http://www.smh.com.au/news/Heckler/Degrees-of-difficulty/2005/04/24/1114281450827.htmlDegrees of difficulty
April 25, 2005
Kim Smee defends her fellow arts graduates from the class of arse.
Sitting somewhere between the battle of public versus private school and white collar versus blue is the most irritating class war of them all - science graduate versus arts or bachelor of arse graduates, as some like to say.
As a graduate of two arts degrees, I take offence at science students' claims that I do not have real degrees. Like you pharmacological, veterinarian, molecular biology types, my years on campus ground were ones of sweat and tears.
Every day, or so, I had to crawl out of bed and sober up with a splash of cool water as the crack of midday sun pierced through the bathroom window. I had to drive to university only to discover that every parking space had been greedily snatched up by a science student hours before.
When you could quietly sit in the cafeteria corner and leisurely read your physics texts, I was forced to sit with a loud post-modernist clan of intertextual canonists and brainstorm for a group project on the symbolism of the white dove in the final scenes of Blade Runner, the director's cut.
Not to mention all those lavish parties you could attend. Law students had their law revues, medical students had cruises and so on. Arts students? We were still analysing what kind of party would be appropriate on our graduation day.
While my father was as proud as punch on that special day of black hats that make your hair look like a half-sucked mango, even he could not resist the urge to make a jibe.
"What's the difference between a science graduate, an engineering graduate and an arts graduate?" he asked. "The science graduate asks why it works, the engineering graduate asks how it works and the arts graduate asks if you would like fries with that!"
But dad's joke ran off me like water off a duck's back. What a completely untrue, ignorant thing to say. I brought him leftover food for almost two years and he didn't even know we called them chips.
But back to you left-handed brain drivers. In case you think you had to study harder than us to get to that special day, just remember that we slaved over pages of theories for 10 months, but your exams were over in an hour.
When you were asked a question in class all you had to do was answer it correctly, while we had to argue why the answer was not true but a subjective falsehood of truth, and relate it back to intertextuality and post-modernism. Or something.
And when the second Big Bang comes and the few remaining survivors are wandering this Earth, they are not going to want doctors to heal their wounds and scientists to figure out what went wrong. No! The question on everyone's lips will be, how does this relate to the climax in Blade Runner, the director's cut?
So ditch your scientific snobbery and go back to your high-paying jobs without uttering a word of arts degree criticism and let us get back to reading the jobs classifieds and scratching our heads.
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