The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 81, No. 16, Ed. 1 Friday, January 21, 1994 Page: 4 of 20
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4 FRIDAY, JANUARY 21,1994 THE RICE THRESHER
OPINION
Humanities 101 offers unique opportunities for exposure
Chris
Thomas
Hokay Dokay. HUMA. What
comes to mind when you hear the
name of this class uttered?
Do you think of that waste of time
that you sat through your freshman
year, back when you still had ambi-
tions of becoming the next Albert
Einstein; back when you figured on
getting that double double-E, chem-E
degree?
Remember taking the class, only
to realize that you really didnt need it
after becoming an English major all
those years back?
Maybe you were one of the lucky
ones; anticipating your uncertainties,
perverting the intended purpose of
the Foundation Courses; wandering
aimlessly through college, not taking
your required introductory courses
until the final semester ofyour gradu-
ating year. What is the use of allowing
someone to take an introduction
course as little more than a denoue-
ment to your undergraduate career?
Did you take the course and find
yourself left adrift in an embarrass-
ingly Eurocentric interpretation of the
historical development of culture and
thought?
Were there too many white people
in the reading material?
Were there altogether too many
Christians in your assigned readings?
(Heaven forbid!)
Did you skip class often enough so
as not to be subjected to such offen-
sive material, or did you attend reli-
giously in order that you might ex-
press your opinions?
For some, though, HUMA 101/
102 were the first classes they had
ever taken that gave them the oppor-
tunity to read comic books(!).
Others discovered depths to Ma-
dame Bovary they never intended to
probe.
Some were taken by the intricacies
of Franz Kafka, while many were
bogged down by the ran tings of St.
Augustine.
For every inconsistent experience
recounted by a student of
HUMA, you will find somebody's
tinique expectation for the class.
Structured rigidly and applied
JL R I
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Mahe this summer your time
for new beginnings.
Send for our 1994 SummearPrograms brochure:
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loosely, the organization of the course
leaves a few jaded and bored, though
this might be an exception to the norm
In dealing with the large number
of students that register for the class,
section assignments are random, giv-
' The course behaved as a
castle made of Velveeta—
apply too much pressure
and it oozes out from
underneath you. 9
ing students no expectation of who
will be teaching them until the first
day they walk into the classroom
From personal experience, this
random assignment can have its diffi-
culties. In transferring sections at the
semester, I had the unfortunate luck
of having an easy professor first and a
hardasslast
Because of this, it took several
weeks to realize that things wouldn't
be as easy as I had thought Still, it was
just an adjustment problem If I really
had problems with the difficulty of my
courses, I could have accepted that
scholarship to the University of Ne-
braska at Omaha and left Rice behind.
I was proud to have learned sev-
eral things during HUMA classes.
Even though I had grown to learn the
absoluteness of logical reasoning,
HUMA demonstrated quite embar-
rassingly the mistakes that can be
made when trying to fit metaphor to a
rigid logical framework
The course behaved as a castle
made of Velveeta — apply too much
pressure and it oozes out from under-
neath you.
I learned that the execution of an
idea doesnt have weight with your
audience if it doesnt have importance
to you. As a fellow human, I have the
ability to create works as significant as
those studied in class.
Whether others will respect my
contributions depends heavily upon
their ability to recognize the serious-
ness with which I execute my works.
I learned that, with perseverance,
even bullshit can become golden.
Some people have criticized the
course for its relative lack of minority
voices and alternative interpretations.
Maybe this is a conspiracy on the
part of our faculty to keep the under-
graduates uninformed.
Maybe it is a gross omission that is
tantamountto suppression ofthought
Maybe they didn't have time to put
in ten percent of what they wanted to
teach and they are simply try ing to get
as much of a background into the
subject as possible without wasting
time getting too specific.
In my experience, the course of-
fers several examples of alternative
interpretations of Western civiliza-
tion: The Princess of Cleves as the first
feminist novel, The Confessions of St.
Augustine as a diary of a religious
minority, The Metamorphosis as an
expose of the treatment of the handi-
capped in nineteenth-century Europe,
The Iliad remarking on homosexual
love; the list goes on and on.
