[Ouderkirk]

My dear Susan....you are so oblivious to the reality. If a student was not required to take these "diversity classes" then none of this would be necessary. As an undergraduate in Physics and Math, I had to take 30 hours of crap a$$ diversity/humanities that had no direct value to me. I am still a right-wing bigot/sexist/homophobe and that time trying to "liberalize" me was absolutely wasted. It was not an option they were REQUIRED as part of the degree. I would have gladly traded Male/Female communication for Advanced Topics in Field and Wave Electro magnetics. History of Women for Advanced Partial Differential Equations, and on and on.

It's not that these professors are out there it's that their courses are required and there is no other options available. You think your job is to produce "well rounded individuals" as opposed to well educated graduates.

[RonF]

I hold a BS in Biology at MIT that I earned in 1974. During my course of study I was required to take exactly two Humanities classes; i.e., two classes that didn't have equations in the books. I actually ended up taking 3. I started a Kierkegaard class and dumped it after 3 weeks because it was likely the most depressing stuff I ever read and my fraternity brother and I decided that the guy was crazy and made no sense at all. Music theory was a good one for me because I sang in the MIT Concert Choir; these days singing in the Choir (plus preparing two works for solo presentation) counts as a Humanities class. I also took a class on Fantasy and Science Fiction that the instructor, after reading our first sets of papers, decided to turn into a writing course. It's probably the one class whose content I still use of all the ones I took at MIT.

I was also required to take two Phys Ed classes. I passed one of them by taking a semester of Pistol Shooting. I got pretty good at it.