From commenter Uburoisc on Huge Serving on Academia Nuts at Pajamas:
I graduated at the top of my class with a double major from a good college; I did not enter graduate school because I couldn’t take one more minute of the postmodern gibberish being peddled in every department and by nearly every instructor, at all times. Even the visiting lectures were hopelessly corrupted by the barbaric and unlovely LitCrit jargon: “Jane Austin and the Deterritorialized Gaze: Possession, Feminism, and the Other in 19th Century England” I’d rather watch TV, thank you. I spent my entire time reading the great critics and scholars of the preceeding generations and largely ignored my professors; Harold C. Goddard has more thoughtful things to say about Shakespeare than all the current crop of pedagogues could collectively put together in their lifetimes.
Lastly, and I feel I can say this with authority, the university is the least free place to speak your mind in the United States. At any time you might slip up and find yourself before a tribunal of administrative jellyfish, being castigated by a howling lunatic from some immaterial discipline demanding your immediate expulsion. It’s not worth opening your mouth, because no one will even see the need to come to your defense. The hard and natural sciences sail along, imperiously indifferent to the fate of the humanities. By the time they realize that the barbarians have stormed the gates, and taken the city below, their floating island will have been over-run with the same hordes of irrationalism, misplaced sentiment, self-loathing, and muddleheaded thinking that doomed their sister schools. Once language is detroyed, it becomes impossible to even articulate the grounds of dissent, or remember when things might have been different.
One of the most pressing needs that conservatives and honest liberals have is to rebuild the university; not to create a new model, but to reinstate the grand one that once existed and must exist again if our common culture is to re-establish a fellowship with wisdom.
