Arts and Letters is real!
I was just snickering along at this article about creampuff college classes and trying to recall if there were any at ND. Nah, even the weird ones I took – like “Ancient Wisdom, Modern Love”; remind me to tell you about that sometime – still had a lot of reading and writing and study groups to attend. So I was totally unprepared when “Notre Dame” leapt out at me. Check this out:
When Lou Holtz was at Notre Dame they used to give out a degree called Arts and Letters. – Don L.
Okay, first off, Don, Arts and Letters isn’t a degree. It’s a college. There’s the College of Science, the College of Business, the College of Architecture, etc. They’re like departments. And the one with all the humanities courses, like philosophy and languages and history and literature? That’s the College of Arts and Letters. What the hell do you think “B.A.” stands for? It doesn’t mean, like, finger-painting the ABC’s or something. In fact, it was the College of Business that was commonly known as the “creampuff” degree at Notre Dame (but only because everybody who failed out of freshman pre-med moved into marketing). Secondly, what was the point of mentioning Lou Holtz? Are you suggesting that a football coach has anything to do with the classes that are scheduled? Or that our last championship team only succeeded because they had easy courses available to them? Because that’s bull. Notre Dame has high entry standards for everybody, even the football team. We’re not Ohio State or Florida where we let every rapist and mouth-breather over seven-foot onto the team. Hell, every year we suck the chorus gets louder from the alumni to actually lower admissions requirements so we can get better players! So to conclude, “Don L.” was completely talking out his ass. Rant over. (Original link courtesy of Max.)
5 responses
Those folks who snigger at ‘Arts and Letters’ because they’ve never heard of such a thing are the creampuffs. Clearly they’ve spent a lot of time in learned institutions, not 🙂
My fluffiest class was called ‘Business in the Global Economy’. It was one of those subjects about nothing. One of the exam questions read: “A joint business venture is like a marriage. Discuss critically”. Ehh!
I can’t think of any creampuff classes either, although our physics class freshman year was kind of a joke. . . “And now, let’s say a prayer to the great spirit of Montana!” But that was physics for enginerds! The fluffiest classes were definitely in the business school, no question.
I think “In Shakespeare’s Playhouse” was the only thing I took that came close to being fluff, but that was in London and was only 1 credit. And the final wasn’t as fluffy as I expected (as I didn’t study for it at all — oops).
Don L. was indeed talking out his ass.
I think what might be interesting is the creampuff majors… All our basketball players at Duke seemed to major in sociology (we didn’t have a marketing major or an undergrad business program). There was one walk-on player who was a Mechanical Engineering major; I always wondered how he did it. And it wasn’t that these guys were stupid, they were just very busy with practice and flying across the country winning national championships and making tv ads and stuff.
Our undergrad colleges were the school of engineering (where I got my degree) and the school of arts and sciences. No men and women of letters from Duke.
Dude, another Dukie. And a Teer-dweller at that. I had no idea. I always got annoyed when people tried to say sociology was a fake major set up for the basketball players. Sociology is a real major. Most of the people that study Soc are normal Duke students. I even thought about majoring in it. I might be better off now if I had! I took one Soc class. It was just a regular class. It wasn’t killer, but you still had to read and study and stuff if you wanted a decent grade. The only real joke class was Intro to Jazz (because it was so easy to cheat), and the Deans eventually shut it down.
History of the Beatles….in London. The greatest class I’ve ever taken. God bless Indiana University and their rock and roll minor.