The Rant

Here it comes. Ready?

I am disgusted by the general trend in academia in which intelligent unintelligence permeates articles and essays. Obviously, since ethos and logos are dead, pathos is the only means to reach everyone.

I say this because as I was searching the New School University website, I stumbled upon an essay contest for a scholarship "When should a person be allowed to take their own life?". Not that I disagree with the topic itself, I think it's an interesting subject to debate. However, the blatent obviousness with which the question was asked is absolutely abhorrent. It is making a direct appeal to the emotions to make some left-wing or right-wing extremist to evoke an essay lacking logic and sensitivity to the situation. What I'm saying is that the question could have been worded better, I believe that human life is too precious to be reduced and demeaned to a single congealed glob of words on a piece of paper or computer screen.

Another one, scholarship that is, I particularly enjoy and I quote: "Unlike many other scholarships, they don't discriminate based on your GPA, writing skill, involvement in community or service organizations, or other similar criteria. They don't ask the traditional scholarship type questions because they want their applicants and judges to have fun"

....wow....

Don't believe me, go to www.oploftbed.com and try your luck with this one.

Money that should be going to deserving applicants like first-generation college goers of working-class families struggling to escape the interminable cycle of living paycheck to paycheck is instead being wasted on slackers who smoke their marijuana and spit out "creative" answers. Well, if I was hallucinating on mushrooms I'm sure I could come up with some creative answers to seemingly mundane questions.

I don't care what political ideology you follow as long as you do your research and sincerely believe and practice what you preach instead of following the bridge-jumpers on both sides of the partisan line, I myself am a moderate-conservative and see virtues on both sides of the party lines; but I have a serious problem with schools that extol the virtues of doing nothing but making it seem like you're doing work and reaping the accolades. In my opinion, that is why Mannes receives ZERO funding from New School; they are the only school that requires hard work and dedication from PRE-SCHOOL to get in in this university and then enter a profession that gets neither the funding nor the appreciation it deserves.

Academia is dead...or at least on life-support and we all know what happened to Schiavo.

There it is. I'm done.