We graduate from high school, excited to move on to the college experience. We pack our bags and go off to an institution of higher education to a place that transcends the mind-numbing boredom of high school classes, hoping to fill our brains with knowledge. We arrive at the dorms, make ourselves at home. Classes start, and we attend them with gusto. We sit down in our chairs, our eager eyes reading every letter the professor writes down, scanning every line of text in our books. Our ears are bowed forward, all the better to listen to every breath the professor expels. Our hands grip tightly to our pens and pencils, furiously scribbling notes, each page dense with profound knowledge.
We go through four years of this. Upon graduation, we receive a rolled up piece of parchment with ostentatious gothic lettering that proclaims that we have passed through this academic gauntlet. It is proof that we have emerged from the college with minds that are more well shaped, sharper and smarter through vigorous work. We hang this sheet of paper on our walls with pride, framed within a beautiful heavy walnut. We can now proclaim to the world that we are now more intelligent than those of our brethren who have not received such an honor. We claim to be more competent and more capable than the dullards who did not graduate with a diploma in hand.Most of the degrees earned nowadays are Bachelor’s degrees, though there is a rise in people going for higher degrees like MBAs and Master’s. That means that most of the assholes I come across who claim to be educated hold a Bachelor’s degree.The bone I have to pick: people who talk out of their ass, and then pull their diploma out to back up their claims. What do I mean, you ask?
Take Jimmy for example. He graduated from a decent college with a liberal arts degree. He enters into a conversation with Johnny…let’s say it’s about politics. Eventually, the conversation gets a little heated, and it slowly turns into a debate. Jimmy claims that Republicans are ruining the country, but Johnny disagrees. Johnny attempts to appeal to Jimmy’s logic. But guess what? Instead of debating intelligently, Johnny says, “Jimmy my boy…you haven’t graduated from college yet. I took a class on political issues in America, and I tell you, the Republicans are really the ones who make America look bad. Why, just look at what happened in 1995….”
What’s really happening here? More often than not, Jimmy is but a mere parrot. He is reciting facts and theories that he learned from a textbook. He is remembering what his professor said in a lecture. Jimmy is simply reciting an amalgam of annotations, exaggerated explanations from his various professors. Jimmy’s professed well of knowledge is a product of those who have taught him, and nothing more. He does not think for himself. He believes that just because he took a couple of courses, or maybe even several semesters, he becomes the foremost expert in the field to anyone who has not taken those courses or earned a degree. Two semesters of political science makes his knowledge irrefutable proof that he is right.
People become very elitist and proud when they can say that they graduated from such and such college. They like to pull it out of their ass and say, “Here, sniff that. You smell that? My shit smells better than yours because I graduated from Snobsworth University. I’m right and you’re wrong because this piece of paper says so.” Try to debate with someone like that. I guarantee that you’ll have a coronary in fifteen minutes or less. The problem with these people is that they simply make arguments that their professors made. They don’t bother to think any deeper than what they have heard. What they “learned” is gospel, because that is all they know. When pressed in the heat of a debate, they will simply repeat everything that they have made a point on before. And it pisses me the fuck off.
You may have taken a couple of courses on politics or spent a year studying philosophy. That doesn’t make you Noam Chomsky or Plato. For fuck’s sake, all you’re doing is absorbing the hundreds of thousands pages in the tens of thousands of dollars worth of textbooks and spitting them back out in an arbitrary order. Get the fuck off your high horse and understand that one doesn’t need a goddamned degree to be able to have as much authority as you do on any given topic. Will Hunting had it right on the money:
Will Hunting: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in library late fees.
Asshole with shitty ponytail: I might have wasted my money, but I’ll have a degree, and you’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-through on our way to a skiing trip.
Will Hunting: Yeah..but at least I won’t be unoriginal.
People are so fucking unoriginal. They cut and paste little snippets of bullshit that they gleaned from textbooks and newspapers to create a collage that camouflages their ignorance. They argue with their emotions and back it up with a fucking fifty cent piece of paper that they spent a hundred dollars framing. How many of these dumbasses posing as intellectuals, to paraphrase Will Hunting again, read some obscure passage and pass it of as their own? Why can’t these people get it through their stupid fucking head that a person is not any less valuable or any less intelligent and capable of original, valid, and profound thought simply because they did not have the time, money, or resources to complete a college degree?
You know when you’ve met one of these elitist paraphrasing shitheels when you corner them in a debate and they pull the education card. That means that they aren’t smart enough to keep up with your superior debating skills. They cannot articulate the reasons for their own beliefs because they really aren’t their own beliefs. They simply mirror someone else’s beliefs and follow what someone else has said. Try it. Find one, and argue with them until you’re blue in the face. You probably won’t even get that far: they’ll just pull out the “I went to college” line on you. SHUT THE FUCK UP. Going to college doesn’t make you a fucking expert on shit. So you wrote a few papers explaining your thesis and all that other shit. BIG FUCKING DEAL. I wrote a fucking undergraduate thesis paper before. When I was in the eleventh grade. During calculus. In between do-now problems and homework review. Granted, I failed calculus (I was never very numerically inclined), but still. I used that paper in one of my college classes and got a fucking A on it. The (sociology) professor even asked if me if I would mind if he used it as a model paper to show future students. That’s right: I was a junior in high school and I had already written an A paper. What does that tell you? I didn’t need a fucking degree to write something valuable. Later on, I debated the same topic with someone. Lo and behold, that person decided that they could win the debate by simply pointing out that I haven’t graduated yet, whereas they did. If you were smart enough, it would be evident and you would not have to refer to your educational status. Having a Bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean shit.
So listen up all you assholes out there: Shut the fuck up. Take that rolled up yellow-ass diploma from out of that pin-hole sized sphincter of yours and set it on fire. It’s a worthless piece of paper that doesn’t make you any more intelligent. Try backing up your arguments with some real hard research you’ve done on your own. Don’t be fucking lazy and do the fucking work. If you’re going to argue like that, try prefacing your sentences with, “Well, my professors said…”
Fucking morons….
The author is a dean at the university. If you’d like to graduate from Snobsworth University yourself, contact us and we’ll mail out your own personal diploma!
