The Decrepit Circus

A former college professor describes why he took early retirement:

But the primary incentive for flight had to do with the caliber of students I was required to instruct. The quality of what we called the student "clientele" had deteriorated so dramatically over the years that the classroom struck me as a barn full of ruminants and the curriculum as a stack of winter ensilage. I knew I could not teach James Joyce's Ulysses or Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain since they were plainly beyond the capacity of our catechumens – mind you, all old enough to vote and be drafted. The level of interest in and attention to the subjects was about as flat as a fallen arch. The ability to write a coherent English sentence was practically nonexistent; ordinary grammar was a traumatic ordeal. In fact, many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words. I could not help thinking of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, in which the children of the planet are all translated into some otherworldly dimension. I titled one of my books about our educational debacle The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods, based on an initially mysterious phrase in a student's essay by which, as I discovered after long consultation, he meant to say "the total epidemic of psychopaths."

This is the result of the "everyone goes to college" mantra which has come to dominate secondary education over the last two decades. Instead of the traditional top 10%, the colleges are now admitting nearly everyone who applies. Since it is obvious that the average intelligence of the students has not risen, the only way to accomplish that goal was to lower the standards -- or write exceptions to the standards for people with brown skin or internal plumbing. Consequently, the campuses are overflowing with kids who are dumber than housecats and twice as arrogant.

The universities are reaping what they have sown. They will ultimately choke on it, because the time of traditional higher education is coming rapidly to a close.