Mind you, I say this as a University Brat myself, being the daughter of a retired professor who taught at several public universities. We know of what we speak.
Over the past weeks, those watching for stupid statements (National Review Online in their "Kumbaya Watch", The New Republic in their "Idiocy Watch", among others) have never failed to include at least one deeply fatuous statement from an academic, a phenomenon which should make all parents of college-age students sit up and righteously wonder, "And I'm paying this guy's salary?"
It's not news, of course, to anyone who's been paying attention to higher education since the sixties knows. A couple of articles today add to the mix: In NRO, a piece on racial preferences in college admissions, which includes the following frightening data from a survey of Illinois residents:
. "What should a student gain from college?" That was the question put to residents in a recent survey, highlighted in a report written by the Committee on Access and Diversity of the state's Board of Higher Education and adopted two months ago by the full board.
At the very bottom of the eight answers ranked was "Exposure to Great Writers and Thinkers." Next to last was "Responsibilities of Citizenship." These were the only two that most residents did not think were "absolutely essential." Indeed, half thought they were not essential at all, and 14 percent and 9 percent, respectively, said that they were in fact "not too important."
The top two vote getters were "Sense of Maturity and How to Manage on Their Own" and "Ability to Get Along with People Different from Themselves." Only 2 percent viewed these as "not too important," and 71 percent and 68 percent, respectively, called them "absolutely essential."
There's another article on the different responses to the war in secular and religious universities in The Wall Street Journal. The latter piece is interesting, but doesn't really represent the reality which it indicates - the "religious colleges" the author cites are Bob Jones, Southern Virginia (small Mormon school), Brigham Young, and Ave Maria (a relatively new, very small Catholic liberal arts and law school in Michigan). I'm sure that if you went to Notre Dame or even Baylor or any other large, more mainstream religiously-affiliated university, you'd find your share of hand-wringing about root causes and jingoism.
