A Guide to Picking a College Major

Philosophy is the biggest scam in academia. I ought to know; it was my undergrad major. In philosophy, you don't have to be right; you just have to sound like you're not wrong.

That's true. In the discipline's defense, though, teaching students to do that is a lot harder to do than it looks.

I taught political philosophy for five semesters at a highly selective, well respected university, and in my experience, it was the rare undergraduate who could achieve "not wrong-ness." The rest clung to the wrongs of life with a death grip of tempered determination no text or lecture could loose. I tried. God, how I tried! The experience, to quote Thomas Wolfe, was like "trying to strike sparks in minds that held no flint."

Honestly, there were a couple of papers that made me suicidal. The prospects of a future with their authors' hands on the reins of power were just that bleak.