There might be something amiss with our institutions of higher education

Sunday, January 8th, 2017

There might be something amiss with our institutions of higher education, Paul A. Rahe suggests:

Forty years ago, when I was in my last year as a graduate student at Yale, I taught in a program called Directed Studies. It was a one-year boot camp for the very best entering freshmen. It consisted of three year-long courses: History and Politics One, Literature One, and Philosophy One. In each class, the students started at the beginning — with, say, Herodotus, the Jewish Bible, and the pre-Socratics — and ended in the 20th century — with, say, Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, and Wittgenstein. Twenty years ago, I returned as a visiting professor to teach History and Politics One in the same program. I was by no means the only visitor. The director could not find in the Yale faculty enough instructors ready and willing to do the job. Teaching the very best students in the college a survey of the tradition of political rumination was beyond the capacity of all but a handful of those on the Yale University teaching staff. The old liberal arts curriculum, which is still intact here at Hillsdale, produced citizens with a broad range of knowledge and a general familiarity with our cultural tradition. Today you cannot assume such knowledge on the part of a distinguished university’s faculty.

Comments

  1. Bob Sykes says:

    We are now in the situation where the faculty at our most prestigious schools, the ones training the next generation of the Ruling Class, are incompetent. This is a problem that will resist, and maybe defeat, correction. The existing faculty everywhere are the ones who recruit and choose their replacements. And, of course, they recruit and choose people just like themselves.

  2. Adar says:

    This is deliberate and malicious and is a continuing aspect and legacy of the tumultuous 1960s, anti-West and anti-American hatred as it was.

  3. Dan Kurt says:

    There is no intelligence in the University System in the USA. Case in point:

    In the early 1960s I was in my senior year in college. Many students took the GREs that winter. One fellow in my class scored 800 verbal, 800 math, and 960 out of 970 in, I think, Chemistry. No one was anywhere near his score

    No Graduate School recruited him. He never applied to a graduate school. His IQ had to be over 160 yet no systems were set up to find intellects such as his for further development. What a waste.

    He did go to Medical School as he took the Med Apt exam and did well on that. He said that he guessed the answer on one question and guessed it correctly in the exam. I remember the question: define estivation.

  4. Isegoria says:

    I remember coming across estivation in my high school biology textbook. Great word.

  5. Lucklucky says:

    They are worse than just incompetent. They are Marxists.

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