Cheers to autonomy

You know those people you meet at reunions? The kind who say they wish they never left college? Yeah, I'm not one of them. While my days at college weren't exactly angst-ridden, I remember that time fondly but not with a heart wrenching desire for time to turn back. College, like school or like my ex-boyfriend, was a fun ride but not one I was looking to revisit and pine about.u00a0

However the news this week that St Xavier's College has gained autonomy made
me think that going back to college might just not be such a bad idea after all.

As a student there a couple of years ago, I watched my professors in the mass media course gnash their teeth more than once at the University prescribed syllabus. Whilst the real world around us used Quark Express to make newspaper pages, the practical exams demanded that we make them using an outdated version of Adobe Pagemaker. For magazine class, it didn't matter how relevant your content was. All that mattered was that your project was spiral bound, a couple of hundred pages long and most important, that it contained an acknowledgement page at the start that thanked the professor in question for graciously giving us the chance to compile a sheaf of double spaced hogwash that no one was ever going to read again. I also remember a particularly obtuse class about the pecking order among animals. It was therefore hard not to graduate without feeling a bit gypped that you spent three years paying to learn a load of bunkum, most of which was of no use to you once you stepped into that newsroom.

God knows, the professors tried. They had activity classes and encouraged us to branch out, but even they had to finally return to that darn booklet that told them that a six-month module in management studies was vital to the making of journalists, advertisers and public relation executives of the future. They complained about it often enough and we joined them in their righteous condemnation, but their hands were tied. My creative writing professor described it perfectly in a single word. Aargh. This autonomy however changes all that, where now a world-class faculty can infuse intelligence and common sense into a dusty study schedule.

That Xavier's wasn't producing bookish graduates is old news. We'll just be producing the best, least bookish graduates around now. Provocans ad volandum. Say it loud, say it proud.
eugiamcore tem dio diat utat alis amcon.