University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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their great burden. Through these corridors walk the sorely-tried and wondering teachers who, despite their critical importance as professors or the young — a profession which as no other so surely demands their whole being — are paid less than football coaches and much, much less than bank presidents. Stricter admission requirements, more demanding courses of study, and less emphasis on good-natured getting along with the gang and more stress on superior achievement — these must be adopted (and are already gradually being put into ef- fect) to ward off the galloping thy- roidal growth of the school. Some students spend hours mastering ma- terial which should require only minutes; if they are willing to make the tremendous effort necessary to keep pace, they should be commend- ed for their works. But there are so many, many people enrolled in this University (under the laughable title of student) who have no right to be here, that the prize self-praise of local boosters, Carolina is the Har- vard of the South, is beyond belief. If the standards of the University of North Carolina are so lax, so utterly undemanding — and concomitantly unrewarding — that a student can graduate from this school never having beard of Dante or never hav- ing looked into Mendel or Aristotle, or without having studied Archi- Page 2 1

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or Tarboro (or even the state ' s sole metropolis Charlotte, and its aspiring kin Winston-Salem and Greensboro) — how much more an unmeaning cog must the incoming student now feel? Among ten thousand, what is one ? Of course the answer is that the individual student still can achieve, can reach his own goals and can carve out his own educational experi- ence, bounded only by the limits of his own energy, talent and desire. But how many are lost in the massive conglomerative classes that become more and more the rule rather than the exception? A personal remark, teacher-to-student, means more and endures longer than the most erudite mass lecture ever can or will. The state of education at the University is nowhere near the state-witchcraft of 1984, but it does border on 1964, where professors no longer assign papers because the huge numbers of themes would require too much effort to grade; where bright and amoral students take quizzes with impunity in packed classrooms for lesser-en- dowed but equally uncaring friends; and where the student who cares and asks is hissed by his seven-score class- mates who desire only the uninter- rupted hour of note-taking. Intelli- gent growth is fine, but it is a gluttonous attempt to educate tens of thousands within the walls of out- moded and ill-equipped classrooms which almost palpably bulge with ' tttanmuim Page 20

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medes, Marx and Freud — if he, the graduate, the representative of Caro- Hna, has thus escaped exposure to the accumulated wisdom of man ' s brief, curious history, the Universit) ' is at fault for not supplying these gaps in his knowledge. And it is academic sprawl, bulbous bureaucratic mis- steps, and the misguided, well-inten- tioned loose requirements of this University that have reduced the whether by talent or diligence, or luck or cunning, a sufficient number of these courses. So, Carolina can — and unhappily often does short-change and disap- point the students. But one-sided wrongs are rare in this world of com- plex compromises and adjustment, and we students have failed the Uni- versity. Most of us realize at isolated moments that we could have drawn value of its degree to a tacitly de- valuized scrap of negotiable paper. It is negotiable, for apparently those who hire young graduates demand this degree. But it is devaluized, for it means no more than that its holder (whether by his honest sweat-flowing labour or by slothful slipping through or by careful, contained cheating) has sat through the prescribed num- ber and variety of courses, has passed Page 22