College Diplomas: A License to Talk Out of Your Ass

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!