Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. “Do you know,” he said to me and a couple of other students, “there are five people in your class who aren’t going to graduate because they don’t have enough PE credits?”<\/p>\n
“Really?” I said, “Who?”<\/p>\n
He looked at me, and said “What’s your name again?”<\/p>\n
I always think of that when somebody brings up the subject of Phys. Ed. requirements, as the Dean Dad did a little while ago<\/a>. Williams had both a Phys. Ed. requirement and a mandatory swim test (that amounted to “go in the pool for two minutes, and don’t drown”) as requirements for graduation. And every year, a few people fail to graduate because of one or the other of those requirements.<\/p>\n (More rambling below the fold.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s kind of amazing to me that people could not graduate because of PE, given how easy it was to meet the requirement. I player rugby, which accounted for all but two of the credits I needed. To get the other two, I took Intermediate Golf. Twice. With the same guy, the head lacrosse coach, who was something of a legendary character. The second time I took it was my senior year, and when he heard I was a senior, he asked “How many credits do you need? ‘Cause we can work something out if you need more than the one.”<\/p>\n (The golf classes were the best way to go, as far as I was concerned– the actual lessons were pretty painless, and then you got to play for free on the PGA-quality course in town. You were required to play at least 54 holes for the credit, but you could play as many as you liked.)<\/p>\n In order to not graduate because of PE credits, you pretty much needed to make an concerted effort to not<\/strong> get the credits. As the Dean noted, they nagged students about this constantly. “We sent them a letter at the beginning of the year, saying ‘You need PE credits, sign up for something.’ We sent them a letter at the start of the Spring semester saying ‘Sign up for some PE credits.’ We called them two weeks ago, saying ‘You need PE credits. Come see us, we’ll work something out,’ and nothing. At this point, I say fuck ’em.”<\/p>\n Of course, that’s not a really good argument in favor of keeping the requirement. But I’m not sure there is<\/strong> a good requirement. The Dean Dad notes that:<\/p>\n The argument ‘for’ that I’ve heard most often is that students are increasingly obese, and phys ed is our best and most direct hope of addressing that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n but this argument is really pretty weak. Even the Phys Ed classes that involved real sports didn’t require enough exertion to make anybody lose weight, and it’s highly unlikely that being forced to do yoga for college credit is going to instill a deep love of physical fitness in a student whose primary physical activity is World of Warcraft. All such a requirement does is make various officials feel good that they’re Doing Something about a perceived problem.<\/p>\n Local legend had it that the swim test requirement was a condition of a large bequest to the college, in honor of some long-ago alumnus who drowned. That’s a better reason than student obesity, at least, but even if it were true, the money vanished into the endowment a long time ago, and there’s nobody from that family checking up to see that the rule is still in force. The PE and swim test requirements are still there because nobody cares enough to make a concerted effort to have them removed. I’m told that they come before the faculty every now and again, and the requirements survive as much because of apathy as anything else.<\/p>\n Really, if you want to justify Phys. Ed. requirements, probably the best justification is that they’re weirdly inflexible and arbitrary rules, and every college ought to have a few of those, just to prepare students for the rest of their lives. Why do you need to take PE? Well, why do they refuse to accept your Ph.D. thesis if the margins on page 63 aren’t at least one inch wide? Why is it that a Social Security card and a birth certificate are adequate identification to obtain a New York driver’s license, but a US Passport needs a second form of ID? Why do you have to wear a suit to work every day but Friday? It’s just the way it is, so shut up, and play the free golf.<\/p>\n It’s as good an explanation as any.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. “Do you know,” he said to me and a couple of other students, “there are five people in your class who aren’t going to graduate… Continue reading Physical Education<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n