One of the topics this secret level focuses on is game-based learning, and sometimes I also rant post about school systems as such. But there’s also higher education—and the university system in the U.S., which has been eroded, dismantled, assaulted, and hijacked for and by monetary and political interests for quite a while. Recently, it’s come under sustained assault more than ever, and even academic tenure’s now in the crosshairs. Tenure certainly has its flaws and can be exploited, but it’s there for a reason.
SMBC, my favorite web comic together with XKCD, regularly and notoriously makes fun of every academic discipline—natural sciences, social sciences, math, you name it—but it always felt to me that the jokes targeting the humanities were a bit less playful and a bit more deprecating.
Thus, I was blown away by this jumbo-sized SMBC comic the other day, with its lovingly crafted metaphor of liberal education as an “old dank pub”—so much so that I can’t but link to it here for posterity, and to make you cry too.
Don’t forget to click on the red button at the bottom for a bonus panel, and read a few other comics as well while you’re there!