Statler State of Mind

Of the 161 Things to do at Cornell, I'd say that "making fun of hotelies" is a rather large oversight on the list. I'd venture a guess that people are more likely to make fun of hotelies than, say, "milk a cow."

But nothing could be more removed from reality.

With the benefit of hindsight and maturity, I'd say that hotelies had the best go of it at Cornell, bar none.

This is true especially if you subscribe to the notion that the most important part of college are the academics.

Sure, architecture is pretty essential and engineering is something nice to know if you're going to rescue 33 trapped miners. But let's leave the actually practical and useful majors and schools out of this, since they are inconvenient to my analysis.

I'd be lying if those classes at the hotel school don't sound awesome. In order to be able to take the spirits class, you had to take the beers class. And in order to take beers, you had to go through wines.

Then they have the new viticulture and enology major. Or "Introduction to Casino Operations." Or the meat class, where the final exam is in the slaughterhouse and involves butchering a newly dead cow, followed by a cook-out where you can grill the Prime Rib that you just harvested with your own, bloody hands.

These are useful classes. And they're fun. And they're complemented by less fun but probably more useful classes like Corporate Finance and Business Law.

Meanwhile, I was an English major, sitting in a dark classroom listening to Victor drone on about how Lady Mary Wroth's poems are more representative of the Elizabethan tropes of phallocentrism and temporal displacement than John Donne's sonnets. Then we'd adjourn and go to Stella's, where the women would wear turtlenecks and the men would cross their legs at the knees and everybody would make fun of Hemingway. Later, we'd go home and work on our 20-page papers about how gendering and post-capitalistic hegemony neuterized the Bronte sisters.

And I had the gall to mock hotelies.

Look, I love the liberal arts. I'm not going to sit here and say that my college education wasn't useful.

But I will sit here and say that classes like "Super Smash Brothers Melee Theory and Practice" are really, really, really useless. That's an actual class at Oberlin. If you click through to that link, you'll find equally useless classes at similar liberal arts colleges. "Philosophy and Star Trek," anyone?

The trick is blending practical education with a liberal arts education in a balanced way. Spectacular insight, right? You think it would be easy. Why can't we combine the two in a way that gives you a basic humanistic foundation upon which you can build a practical, tangible skill set?

Cornell, show me what you got.

"How about HADM 5590: Derrida and the Philosophy of Hospitality?"

Sigh.