12.01.2009

No fat students!

How ridiculous is this requirement that Lincoln University has that any obese student take a fitness class before graduating? It would be one thing if it had been shown that weight were largely under one's own control. But in fact, the opposite has been shown, with virtually no one able to lose weight and maintain that loss without drastic surgery (as in, less than 2%). As I've written before, recovery heroin addiction has a exponentially higher success rate. It would be another thing if exercise had been shown to help you lose weight. Not so. Exercise has many, many health benefits, but weight loss is not one of them.

So, in order to graduate, obese students must complete a demonstrably ineffective solution to a non-academic problem, and be humiliated in the process. Lovely.

4 comments:

  1. So I guess you won't be supporting my new proposal mandating plastic surgery for the ugly?

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  2. Well. At least that might be effective!

    ReplyDelete
  3. how about the Sexual new orientation treatment, where gays are converted into right thinking Glen Beck lovers (just not in a sexual sense). I think it goes by the acronym S.N.O.T.

    charo

    ReplyDelete
  4. College students being subjected to the paternalistic whims of administrators on the basis of pseudo-science? Unimaginable.

    And charo, it's SNOT funny.

    ReplyDelete