California’s perpetual governor, Jerry Brown, draws the dreaded Chipotle analogy.
Gov. Jerry Brown, who in his last two terms has pushed, often unsuccessfully, to reshape the state’s expansive higher education system, on Wednesday suggested that California universities should be more like Chipotle.
Tastes great and filling? No, no.
“What I like about Chipotle is the limited menu. You stand in the line, get either brown rice or white rice, black beans or pinto beans,” Brown said. “You put a little cheese, a little this, a little that, and you’re out of there. I think that’s a model some of our universities need to follow.”
Clearly, Gov. Brown never struggled with the choice of burrito or bowl. But there’s a point to this strained analogy that just happens to extol the virtue of a company coincidentally moving its headquarters to California.
“They have so damn many courses because all these professors want to teach one of their pet little projects, but then you get thousands and thousands of courses, and then the basic courses aren’t available. It takes kids six years instead of four years,” Brown said.
“I know that’s not politically correct, or intellectually correct, because there’s so much to learn,” he added. “But you don’t learn it all in college. You learn most of it after you leave. So, get a good basic education in whatever field you try to do it in and get out of there.”
This will no doubt endear him to academics who try so hard to create a special niche for themselves, their “scholarship,” by offering a four credit course for which a student takes on debt in the crucial study of Icebergs and the Patriarchy. Don’t you think that matters?
The question, according to California’s bigger-time universities, is really about money.
UC and CSU officials counter that their challenges are the result of declining state funding, which has not kept pace with rapid enrollment growth, often at the behest of Brown and the Legislature. They are lobbying this year for hundreds of millions of dollars more than Brown offered in his budget proposal, arguing that the money is needed in part to add more classes.
Add more Physics classes? More American History? More Gender and Deviant Sexual Studies? Brown’s not buying.
But Brown has expressed little interest so far in their request, telling the universities to instead “live within their means.” It’s an attitude that traces back to his first governorship four decades ago, when he told UC professors they should derive “psychic income” from their service rather than pushing for raises.
If the underlying problem is profs wanting higher pay, it’s a very different issue from universities needing more funds to enable every prof to put on a class in whatever pet project they’re using to establish their academic bones. Law schools have started taking a pass on requiring fundamental courses like Evidence so the students can squeeze in more important lessons about Whiteness and the Law.
Then again, the overall passrate on the February California bar was 27.3 %, suggesting that as important as it may be to assure the wokeness of every inchoate lawyer, they might do better to consider teaching them a little law, too. If they can fit it in. Or else they won’t be ordering lunch from Chipotle, but serving it.
*I picked Kierkegard because it’s a funny sounding name and makes a certain Nebraska judge deeply contemplate his life.
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And they charge you meat & cheese prices for that rice and beans, notwithstanding they’re the staple of impoverished people around the world.
Maybe the universities are already more like Chipotle than Brown realizes.
If you’re not hungry when you leave, or have a diploma even though you lack any marketable skill, isn’t that good enough?
Last time I eat there. When I asked for brown rice, instead of the food I got some “team” who wanted to talk about some racial stuff, which was really weird. Then I got some scowl from the server when I asked for the men’s bathroom. When the bill came, it was $187,000. No worries they told me, you can pay it off in time.
$187,000 sounds high.
Don’t you get it, that is part of the program, after paying premium prices for “Icebergs and the Patriarchy” and other similar educational classes, you don’t need to travel to see “impoverished people around the world”.
You the student become one yourself.
From the op.
“They have so damn many courses because all these professors want to teach one of their pet little projects, but then you get thousands and thousands of courses, and then the basic courses aren’t available. It takes kids six years instead of four years,” Brown said.
Heinlein again.
“It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.”
Never much fancied Kierkegaard. Entirely too much leaping.
Even as of my undergrad years decades ago, the universities had figured out how to manage course scheduling so that it was damned hard to get through the degree requirements for anything in four years. Students had to really plan it through in detail, take summer hours, and exceed the “full course load” for some semesters (for which, one needed the special blessing of the administration). I never had the sense that this was for the faculty at all, but to generate more income opportunities for the university itself. In the decades since, I think it has only worsened. Young people today often have to take basic courses in large lecture halls, conducted by teaching assistants who are sometimes not fluent in English. The system seems to be designed to make sure the average student will fail (and hence, have to repeat) some number of these, so that even attempts to preplan a four-year course of study will be rendered a shambles. Throw in all the current dosage of political correctness, and we get schools doing a worse job than ever of educating students, but charging a lot more for it. The key thing young people can learn in universities today is how to suffer through endless bullshit and Byzantine bureaucracy. they would be miles ahead to simply join the military.
Thank you for explaining how college used to work. I dreamed I would be lucky enough to have someone who went to college tell us other lawyers how it worked. Now I can die happy.
We’ll miss you.
A little.
I didn’t say I was going today. Jeez.
I’m actually a proud 27%er having just passed this last February’s CA bar (just the 1 day attorneys essay only exam). It was hard. They tested free exercise rights are inmates.
But, they didn’t even make us wear our lawyer uniforms for the test. Virginia hazed us all properly by making us wear suits in late July in Roanoke for the two days. Fun swelteringly hot times.
Congratulations, Ryan. Welcome to the guild. Not that it’s needed to take the bar, but they hold court in the summer too. You just get used to it.
thanks, it was a relief and seeing the pass-rate made me cringe. I’ve been in the guild down here in the Va trenches for about a hands worth of years, but decided to torture myself with another bar exam.
The older lawyers still wear seersucker down here, though a young lawyer in seersucker doesn’t sit well
I love seersucker in the summer. Not with a boater, of course. That’s just weird.
SHG,
I would have responded earlier. But I had to speak about a dead guy at a memorial service put on by our local bar. I love dead guys.
I also love Kierkegaard, who is a dead guy, ’cause he is so truthy. His version of “truth” allows you to have it both ways. That’s très good.
From an eminent source:
One of Kierkegaard’s recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, he argues that “subjectivity is truth” and “truth is subjectivity.” What he means by this is that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity.
So, thanks for thinking about Kinky Kierk. While he has both legs in the grave, and I only have one, it is well to remember him if only because he was woke before everyone else–facts don’t matter.
All the best.
RGK
This brought tears to my eyes. Did you have a nosh with your cocktail?
Rich, by the numbers:
1. I thank you for condensing this in the last sentence of the fourth paragraph. Otherwise, my brain cells are insufficiently repaired to put the rest together.
2. There is nothing better than dead guy music–Haggard, Cash and Freddie Mercury.
3. You ain’t half-dead. We got stuff for you to do, and you know what it is. Get to it.
Your Pal,
Skink.
This song always make me think of Judge Kopf. I bet it did the same for Freddie.
Of everything, you find that? Then again, nothing stops him but him, and only sometimes. He’s especially unstoppable when he wears his “imagination cap.”
I have it on good authority that Freddie thought very highly of Rich. They were both child prodigies in different genres.
SHG,
I could never hit the high “C.” Otherwise, perfect. Superman!
All the best.
RGK
There is a delicious irony in Brown saying this at all, considering that CA debt-spends like crazy.
Irony as delicious as a burrito, Brown might say.
But Chipotle deliberately poisons customers to show how virtuous they are. Universities wouldn’t…hey, wait a minute.