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Show THREE-RING CIRCUS Today by Richard Barnum-Reece v '. the students at Harvard demand a greater degree of personal excellence ex-cellence from their mentors in all forms??? Are we getting the good ole Utah academic slip and slide?? If so, it it too much to ask the mentors to lead the charge into a little more "meaningful" form of intellectural interchange? Is academia the repository of dead theories in which the primary aim is to exhume and re-examine the dead per se, or is it too much to ask for a more life-giving albeit more difficult examination? Could it be that everyone around here is feeling the vicegrips of academic tenure and its leavings as the andor postulate of ultimate value? When are you people going to open up and offer something which truly begins to challenge and stimulate and hence begins to measure personal excellence? For myself I have taken a stand, I have just taken an "objective exam" and instead of taking the requisite four hours to memorize by rote five pages of questions and answers which I have distilled f notes and lectures and tex's possible test questions, I wrote essay on the futility of doing so stapled the essay and companying five pages to t exam. I went into the exam with, that offensive and inane deJi which has garnered me a cer proficiency in the academic c game. I came out of that exam W the same knowledge that I enter it minus a quantity of facts and d which I would have forgone, within another four hours. Certainly it was not the professor's fault, for he has apologized for the inadequacies o) that which I decry. He seems to be caught in the aforementioned web And I am wizened enough by the academic wars to not joust with academic idiots. But still some idiocy remains: an "objective exam" which serves no purpose other than to test one's level of tolerance in memorizing data. "Ah, come on guys, can't you come up with something new??" An open letter to academicians in response to another boring round of finals that aren't, in any sense, final. O.K. guys at what time does all this stop, deus ex machina, and we are resurrected into the "real meaning of life." Surely this absurdity ab-surdity which you people have perpetrated called "finals exam week" cannot be a true representation of anything but how one performs while jumping through the hoops of "final exam week." Could it be that you people are so practiced in the vanishing rope trick of the absurd that you have grown inured to it in the form of the so-called "objective exam?" When does the academic con game of memorizing quotes and sources and footnoting stop and creativity, innovation and thinking begin? Are we to believe that it is after the B.A.; the M.A.; perhaps post-doctoral studies?? Is the academic process simply aging in the formaldehyde of someone else's theories?? Post-doctorate Post-doctorate truth-seekers burning the midnight oil under a mountain of tomes and committees? Is it too much to ask that academia be a bit more, yes, "revolutionary?" I do not use that term "Revolutionary" flippantly. Yet the term deserves some consideration given the ludicrous continuance of a system which can only be avoided by attending "better" schools. Oh yesll I know we must separate the chaff from the wheat. Certainly that must be done. But hasn't it been done already???? When does the academic system start demanding more thinking and less memorizing? Could it be that the difference between Harvard and Utah is that |