Concerned for the disappearance of the arts, professors have come up with a new degree program to ensure its survival.
Professors at the University of Tulsa are aiming to bring engineering back to the “Phillips Engineering” art school building. A group composed of five engineering professors and TU’s last art professor met over the summer to propose the creation of a new degree program.
The program, called “Art Engineering,” aims to integrate the technical skills of engineering into the creation of art. Art Engineering will be the key to keeping the arts alive within the university by sneaking it into the “professional super college,” which is gated by the business, engineering and computer science programs. The keyword “engineering” will be the program’s pass into the exclusive club.
There are plans to make Art Engineering a four-year degree program, though only one class has been created so far: Introduction to Art Engineering, or ANES-1000 (pronounced like “anus,” but stands for “Art N’ Engineering Superprofessionalcollegespectacular”). The class made its debut this semester, taught by a mechanical engineering professor who is an avid believer of the ideology “anything is art.”
Many art majors grew insecure about their choice of degree after last year’s True Commitment revision and were unsure of which engineering/business/computer science program to eventually be corralled into. These students were first choice candidates for the class’s enrollment, but engineering students were invited to enroll as well.
ANES-1000 focuses on steering students away from “designing” art and instead “engineering” art. Corporations and employers want to hire “art engineers,” not wimpy “graphic designers” or “artists”.
Paintbrushes, pencils and markers are nowhere to be found in the classroom. Art is to be created on the computer utilizing applications used in engineering contexts, like AutoCAD and Microsoft Excel, rather than art programs like Photoshop.
Upon visiting the class, the atmosphere was mixed. Those who were engineering majors reported that they breezed through the class, simply submitting straight lines with dimensions on them and calling it art, to which the professor approved. However, students who were art majors were observed crying as they worked tediously on their art engineering projects.
One student sobbed, “I have such a vivid idea I want to create, but I can’t translate it into reality using a mouse and a keyboard. How the hell am I supposed to blend colors in Excel? Oh man, why did I come to the University of Tulsa to major in art? I could have made hundreds at home drawing porn for horny rich people on the internet instead of being here in debt.” Other students within earshot began crying as well.
The original delegation of professors who brought Art Engineering to life proudly claim that “this is the first thing we’ve ever engineered that looks like it might actually work instead of blowing up.” All of the engineering professors now consider themselves to be honorary art Ph.D. holders, thanks to the ideology that “anybody can be an artist.”
One of the mechanical engineering/art professors shed a tear as he saw students walking into ANES-1000 on the first day of classes. He reported, “You know, all my life I never considered myself an artist, and possibly even a failure of an engineer. I went back to my office, dug up my CAD drawings from that time I tried to design a self-destructing Furby, and printed them out. They’re framed up at home above my fireplace. My wife hates them, but that night I told her, ‘Honey, that’s art I made right there. That’s art engineering.’”
Another section of ANES-1000 is planned for the spring semester, along with the debut of ANES-2000, which is “The History of Art Engineering.” A half-melted Furby is proposed to be featured on the front cover of the very lithe class textbook.
