Maggie's Farm

Back in the 50s and early 60s, Colleges were poor, not all professors had PhDs, and the curriculum at small liberal arts schools was focused on traditional excellence. That began changing with the "new criticism" in the 50s. Then the world changed in the 60's when the growing mass of the baby boom began to hit higher ed from the earliest in '63 to the peak baby boom year of 1977, ending in 1982 (roughly) with the culture wars tucked in there.

The baby bust meant not enough kids to fill the expansion higher ed had gone through. That was, wasn't it, when the big push to get everyone to go to college started? Classes had to get sexy to attract students, black studies and women's studies and slapping names on courses to make them look really interesting even if they were somewhat content-free. Hook-ups and binge-drinking, politicized curriculum.

And the backlash is really starting, a result of the inconvenient timing of combining a recession and mass unemployment with obscene college costs
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A marvelous book is Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave the autobiographical story of a WWII vet's adventures in becoming a professor at Yale and Princeton. His adventures in the WWII Navy Crossing the Line are enthralling. He managed to be involved in every major action in the Pacific. Dry wit and good humor.

I left out the other big factor: all the ardent lefties who stayed on to get their PhDs — to get their deferments from Vietnam —and then flooded the universities, replacing the poor professors who just had masters' degrees. With declining enrollments, it was important for universities to brag that all their full professors had PhDs, even if the classes were actually taught by grad students who could barely speak English. If we don't look at the big picture, we get the remedies wrong.