From the Academy

Students with natural intelligence, some decent curiosity, and a desire to know first principles are in a sorry plight in American colleges nowadays. First of all, a great many young people have been admitted to our crowded colleges who have neither desire nor aptitude for the higher intellectual disciplines, and so grow bored, and infect others with their boredom. Second, the level of instruction at most institutions is so low, on the average, and the method so perfunctory, that dull professors dampen whatever taste for ideas many students may have possessed. Third, the proliferation of meaningless and worthless courses has been so great, and the hierarchy of humane and scientific studies has been so deliberately neglected, that few students can find any end or meaning to their college tasks—and so shrug their shoulders in irony or bewilderment.

At Wisconsin, as elsewhere, the better students have been saying that the scholarship of many of their teachers is shoddy; that the apathy of the student is exceeded by the apathy of the average instructor; and that while the mediocre or inferior student is coddled and perhaps given the grade of “B” (superior”!), the student of independent mind often is penalized for daring to deviate from the current orthodoxy.

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Russell Kirk

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Students with natural intelligence, some decent curiosity, and a desire to know first principles are in a sorry plight in American colleges nowadays. First of all, a great many young people have been admitted to our crowded colleges who have neither desire nor aptitude for the higher intellectual disciplines, and so grow bored, and infect others with their boredom. Second, the level of instruction at most institutions is so low, on the average, and the method so perfunctory, that dull professors dampen whatever taste for ideas many students may have possessed. Third, the proliferation of meaningless and worthless courses has been so great, and the hierarchy of humane and scientific studies has been so deliberately neglected, that few students can find any end or meaning to their college tasks—and so shrug their shoulders in irony or bewilderment.

At Wisconsin, as elsewhere, the better students have been saying that the scholarship of many of their teachers is shoddy; that the apathy of the student is exceeded by the apathy of the average instructor; and that while the mediocre or inferior student is coddled and perhaps given the grade of “B” (superior”!), the student of independent mind often is penalized for daring to deviate from the current orthodoxy.