I have two favorite coffee mugs. Sentimental favorites.
The smaller mug was a Christmas present from my niece, purchased during a trip to the Smithsonian Museum a few years ago when she was still a young child. It’s decorated with drawings of dinosaurs. She knew I’d been especially fond of dinosaurs when I was her age, and for some reason believed that the fascination with these extinct monsters had continued into my adulthood. Little did she understand that dinosaurs lose their intellectual attraction, for boys, around the time we find out that females of our own species have become surprisingly charming… an appeal that may not be totally intellectual.
The larger mug, I purchased at the Fort Lewis College bookstore during my last month of college, around the time that I’d finally acquired a taste for coffee after four years of trying. I generally choose the Fort Lewis mug for my morning coffee because it holds slightly more than the Dinosaur mug does. Also, the Fort Lewis mug makes me feel more mature, emblazoned as it is with the word “ALUMNI” in all capital letters.
But to be fair, the other mug is also decorated with a word in all capital letters. “DINOSAURS.”
It’s sometimes tempting to pick the smaller mug and marvel, as I sip my coffee, that the Age of Dinosaurs lasted about 180 million years. How do you wrap your head around the idea that a group of overweight beasts, with brains the size of a walnut, ruled the planet from 245,000,000 BC until about 65,000,000 BC without the benefit of credit cards or student debt, and without causing even the slightest bit of climate change?
Maybe brains ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.
I’ve been following the news lately, and it sounds like the higher education industry — colleges and universities — might be struggling next semester as the result of the coronavirus epidemic. Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee last week proposed to cut $493 million from next year’s higher education budget as part of an effort to patch a predicted $3.3 billion hole in next year’s state budget. That would amount to a 58% cut in college funding, except that Governor Jared Polis is proposing to give the state’s public colleges and universities a chunk of CARES Act money — about $450 million — earmarked for addressing the pandemic. That should lighten the blow.
According to one news report:
It means colleges could foreseeably use the [CARES] money for their core mission: the education of students.
I admit to being confused by that sentence. Like… what else would a college use the money for? Party favors?
However, the colleges are wondering how many students will be enrolling come September. The future is looking a bit cloudy, and it’s not just the COVID scare.
I’m certainly proud to be a Fort Lewis College alumnus, but my bachelor’s degree in Medieval Poetry didn’t really help me get my job as a dishwasher here in Pagosa Springs. Well, to be completely honest, it’s a substitute dishwasher job… but it’s a job, at least. And I think it’s the type of job that Artificial Intelligence software is unlikely to make obsolete.
I feel sorry for all those people with Data Processing degrees, when computers start programming themselves in a few years. Maybe they’ve already started. Pretty soon, those folks are going to be hankering for my dishwashing job, I betcha.
Which brings me back to my coffee mugs.
An awful lot of jobs that required a college education are going to be on the chopping block if this pandemic drags on for too much longer. Or even if it doesn’t. Will it really make sense to acquire $30,000 in student debt — an average amount nowadays, I hear — when people like me already have a corner on the substitute dishwashing jobs?
When I choose the mug for my coffee each morning, one of the mugs represents a bunch of professions that disappeared rather suddenly, 65 million years ago. Largely, those professions involved eating one another.
And the other mug?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.