Published: Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4:34 p.m. Last Modified: Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4:34 p.m.
“We’re spending a lot of money on education, and when you look at the results, it’s not great,” Florida Governor Rick Scott told a luncheon crowd of the Northwest Business Association in Tallahassee. “Do you want to use your tax money to educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology? I don’t.”
Finally, somebody in a position of authority has had the guts and common sense to acknowledge what should have been obvious to everybody:
Anthropology is a waste of time.
And there’s virtually no money in it.
Our great universities have been pumping out anthropologists for a century, and what have they accomplished?
They’ve dug up a few dinosaur bones, and spent thousands upon thousands of man hours observing the tribes of Papua New Guinea, but these things have done precious little for the bottom line.
Gov. Scott is right on the money. not one more of our valuable tax dollars needs to be spent creating a bunch of freeloading, intellectual non-job-creators. as the governor said, we need to force the best and brightest of Florida’s students to be engineers and scientists who can help us crush our economic competitors in China and India.
Anthropology is just step one, however. There’s so much more dead weight in academia. We need to take out the red pen, go department-by-department and decide: which majors should we keep, and which need to be thrown on to the anthropological heap.
English majors: get rid of ‘em! these chumps may have been important a few decades ago, but then somebody invented a little thing I like to call “spell-check.” Say goodbye, go read Chaucer on your own time.
History majors: Sayonara. This is the 21st century, and we’re not going to keep pace in the global technology race by reading and talking about stuff that happened hundreds of years ago. as some philosopher once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” so, you see, we can all find out about history next time it happens.
Biology majors: This is a hard one. some biology majors may end up inventing a drug that might bring in billions of dollars, and maybe cure somebody of something. But other biology majors concern themselves with low-profit endeavors, like examining the lives of endangered turtles. so we’ll break it down like this: GlaxoSmithKline biologists can stay; turtle biologists, get out.
Math majors: It’s extremely important to be able to accurately add and subtract financial data, especially when you need to send bills to Medicare, pay large settlements to the government, or purchase elections. still, we have calculators that can do the job nicely, and most math majors are more concerned with theorems and square roots, which have little economic value.
Psychology, sociology, philosophy, and anything with the word “classical” in it, we’re coming for you, too.
Once we’ve eliminated these economic ciphers, we’ll have a lot of empty buildings at Florida’s prestigious institutions of higher learning. A few of them, of course, will have to be used as shelters for unemployed anthropologists, but there will still be a many classrooms open to create new, 21st century majors that can make this country competitive again.
How many of our most brilliant students would have chosen to major in Profiteering, but were never given the chance? and the fact that there’s never been a Large Scale Polluting Major is one of the great crimes in higher education.
Thanks to Gov. Scott, it’s a great day for Florida’s universities. Once these changes are instituted, we’ll finally be on the path toward building a greater, anthropologist-free America.
And, just maybe, the people of Papua New Guinea can get some peace.
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Department of English
Valdosta State University
