Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: the economy just isn’t what it was. Everyone has been affected by the national drop in employment, and recent college graduates have been some of the hardest hit. Humanities majors, in paticular, have suffered from the dip. As they see their liberal arts degrees failing to produce any form of income, some ask whether or not their chosen major can support them in the professional world.
In order to combat this declining number of unemployed Humanities majors, the University has agreed to construct a new café in Wyatt Hall that will be staffed solely by Humanities graduates.
Employees will be hired based upon their ability to write an essay critically analyzing the relationship between the average citizen and their coffee. Of course, there is no right or wrong answer, but the structure of their argument will provide employers with a sort of cover letter.
In order to justify the dense and often mundane reading humanities majors must do, there will be a required reading list for all potential employees. A suggested list of required authors and texts is said to include Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Joyce’s Ulysses and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. New employees will then start their career at the café writing down selected inspirational works from those works on the paper cup wrappers.
Martin Dinkle-Finesworth, class of 2010, for one, is excited about his new entry-level position.
“It’s kind of like writting fortune cookies, except instead of trite clichés written by white entreprenuers to take advantage of American cultural ignorance, they’ll be snippets of the written word penned by humanity’s greatest thinkers. And then transcribed on to pieces of crinkled cardboard by depressed Humanities graduates, and served to naive Humanities undergraduates, of course,” he said.
Music majors and graduates, on the other hand, have formed a committee to try to halt the opening of the Wyatt Café.
“Humanities kids already have Diversions,” percussion major Percy Hortenshort-Berkanowitz said. “Do you know how few people actually make a living playing instruments? Two-thirds of all Puget Sound music students end up banging on five-gallon plastic drums in New York subways.”
When asked where he got that figure, Hortenshort-Berkanowitz revealed he had not actually taken a math class past “that minus sign with the two dots.”
For now, University officials have not commented on the possiblity on a Music Building café, only muttering something about there being too many mushrooms on Todd Field.