After reading of the latest example in the news of a “distinguished professor” at a major American university revealing himself to be a boob, a fraud, and a moron (one Ward Churchill of the U. of Colorado, who compared the innocent victims of 9/11 to the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann) I ran across this enlightened description of the typical American university:
“[T]he great majority of American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really civilized country, they would be closed by the police . . . In the typical American state they are staffed by quacks and hag-ridden by fanatics. Everywhere they tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of idiocy. Not one professional pedagogue out of twenty is a man of any genuine intelligence. The profession mainly attracts, not young men of quick minds and force of character, but flabby, feeble fellows who yearn for easy jobs. The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in education, at most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window dressing . . . . Their programmes of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane.”
From H.L. Mencken, “The War Upon Intelligence,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 31, 1928.
8:18 am on February 8, 2005
