Leeches Among Us

In conversation with a number of my fellow VACA majors, I have become rather incensed with a number of students on campus, and in explorative conversation with peers in other departments I have found my anger with a certain group of students to be valid in broad strokes across our campus.

This group of students is a part of a generation of young Americans that expect things to be handed to them without earning what they want. There are students on this campus that expect a degree instead of having to work for a degree, and it is these students that are the ones to blame for the prioritization cuts that are crippling departments across campus. These students (I will refer to them as leeches from this point on) are limiting those who work to the point of exhaustion to maximize our education.

By arbitrarily deciding that they don’t want to go to class, these leeches have decided that their time is more important than that of our professors and that the rest of us aren’t important either because they expect the professors to teach them what they missed instead of teaching those of us who plan on working for our education what we need to know in order to succeed.

These leeches have to be fed by someone, and the feeders are our professors who decide to assign busy work instead of teaching valuable skills, or even worse, decide to teach worthless courses. The leeches are smart, and soon realize that they don’t have to work in these worthless classes or that their work is worthless like the class, and thus further the vicious cycle of apathy.

I propose to all you professors that we should let these pseudo-students sink or swim and stop giving them a break that in turn takes away from the education of the rest of us who want to learn things such as photographic technique instead of how to use a DSLR for the fourth time during our two-year-old college career. And this is just one example, of which there are many (there are even students who, after the fourth time, still don’t know that DSLR stands for digital single lens reflex camera).

The leeches among us are causing this university to lose relevance in a fast-changing world, and it is time that the rest of us take a stand for our education and call out the leeches when they again try to steal class time, professor time, and by chain of events, our ability to be effective for change in this ever failing world.

Cheers,
Mark Fenton