One point I am curious about is what your army of cousins
majored in. Often, in certain undergraduate
professional schools, and certain hard science majors, the liberal
arts requirements are de-minimus, and can be met in large part
with elementary languages courses, and things like "Business
English." One of the most common college courses is Elementary
Spanish, and that does not reflect an affinity for Hispanic
culture, but merely a desire to boss Jose and Maria around more
efficiently. I doubt very many people major in core liberal arts
fields without taking any history.
Incidentally, I think C.S. Forrester's "Nelson Test" applies. "No X
can do very wrong who Y," is the general case of Nelson's
fighting instructions at Trafalgar: "No captain can do very wrong
who places his ship against that of the enemy." Similarly, no
professor can do very wrong who enrages the governor to the point
that the governor loses his cool, and adopts the tactics of a
Soviet commissar. The mere fact of Cronon having managed to
draw fire is, in and of itself, grounds for commendation.
[Bray responded with a list of "the usual suspects,"
undergraduate Business Administration, Elementary Education,
etc. I was then able to address these in detail.]
Part of the rationale of education programs is essentially to keep
school-teaching from being a kind of high-level unemployment
insurance, eg. an engineer teaching math and science in high school,
while waiting for a high-tech industry slowdown to burn itself out.
Back in the 1920's, John T. Scopes, of monkey-trial fame, was
teaching while waiting to get into grad school, and eventually wound
up as an oil-company executive, having started as a geologist.
That means the professional school-teachers have to create a
sort of esoteric mumbo-jumbo in order to have long-term careers. The
whole point is to make school-teaching unattractive to highly
qualified people with only a year or so to spare. You understand, I
went to a New England prep school in the 1970's, where the
junior teachers were all like that. I learned much of my chemistry
from a pre-med-student, who wanted to save a bit of money for med
school, and who also taught a short course in the Rationalist
Philosophers (*). I very much doubt that the pre-med-student
had ever taken a course in how to teach science-- all he had was a
thorough grounding in organic chemistry, biochemistry, and
molecular biology.
(*) Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza; a group of leading
seventeenth-century mathematicians and physicists who made a last
effort to prove the existence of God before science and religion
parted company.
As for Business Administration, I dug out an old University of
Oregon catalog, and looked at the recommended program
for pre-business-administration majors:
Freshman year: Freshman English, Math, Psychology or substitute,
Literature/Foreign Language, Business Administration/elective.
Sophomore year: Math, Economics, Business Administration,
Literature/Foreign Language, elective (science).
Technically, this meets distribution requirements, but it is
still pretty narrow. History is usually classified as a
social science, and is driven out by Economics and
Psychology, social sciences which purport to be
technologies of manipulation. The mathematics isn't to a very
high standard, but business administration does not
attract the mathematically talented, so the business
administration students would have work at learning enough
mathematics to understand accounting. Someone who had
done enough Spanish in high school to secure exemption from the
freshman course could take the sophomore course as a freshman,
and then a Spanish composition course as a sophomore, and gain a
usable command of the language.