SOME IRREVERENT OBSERVATIONS ON ACADEME

PH.D. REQUIREMENTS. We are not suggesting that every Ph.D. in English should have to compose a passable sonnet--though that might be more sensible than requiring him to read Anglo-Saxon. What we are suggesting is that nobody should get a Ph.D. in English who has not tried to write a sonnet.

TEACHING ASSISTANTS. They listen to complaints and generally protect the professors from overexposure to the ignorant.

ACADEMIC STANDARDS. The amount of absenteeism, indolence and incompetence permitted students is far greater than that permitted almost any other sort of worker.

COLLEGE AIMS. The majority of those who enter college are plainly more concerned with accumulating credits and acquiring licenses than with learning any particular skill while enrolled.

COLLEGE RESULTS. The primary importance of schools and colleges is not that they are changing the overall quality of life, but that to some extent they determine which particular individuals will enjoy the good life and which ones will not.

SCHOLARSHIPS. Small scholarships are usually offered to middle-class students whom the college wants to recruit and who it fears will go elsewhere if they don't receive some token of the college's esteem.

RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES. One of the functions of a residential college is to emancipate the young from the inevitable limitations of their home and neighborhood before it is too late. Even a superb academic program is unlikely to move most students very far if they return every night to home and mother.

GRADES. The relationship between course grades in most professional schools and occupational success is in fact very low, often approaching zero.

COEDS. Relatively few women become entranced with the apparatus of scholarship that serves so many men as a substitute for thought.

MEN'S COLLEGES. These stag institutions preserve earlier collegiate styles, like the Jazz Age pride in holding hard liquor one can still find at the University of Virginia, the teen-age muscularity of Princeton or Notre Dame, or the John Wayne militarism of Texas A. & M.

WOMEN'S COLLEGES. We are inclined to conclude that women's colleges are probably an anachronism. They try to separate women from men at a time when most women rightly want proximity.

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