| Yeah, that's the thing... It's easy to do art history badly and get a good grade in an intro class. It's difficult to do art history well. It's amazingly difficult to become a noted art historian. I fathom that it'd be harder for me to become a noted art historian than it would be to get to design skyscrapers, but that also might be because I've gotten to the point where they let me do the one, but not the other, so the other seems harder... I dunno.
The capacity for challenge is there... But I'd say that within certain programs, yeah, it can be a blowoff major. Someone once told me that a non-technical academic major (at Rice we called them "academs" or "slackadems") can be as easy or as difficult as you make it. I kind of tend to believe that, and I would presume that the uncle of the friend of the OP's tends to hire the ones that make it difficult.
But it's still screwed up that he won't hire engineers, because like there are different levels of gusto with which art historians attack their degrees, there are different levels of gusto with which engineers approach people-situations. |