Vonnegut, who wrote Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, graduated Cornell (in 1942, I think) and was an editor for the Cornell Daily Sun. Read his obituary in Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18081655/site/newsweek/

I was unfortunately (or fortunately) unable to attend the lecture earlier this week by White House press maven Helen Thomas, but a line from the online Cornell Chronicle article caught my attention:

“We’ve never been in worse shape as a country.”

Really, Ms. Thomas? Granted, the Iraq adventure might not be going so well, but to be able to say that the country is in its worst shape right now shows either a willful ignorance of American history, or a demogogical dishonesty. Are we in worse shape now than, say, between the years 1861-1865, when 600,000 men died in battle on U.S. soil? Or how about the 1930s during the depths of the Great Depression with its staggering unemployment and hunger? The idea that Helen Thomas could say something like that with a straight face, and probably get plenty of students and faculty to applaud her, is baffling to say the least.

One could argue from a conservative perspective that the cultural climate of modern America has plunged to new lows with the continuing abortion holocaust and efforts to legitimize homosexual “marriage,” among other things. But somehow I don’t think that’s what Helen Thomas and her ilk have in mind.

That’s excellent stuff, Sandy, thanks very much.

College has become just an expensive prolongation of high school. It used to be a place where you learned things. For instance:

The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics. (Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah)

Even a very elite institution such as this one is showing all the signs of a pervasive mediocrity, at least in the humanities. Those who are truly interested in the intellectual life – a very small percentage of students overall, it seems to me (and why not?) – are not served by the modern college system. And what is the value of a college education to someone who has no interest in the intellectual life? Why not go to vocational school?

Charles Murray’s article on the same topic is a must-read:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009535

These comments from John Derbyshire are also interesting:

A conservative—I had better say, paleoconservative—acquaintance of mine is fond of saying that the two body blows against the USA in the past half century were, first, the 1965 Immigration Act, which fired up the odious doctrine of multiculturalism, and second, the Griggs v. Duke Power decision of 1971.

The second of those is of course much less well known than the first. It essentially rules that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids employers giving aptitude tests to prospective hires. In other words, it forbids an employer from trying to find out how smart you are before hiring you.

The result is, that employers need a proxy for smarts. The obvious proxy is a college degree. Our colleges and universities have therefore become credentialing institutions, whose purpose is to stamp a person as suitable for middle-class employment. The actual content of college courses has degraded accordingly. What does content matter? An employer just wants to know how smart you are. You graduated from a decent college? Fine, you’re smart, you can start Monday. The fact that you accumulated your college credits from courses like Queer Approaches to Literature, or Women’s Studies, or anything beginning with “Representations of…,” is neither here nor there.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=5192&sec_id=5192