two links, you would get the impression that our Journalism department just isn’t very good.

But I’m not here to rag on the Journalism department. If someone who’s actually taken a Journalism class wants to do it in this section, they’re more than welcome to, but I’m not really qualified. Instead, I want to talk about how this is indicative of a major bug in our departments as a whole.

Here’s another example, that I actually am qualified to talk about: the Politics department. I used to be a Politics major, and it took only one class to change that: Power and Politics in America. What I discovered from taking that class and talking to my adviser was that the Politics department didn’t spend a whole lot of time addressing what I thought was really relevant: politics not as an abstract, but as a tangible force. Instead of attempting to explain politics in the context of actual policy or recent American history, we spent a lot of time learning about theoretical models for how people vote, along with a couple units on procedural stuff. It was all about how things happen with no focus on why, and the models we were using were far too abstract to make any sense in a system as eccentric as ours.

In other words, instead of being taught skills, we were being taught an archaic set of abstract rules with little relevance to the modern world.

Sound familiar?

Consider the English department, as well. Josh Becker wrote a post for us last semester in which he said:

I am interested in modernism. The idea that Heller, Salinger, Bukowski, and the beatniks are nowhere to be found on an NYU English undergraduate syllabus is shocking, and ignores the literary movement that has most directly influenced the writing I read today. The closest thing NYU has to offer, for Fall 2008, is a James Joyce colloquium, which is, you know, nice and all, but Joyce kind of requires his own class anyway, doesn’t he? He shouldn’t be the only modernist author to appear on Albert. Yet he is, and at the same time I see about a thousand different classes on nineteenth-century British literature.

My point isn’t that our whole school sucks – I kind of like it here. It’s that NYU, even moreso than a lot of other Universities, is a massive bureaucracy, and massive bureaucracies are by their nature, lumbering, slow-witted beasts. To a certain extent, it doesn’t even matter how good the professors – most of whom I’m sure are very intelligent and spry – are. Our education is suffering from an institutional problem, and the larger the institution is, the longer that sort of thing takes to fix. This is especially true given that universities by their nature are particularly resistant to change – hell, the modern lecture hall is an artifact of the Middle Ages.

You know what would help, though? More administration responsiveness. Let students audit their classes and their departments. Let us be partners in trying to make our education a little more relevant to the modern world. Getting some of these classes into the 21st century might be a bit much to ask, but for now I’d settle for the mid-20th.

Photo by Flickr user Ole Begemann used under a Creative Commons license.