That each work allows for myriad
interpretation demonstrates the slip-
pery nature of our existence. If the
course is able to demonstrate these
points to those most needing it—e.g.,
believers in the gospel of ones and
zeroes, the binary absolutists — the
professors are doing their job and
doing a service to the community.
NEXT WEEK: SCSI 102, or How I
Learned to Hate Chem Lec.
Chris Thomas is a Sid Richardson
College senior.
NATO
FROM PAGE 2
would gain credit for their irreversible
transition towardsthe West the credit
that leaders of these countries will
need in their respective parliamen-
tary elections.
When NATO hesitates to accept
these countries with full membership
it lends momentum to their anti-re-
form politicians — who rely on wel-
fare promises — and public criticism
of current recession.
Moreover, Clinton has made an-
other serious mistake, which in the
long run endangers good relations
among the Visegrad nations them-
selves. He passively allowed Czech
President Vaclav Havel to change the
agenda of the American leader's stay
in Prague.
What was planned *was a multilat-
eral summit between the U.S. presi-
dent and the he&ds of the Visegrad
group; instead, pursuing only his own
interests, Havel turned the summit to
the bilateral Czech-American negotia-
tion on how to shift the border be-
tween East and West behind the Czech
domain.
Misguided by his untrained advis-
ers the U.S. president did not perceive
Havel's effort to monopolize the meet-
ing. It was easy to predict that Havel,
after the decrease in his power by the
split of Czecho-Slovakia, endeavors to
improve his hurt reputation and to
secure his own fame.
The Czech president wants his
country to enter NATO first and alone.
He is willing to discontinue the politi-
cal cooperation established among the
Visegrad group and operate his gov-
ernment under a budget deficit in or-
der to quickly improve Czech military
standards.
Havel's plan of getting to NATO
first and "closing the door behind me,"
if approved by the United States, could
create contention and rivalry among
' Clinton let Havel alter
the whole American
position on the future of
central Europe in
exchange for a mug of a
beer and a saxophone. '
the other central European countries
that are more parsimonious in their
military expenditures.
President Clinton obviously isnt
aware of this danger.
After receiving a protocolarly un-
usual state dinner in an ordinary pub
in Prague, Clinton let Havel alter the
whole American position on the fu-
ture of central Europe in exchange for
a mug of a beer and a saxophone.
Clinton's day in Prague has laid the
foundations for intense rivalry cre-
ated among the Czech Republic and
its erstwhile partners in the Visegrad
group.
With the recent diplomatic conflict
between Slovakia and Hungary over
the controversial Danube River dam,
Clinton's misguided approach towards
this politically sensitive region further
threatens Central European stability.
If Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and
the Czech Republic were all accepted
into NATO now, it would hamper any
rivalry among them NATO member-
ship would provide the road to fully
functioning democracies, just as it
helped stem authoritarian backslid-
ing in Portugal, Span, Greece, Tur-
key and West Germany when they
became NATO members.
Needless to say, Partnership for
Peace won't work. Instead of express-
ing its unanimous support the United
States has relegated four former So-
viet satellites reaching for democracy
to the level of barely post-feudal
Tajikistan or Turkmenistan.
■ Although Clinton was generous in
including countries for his Partner-
ship for Peace that lay to the east of the
Ural Mountains and who thus would
take away political cohesiveness from
the alliance with geographically north-
Atlantic orientation, his evaluation of
the four major NATO applicants was
not proper. The leaders of NATO who
gathered last week in Brussels incor-
rectly attached talismanic significance
to the present number of NATO mem
bers.
They didnt realize that bipolar di-
vision Of Europe is past history and
that NATO must come out of the old
era. Otherwise it will go out of busi-
ness.
Marian S. Pistik
Hanszen '96
N0TMIN& 5 ooman our HERE,WI-
THE PRESIDENT'S OHHtSW^TO
ANNOUNCE. THE WnEWMER
SPECIAL COUNSEL, THAT'S Ml-
50FR/-1 JUST THOUGHT I HEARD
THE UNKttSIWABtE SOUNDS OF
NCWHfi AND SCREAMING-
Vi
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Howley, Peter & Epperson, Kraettli. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 81, No. 16, Ed. 1 Friday, January 21, 1994, newspaper, January 21, 1994; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245863/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1: accessed July 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.