Back in October, Harvard’s president Drew Faust penned an article for USA Today in which she dished out a heaping plate full of smiley face cliches about higher education: more money, healthier lifestyles, greater civic engagement, and of course, the way college “opens minds and worlds in ways that defy measurement.”

True for some, but for a great many young Americans, the college experience is nothing like that. For contrast, I suggest reading Eileen Toplansky’s Nov. 8 American Thinker article “I Did Not Come to College to Read.” Toplansky, who teaches English at Union County College in New Jersey, finds little of that mind opening going on. “What more instructors are faced with is a classroom of bored students who would rather stare into space than actually tackle the lesson at hand. And remember that for financial aid purposes, ‘D’ and ‘D-’ are passing grades.”

The college environment hardly consists of deep thinking about academic disciplines and mankind’s problems. Instead, students are bombarded with rhetoric on the panoply of leftist causes. Faculty members have to concentrate on how to get students who don’t want to do assignments to make some effort.

Higher education? It’s barely education at all.