Ho, ho, ho. PPS… what a joke! My major is serious. My major involves theoretical wrangling. My major requires me to sit in Rodinesque contemplation while arcane equations fill my thought bubble.
I know all about PPS because I read The Chronicle’s report on its 2002 external review. Some people said The Chronicle grossly distorted the tone and recommendations of the review and made the department sound much worse than it was. Some people even said the editorial board didn’t know what it was talking about in condemning an entire department based on misunderstandings and—gasp—their own anti-PPS bias. But I know better.
I’m a purist. I don’t buy all the “interdisciplinary” junk they try to sell over there. I can’t believe those jokers would try to combine leadership, ethics, media, politics, social policy and economics—what kind of crazy jumbled-up world do they think we’re living in? Like that stuff would ever be interrelated.
Everybody knows the only real way to study the modern world is to pore over the philosophical tomes of 17th-century Brits. I know PPS establishes a historical and theoretical context in many of its courses, but unless the centerpiece of your curriculum is crusty old rationalists, you will never truly understand the way things actually work in the 21st century.
My favorite professor, Beauregard Q. Worthington, likes to poke fun at PPS. “While I’m slaving away on my ruh-search, my fine colleagues at the Sanford Institute seem to derive more scholarly benefit from ‘studying rural poverty’ and ‘proposing reforms of the educational system’ and ‘writing influential op-eds about Iraq.’ Ha! Poor misguided souls. You, boy—pour me another Scotch!”
One person Professor Worthington especially likes to tease is Bruce Payne. I like to tease him, too, because, well, Professor Worthington is an infallible genius. So this Payne guy teaches a core PPS course on ethics, of all silly things, and assigns his students great literature and teaches them about life and making ethical decisions through these books and ensuing discussion and writings. That sounds borderline psychotic to me, but apparently lots of people’s lives are changed or whatever and they leave the class better prepared to become citizens of the world or what have you. Ridiculous.
Being an academic elitist is a ton of fun, especially since I have no plans on being an actual academic once I graduate from Duke. The way I see it, I only have four years to talk down to PPS majors and denigrate the research and teaching of PPS profs—so why not make the most of it?
I take my classes in a squat, dilapidated building on Science Drive, where real work gets done—unlike the fancy-pants Sanford Institute. As I see it, it’s impossible to be a serious academic unless you work in a dank basement, by candlelight.
And it’s a scientific fact that the quality of a student’s experience is directly proportional to the difficulty of a department’s subject matter. You can’t argue with science. So, since I got three Cs last semester and “lots” of PPS courses are easy, my physics major provides me with a more superior education than PPS—pure and simple.
Here’s some more science for you: there’s a hierarchy of majors at Duke. From most valid to least, it goes math, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, econ (the B.S.), econ (the B.A.), philosophy, poli sci, psychology, history, English, PPS, cultural anthropology and sociology.
How do I know about the difficulty of other majors that I’ve never taken classes in? Simple, it’s because… shut up!
I will admit that when someone with as many degrees as Philip Cook says that PPS benefits from its professors of the practice, I am almost inclined to listen. But then I remembered that The Chronicle wrote an editorial about the “big problems” wrought when professors of the practice make the most of their real-world expertise and provide context and experiential learning for students. Who would want to “experience” learning from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry or former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa James Joseph when you can read about it second-hand?
In sum, PPS is obviously the worst of the worst and I’m so glad I’m not a major. Except… well… I guess the deli is pretty awesome.
Andrew Collins is a Trinity senior and former University Editor of The Chronicle.
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