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Not even GPS would have rerouted my GPA

By Ed Goldman

Each year at this time—as college kids graduate, check out the job market or haul futons into their parents’ basements and demand an improved Wi-Fi signal—I think about how much I might have missed by attending two state universities (in Long Beach and Fullerton) instead of one of those covered with ivy, steeped in tradition and targeted by the White House.

From friends and movies I’ve learned that those schools’ rich curriculum included Latin, philosophy and the humanities, all of which made their alumni fuller, deeper and largely unemployable human beings.

This year’s graduating class, which I’ve dubbed Generation Why Not, more likely filled their four years by taking courses such as the following (all of these are real): How to Watch Television; Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse; The Art of Walking, and The Science of Harry Potter. 

Others may have become engrossed in (again, all real courses): Tree Climbing; The Sociology of Miley Cyrus; Arguing with Judge Judy; Getting Dressed, and Bowling Lanes Management. That last one actually seems practical, though it may not seem to be right up your—oh, never mind.

For some reason, auctioneering, bagpiping and puppetry, all of which are genuine academic studies, are mocked at an online site called “Weirdest College Majors.” This seems counter-intuitive since all of these trades require skills and can become satisfying careers. I’ll admit they could also morph into seriously annoying careers if their practitioners are given to taking their work home with them. This is why it’s often advisable to find a life partner in the same field as yours. After all, pillow talk is best when each party can lend a truly empathetic ear—or in the case of puppetry, available hands.

When I was in college, my peers joked about majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving or interning as a Lifeguard in a Car Wash. These weren’t real options (at least not back then). Nor were some of the courses I proposed when I edited my community college newspaper, The Viking.  One was an intro course in Pig Latin—or, as I wrote in the fictitious course description, Ig-pay Atin-Lay. Another was Intermediate Lunar Geology, which wasn’t so far-fetched considering I wrote that in 1968 and in 1969 America put our first man on the moon. So had my humor been prescient, precocious or simply prepubescent?

When I attended Long Beach City College from 1968-70, smoking was permitted everywhere on campus, so my friends and I referred to the school’s ambiance as “high school with ashtrays.” My next stop in academia was Long Beach State College, which rebranded itself as California State University, Long Beach in 1972, a move that I’m sure had been intended to make it sound like it was part of the more lustrous University of California system.

The value for me because when I landed there in 1970 it was still a state college; but by the time I graduated, it had become a state university. I sometimes wonder if I’d remained there another couple of years to work on my master’s degree, would it have been renamed Harvard University West? 

Instead, I trundled off to Cal State Fullerton, which was how it was still known, and distinguished myself by getting the first D+ ever given in a graduate course in Statistics. My excuse for performing so badly was layered: first, my dad was gravely ill and sometimes I visited with him and my mom at their home an hour away from campus; second, I loathed, abhorred, feared and wanted to murder Statistics, both as a course of study and for being a word that nobody with a lisp could pronounce without spraying innocent passersby with saliva.

Upset by my prestige-lowering grade, the head of the Communication Studies Department at Cal State Fullerton—where by now I was also a peewee member of the adjunct faculty, teaching an introductory reading and comprehension class—offered to raise the grade if I worked with a tutor for about a month. But I had to decline his face-saving offer (his face, not mine. Mine remained stonily indifferent to the grade).