To be taken as a work of reality

To the editors of “The Radish”:

I would like to applaud your recent article regarding the continuing and startling “uselessness” (as you call it) of a liberal arts education. You correctly point out that in today’s perilous job market, those majors and areas of study not geared toward financial success leave academic consumers in a highly disadvantageous economic position.
The idea that the modern university should gear itself toward the pursuit of abstract intellectual thought and research is a commendable yet misguided one. How can any organization within a society organized solely around the personal accumulation of wealth ever consider an alternative focus?
Surely everyone agrees that “reading is fun” and advisable for students still in grade school, but the real question is: Does it make me money? Learning about “other” cultures and “understanding” history certainly helps liberals too timid to take a business class relieve themselves of guilt, but they don’t help you land a six-figure job at an investment firm straight out of college.
I like poetry as much as the next English major, but literature does not even foster a sense of the outside world; it only dissociates you more from reality. Even worse than a misguided soul who dedicates his entire academic career to these illusions are the innocent students from productive departments forced to sit through lecture after lecture learning about women’s history and obscure religions.
It is for these reasons that, given the University’s unspoken purpose of capital, and not “knowledge,” formation, all those useless departments unable to improve the job prospects their respective academic consumers should be eliminated by IU entirely.
I realize “general studies” can never be fully gotten rid of, but I would rest easy (and so would the American economy) with the abolishment of the most useless of all majors, a parasite on the University’s budget, comparative literature.    

Walker Rhea
IU junior