Why College Elective Courses Are Great
I wish I could take a course on Kendrick Lamar.
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Temple University just announced that it will offer a course this upcoming semester entitled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City,” taught by Professor Timothy Welbeck.
As you may recall, Mr. Lamar headlined the Super Bowl LIX halftime show, which was seen live by 138 million people worldwide, the most ever — about the total number of Americans who watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969.
The responses from many conservatives online to this announcement have been predictably histrionic. They’re annoyed. They’re angry. They’re claiming this is proof that a college education no longer means anything.
Yet again, we're in one of those moments when a college offers an interesting elective course, and clowns online get all huffy about it and whine that college education has become trivial and ask what job a student will get with this course.
So, a quick explainer:
The typical undergraduate education— a bachelor's degree—is 120 credit hours over four years. Just about every degree program at every college or university in the country leaves at least 9-12 of those credits open as free slots for other subjects a student wants to explore.
That usually amounts to at least three or four courses over the full four years. Some degree programs offer more. Some students choose to use those elective slots for a double major, while others apply them toward a joint degree program (bachelor’s and master’s) completed over four or five years.
But most will not!
Most students will use those elective slots for courses on a topics they find interesting or challenging or which deepen their understanding of the world. Many students in a particularly challenging major will use those slots as a breather.
This goes for all majors at every college or university. If you major in engineering, you have electives. If you do pre-med or pre-law, you have electives. If you do theology or philosophy, you have electives. Every major has electives.
But here's the interesting part...
This isn't some liberal college campus thing. It's also a practice at conservative colleges or universities. The most conservative institutions in the country allow their students to take electives.
For example, Liberty University offers elective courses that many conservatives would probably decry as wasteful and unnecessary if they were offered at a college or university that's perceived as non-conservative.
Check this out:
The African American Experience (CSTU 220): "An examination of the cultural, social, religious, political, literary, and entrepreneurial dynamics of the African American experience from 1860 to the present."
Sounds pretty damn DEI to me. Also sounds interesting.
Here’s another from Liberty:
Diversity (ENGL 306): "A study of the literature of a minority culture—Jewish, African American, Latino, for example."
A course literally called "Diversity" that allows students to intentionally explore only literature outside of white male writers.
This is Liberty University, which has practically become a pilgrimage site for any major Republican presidential candidate. This is where Trump chose to deliver his first college commencement address as a sitting president in 2017.
At Liberty University, the few LGBTQ students there are strongly discouraged from being open and straight students are literally prohibited from dating outside marriage. Not just sex but dating. You cannot date at Liberty University.
Yet they still offer interesting electives.
Colleges offer all sorts of interesting electives that most likely aren't going to get students a job. How many colleges offer boxing as an elective course? A lot of them, but I don't see conservative detractors slamming that as wasteful and unnecessary.
(No shade to boxing, which will definitely teach you how to respond to failure.)
At Georgetown, I did an interdisciplinary major that was basically western philosophy and theology, and I loved every moment of it. But I also took some amazing elective courses. One of them was Constitutional Law, which made me a better writer.
One of the more difficult courses I took as an undergrad, elective or not, was Introduction to Acting. It was way outside my comfort zone. I learned how to score a monologue and effectively express rhetoric, which made me a much better public speaker. I still use that instruction when I deliver a speech.
Let's go back to the Kendrick Lamar elective being offered at Temple.
Mr. Lamar is easily one of the greatest writers of my generation. His style includes Shakespearean themes, Christian theology, and other aspects of the Western canon to explore race, gender, poverty, violence, etc.
In 2018, he became the first non-classical, non-jazz musician to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his album "DAMN."
No rock or country artist has achieved this. Bob Dylan and Hank Williams received retrospective special citations for their work but not the Music Pulitzer.
The committee wrote that it was "a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African‑American life.”
The elective course being offered at Temple this fall covers "Good Kid, M.A.A.D City" (2012), the album that initially vaulted him into universal critical acclaim. It's basically an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel set to hip-hop. Some academics have compared it to the works of James Joyce.
And hey, this may not be your cup of tea. There are plenty of great writers I recognize as exceptional at what they do but don't really resonate with me. Great literature doesn't require being liked (although it certainly helps). Art is subjective.
But pretending that Mr. Lamar's writing isn't worthy of being studied in a college course like any great works of literature is pretty absurd on its face.
What annoys me about so many of these conservative detractors of electives is that they haven't even explored the writers they'd probably put on a pedestal. They wouldn't bat an eye at F. Scott Fitzgerald being taught, but have they read him? I don't think they'd like him.
What about the Bible? As a Christian, it's one of my favorite works of literature. So many colleges offer niche courses on specific aspects of the Old and New Testaments, through prisms of gender and race and disability and class, etc. Are those worthy elective courses?
Will students be likely to get a job studying Ruth or Mary through a feminist lens or Jesus through a class lens or Moses through a collective bargaining lens?
Maybe not, but who'd claim the "marketplace of ideas" requires thoughts to be easily commercialized from the outset?
Isn't the whole supposedly conservative concept of "diversity of thought" intended to take our brains outside of how we're conditioned?
Or maybe... that's not what this is really about. Maybe it's about the work of a Black hip-hop artist being praised as great literature. Ya think?
These folks whine and complain endlessly about "free speech" and they supposedly opposing censorship, but they curiously can't stand any thoughts or ideas or themes that don't firmly align with their worldview, particularly from folks who don't share their specific experience.
Many of these folks claim that colleges should just "teach the basics," and I honestly don't know what the hell that means. How do you study engineering or physics without questioning the world around you? Who gets to decide which works of literature have merit in teaching composition?
The discourse from these clowns over college electives is pretty ridiculous, and what's tragic is that if they were willing to open their minds a bit and be a little vulnerable, they'd probably find electives to be one of the more meaningful aspects of the degree.
Anyway, listen to Mr. Lamar’s discography and reflect on the lyrics. At least hear out what you’re inclined to hate before hating on it.
I agree. No greater demonstration of where we are than the Musk minions. They had skills but no education or cultural frame of reference for even understanding what they were cutting. Trump, the most boorish example of an Ugly American put himself in charge of the Kennedy Center. As if that would gloss over his uncouth, ill fitting garments who job it is to disguise his obese ill health&habits.
I was educated in a way I could afford, but liberal arts&good teachers help put a veneer over my middle class midwestern persona.
Yes save social culture, save historic culture, music&art. Don’t let MAGA culture be our coda
As always your insight shines! My husband has a doctorate in physical therapy. One of the hardest courses he took for his undergrad degree was an elective, "History of the American West in Film". It was taught by the Dean of Arts and Sciences. The students had to analyze how Caucasian people and American Indian people were portrayed in film. They discussed how the cultures were represented and contrasted to the reality in history. Very relevant since we live in a state with 9 Indian reservations. In my undergraduate degree I took a semester of Lakota. It was difficult! In my masters degree program I took a class about the culture of poverty. It enlightened us as to why people living in poverty have different decision making components to consider than middle class people do. Electives are broad in scope and valuable. They stretch our thinking! I too would live to take the course on Kendrick Lamar's lyrics.