To graduate in ‘77 with an engineering degree I needed (as I recall) 15 hours of “art and humanities” which was not allowed to be of “any practical value.” I could not substitute biology or labs instead. When I went to the college dean and asked why he told me, “The college of liberal arts will extract their pound of flesh from every other college.” Otherwise, they would not have been able to pay those teachers an astounding $40,000-$50,000 per year when the top engineers in their field were earning $30,000.
I ended up taking, among other courses, “The history of film” where we watched such classics as “The Maltese Falcon.” The art students were stoned out of their minds. All you had to do was answer questions about who stared and what the plot was and they were always panicked by tests. The teacher would tell them, “Come by my office later and bring one of your friends; Jim Beam or Johnnie Walker. I read 20 years later that he’d been fired for accepting bribes of liquor, drugs and sex. Another of the art teachers was fired for having sex with his students as well. It was obvious when I was in class that he was hitting on girls. (And, I do mean “girls.”)
Blather...
That is FUNNY! I think you and I probably went to the same university. Same course on movies then next semester I took a history of American pop music by the same professor. I was a hard sciences major and didn’t see a reason why to work much on a more difficult humanities. What I noticed was the class was largely the football and basketball teams. LOL