[Seth Says] Course Correction
teachers are great, colleges are under attack, and I write wedding vows
Q: Why do some universities send so many spam messages on LinkedIn?
A: They hired lots of AdJunk professors.
Well, it's almost September which means college starts in a week or two. (Well, the colleges here. See local listings for details.) And this year colleges are doing less well (and less good!) than previous years.
UChicago is apparently super-over-leveraged in debt. Lots of other colleges are doing not at all well financially. Obviously the government isn't helping, between withholding funding and banning/threatening international students. And that still isn't enough for them, they want more oversight to make sure no one's teaching the kind of controversial and dangerous ideas they're trying to scrub from the Smithsonian, such as "Slavery was bad, actually."
Big shout out to teachers, who do such an important (and underappreciated) job especially when they care about equipping kids to deal with the actual world and engage with it empathetically in a way that supports humanity. Which again, is very much frowned upon by TPTB (Ted's Prejudice & Tyranny Barn).
COLUMN ME MAYBE
This all had me thinking about what sort of college curriculum is acceptable to the current regime, which led to this week's column:
Federally-approved College Course Catalog
You can get a sneak peek here:
Dear Incoming Students,
As you may have heard, we at the National University of Thoughtful Study recently signed an agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal funding to our university. In exchange, we have granted the administration some control over our hiring, admissions, disciplinary process, speech, limbs, and academic offerings. But please rest assured we will continue to offer a nearly-top-notch education, as you can see from our newly-revised Fall 2025 Course Catalog:
AFRO 101 - Introduction to African-American Studies
(This course removed)
...
AGRC 101 - American Agriculture
From our Founding Fathers whose fields magically harvested themselves, to today's massive farms which also magically harvest themselves, this course will discuss the wonders of American agriculture and how we continue to provide food for the world's greatest country: Through hard work, American know-how, and certainly not any sort of underclass who we discriminate against while relying on their labor.
...
ENVI 201 - Fossil Fuels Are Friends
While other countries have made great strides in green energy through wind and solar, America's great strength is its inability to advance beyond 1950. We'll study why coal (Santa loves it!), oil (Texas tea!), and gas (Natural!) are much healthier for the environment than evil wind turbines (ugly!) and solar cells (drain the sun!).
...
MATH 304/PHIL 304 - Ethical Statistics
What responsibility do statistics have to convey the truth in our hearts? This course will examine why it is unjust for job statistics to show the economy crumbling when we know it's doing great, or for statistics to show that crime rates are down in major cities when we know crime is a big problem.
I wish this was just satire, but it was only a year or two ago I was writing satire about Florida trying to pretend the Tuskegee Airmen never existed, and then the bastards went and actually did it. So, uh, sorry if I'm Internet Cassandra (only less pretty), but like most sci-fi or satire writers, I'm just writing about what I see and pretending it's later.
READER MAILBAG
I was pleasantly surprised to see a letter to the editor in the Eagle the other day appreciating my previous column. On one hand I guess it feels a little braggy (C'mon there lil' braggy, there's a good boy!) to share it here, but on the other hand the newsletter is free and I'm not selling you anything, and on the other other hand (I knew I shouldn't have eaten that radioactive waste!) ostensibly you are the people most interested in hearing about my smallest triumphs (finally recycled some of the cardboard boxen that were clogging up the porch)(yes boxen is my preferred plural)(of box, that is. I wouldn't want to be referred to in the plural as boxen.)(preferred pronouns, and non-preferred nouns)
Anyway, letter:
To the editor: Seth Brown's Aug. 7 The Pun Also Rises column "Will work for food" was dead-on true. I only wish millions of people could read and appreciate the sentiment. Thank you, Seth, and thank you, Berkshire Eagle, for publishing such columns.
Obviously millions of people aren't in the cards, but if you didn't catch the excerpt in my last newsletter, here's the column rerun in the Banner:
Regardless, it's always nice to know that people are appreciating the columns since it's very much different from stand-up or improv comedy where you're on stage and getting that immediate feedback to know someone appreciates what you're doing (or thinks you suck).
Actually, I used to have a stand-up bit about that, how a big reason video games are so popular is because they offer clear goals and positive feedback, whereas a cashier who finishes checking out their thousandth customer never gets an angelic chorus as beams of light descend from heaven to illuminate them, upgrade their cash register drawer to silver, and grant them a permanent 4% increase to scan speed. (whereas that's par for the course in an aRPG.)
And yeah, I guess that's not unrelated to the last column since it's all about how most work is underappreciated. But anyway, with back to school happening now or soon, I want every teacher to know: You are great and what you're doing is really important! And to all my other readers, you're also great and what you're doing is located somewhere on a sliding scale from "really important" down to "sort of dumb but pays for you to keep existing and thus is important for that reason if nothing else". (in a tiny font, because otherwise it wouldn't fit on the scale.)(that was a terrible joke, on balance)
The work I do runs the gamut and probably the preponderance of it falls in the "sort of dumb" category, but my favorite work these days tends to be writing wedding speeches.
PRIDAL SHOWER
This month I had a previous client for whom I'd written a best man speech come back and ask me to help him with his wedding vows. This was a treat for me, and also a challenge because while I have a lot of experience writing best man (and maid of honor, and father of the bride, and mother of the barmitzvah, etc.) speeches... wedding vows are a whole different kettle of fish. ("why did you put a kettle of fish on our registry?" "because we already had a carafe of birds!")("Carafe of Birds" is my Flock of Seagulls cover band)
My usual prompting questions didn't apply, and my usual frames of approach also didn't apply, and while I always build my speeches out of the information the client gives me, this time that just didn't seem good enough. So between his notes and my questions I probably had him write 3,000 words, and then I cut most of them and rearranged the rest and managed to assemble vows that were much more impactful but still written pretty much entirely by him.
It was a lot more constrained working this way, since I'm used to being able to use words to paint whatever I think would look best, and this was more of having to use the limited pieces available to make a collage (and I gave it the old collage try). The result seemed good to me (and, more importantly, to the client) but it was definitely a step up in difficulty for a (narrative) control freak like me who is used to being able to map out the arc of the speech first and then figure out how to make it say exactly what I want.
Luckily I can blather endlessly in this newsletter and say whatever I want with no end in sight.
THE END IS IN SIGHT
("Oh my god Becky look at her butt!") That about wraps it up for this week's edition of Professor Blatherton's Useless & Needlessly Detailed Journaling. As always, I thank you for reading, will be back in two weeks with another column, and remember that you never have to stop learning... they just stop giving you personal pan pizzas for doing so.
Professing all sorts of nonsense,
Seth