The University of Wyoming approved the creation of a School of Computing, with programs up to the Ph.D. level. All undergraduates will be required to take at least one computing class as part of their undergraduate curriculum.
This seems to me to be a good addition to the university, as opposed to the eliminations in degree programs we wrote about yesterday. And the requirement to take a computing class, in this day and age, also makes a lot of sense to me.
Having said that, I really think the general elimination of a foreign language requirement, which was fading when I was there, is a really bad thing. I had to take two semesters of a foreign language (I took three) but I recall there was a way to opt out of it, which generally almost all the geology students did. I like foreign languages, and I'd had German in high school. I think that generally a foreign language was a high school requirement, or nearly a requirement, when I was there, and I'd had two years of French in junior high.
One of my lasting regrets is not having followed up on both of those topics, French and German, while in university beyond the extent to which I did. And I wish I could speak Spanish. I've picked up bits and pieces of languages here and there since then, but I wish I was really fluent in one, or more than one. And its hard to appreciate the extent to which only speaking English is really limiting on a person, or at least a professional, later on.
My parents had both had to learn Latin in school. My mother spoke French and English, having learned French both in school and in the culture in which she grew up in. My father learned Latin, as noted, in high school, and German in university. His father was fluent in German due to where he'd grown up.
I'm not, I'd note, hopping on the "education was better back in the day" bandwagon, which operates very similarly to the "the "X" bar was great back in the day, but now" type of argument. Due to my family's association with it, I know what education here was like in the 40s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s, and from that I think it hit a low point in the 60s-70s (up to the early 1980s) but its really rebounded, and it's better than ever here, in my view.
But I'm concerned about university education across the nation, which has suffered greatly from the infusion of cash into the system that started with the GI Bill and which carries on. That may sound odd, but the addiction to government bucks that came started to erode universities starting in the 1970s. Not universally, by any means, and UW remains a very good school. Nationwide, there's a rethink going on with some now criticizing that system and others, like Bernie Sanders, delusionaly believing that if its universally funded everyone will go on to great jobs. That belief is fatally flawed for numerous reasons we'll get into some other time, but we'll note that 1) there's no such thing as a free lunch; and 2) things that are advertised as free lunches usually are bad lunches.
Anyhow, the other thing I'm really concerned about is the seeming lack of a willingness to deal with an obvious budget crisis in Laramie. I agree that some programs need to be cut, and overall I can't opine on that. I'm encourage that this new program, which seems to be grasping the future is being created. I wish that other programs that UW, a land grant college, could springboard into Wyoming's future could be created as well, and I have some ideas what those may be, which perhaps I'll post about some other time.
Be that as it may, the school is mired in a now obsolete funding model that isn't going to fix itself. I know that a lot of legislators grasp that, but others refuse to do so publically. The state has stuck its head in the sand on this consistently and that sure hasn't helped. We've criticized the change that's roaring before us and that's not helped. We've even attempted to sue our way out of it, and that failed.
Winston Churchill once stated that Americans could be counted on to do the right thing. . . once all other options had been exhausted. Let's hope that's true of us. For the meantime, this is an encouraging development amongst a flood of bad ones.
Related threads:
No comments:
Post a Comment