Zdeno describes something rotten:
For almost half a decade, my life was a Johnny Cash song. I would drink to the point of blacking out four nights a week, sleep past noon every day, and devote most of my waking hours to chasing loose women and an altered state of mind. I exaggerate only slightly when I say that I accomplished, learned and produced nothing of value throughout this entire dark age of my life.Was I a bum? A liquor-soaked storefront panhandler? A toothless vagrant, shuffling up and down the streets of Baltimore, peddling handjobs for crack-cocaine?
Not quite. I was a student at one of our continent’s better Universities. And my experience was hardly unique. If I learned one thing over those years, it’s that the modern University is anything but an institution of higher learning, and trust me: Unless you are still inside the beast, or so fresh from the rear of her digestive system that the smell still lingers, you do not fully understand how completely and utterly ridiculous the contemporary higher-education system has become.
Universities do have their good points — we fill them with our best and brightest, after all — but consider the bad:
While pockets of practical, truth-seeking scholarship still remain — engineering, the hard sciences, perhaps a few nooks and crannies in business and economics — the majority of students are studying the 21st century equivalents of Chrysopoeia, Alectormancy and Theodicy. Some of the system’s worst excesses have been culled in the past decade or two, as truth has a way of seeping in the cracks of even the most impressive edifices of falsity, but new methods of waging war against truth and clear thinking are being dreamed up every day. You’ll notice, for example, that no one actually lost their job over the Sokal Affair.