I’m a fifth-year senior, and I’m still taking GECs. Why, although I have been here for five long years, must I still take freshman-style cram and regurgitate classes? Our fair university tells me that I need to be a well-rounded individual and that taking a variety of subjects will aid me in accomplishing this difficult task.

Why do we have to take a multitude of useless classes? So that our institution of higher learning can have more of our money.

Take, for example, the average 100-level lecture/recitation format class. Students sit in a ridiculously-crowded lecture for 48 minutes a day to hear some professor who really doesn’t want to be there either cram garbage into their heads in hopes that some microscopic thread of it will hold long enough to get them through the midterm.

The student gets nothing out of this. They remember the bare facts, just enough to net them a passing grade on the midterms and the final. The exams themselves are just multiple-choice Scantrons anyway, and with a little luck, students can fake their way through those as well. The student gains nothing, and succeeds only in wasting money, his or her own time and the professor’s time. The materials covered, at break-neck speeds, the exams cover the basic minimum facts and the enjoyment and enrichment factors are nearly non-existent.

Let’s not be mistaken, though. Some of these courses can open an individual up to material they find interesting, and in their earlier years, this person may choose to follow one of these disciplines. The courses that are problematic, however, are the courses that have nothing to do with an individual’s chosen track, once that direction has been taken.

Engineering could easily be a three-year degree, if the university would allow the student to take the full engineering track. The same holds true for a liberal arts student. Why does a graphic arts major have to take a lab science in which he sor she has no interest?

The simple fact that the courses are required creates a dislike for the material in the student. By forcing information down his or her throat, any hope that he or she will get any type of reward out of it is immediately flushed down the toilet. The manner in which these courses are taught borders on the reconditioning scene in “A Clockwork Orange.” Ask me what I learned in Chemistry 121. Which I took the spring of 1998, and I’ll tell you that I hate chemistry, I still have a shirt with acid burns on it and the girl who worked next to me in the lab was cute. Also, there’s a table with bunches of letters and squares, something about a period. I got a B.

Another problem is the amount of information that these classes attempt to bang into our heads in the time specified. Ten weeks is hardly enough time to cover physical anthropology’s history, methodology and use in present day with any sort of depth or enjoyment.

I am going through the “baseball card” lectures, which cover the minimum statistics of all or most of the primates in the entire world. Scientific name, habitat, location, diet, etc., then on to the next one. What about the ‘why’ questions? The teacher’s assistant is forced to cover just the facts and whip through them so that he can get his curriculum covered. He gets little to no joy out of that and neither do the students.

The solution to this problem would be to reduce the number of core GEC requirements and give students more of an option to bridge out and study fields that they find interesting. If a student chooses to totally ignore a certain subject, but seeks to specialize in a completely unrelated subject, he or she should have that freedom.

A university used to be a place where students came to learn for the sake of learning, not to pay exorbitant amounts of money to be shot through GECs in which they learn nothing, and still have to take three more years of classes to graduate. Most of us in a state school don’t have the money to waste on classes that we don’t want to take and material we aren’t going to remember. I hate it here.

Eric Harrelson is a senior in English. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].