/Older readers know how the leading American universities, which had risen to world-class status by the 1930s and 1940s, were upended by the traumatic campus events of the late 1960s and their aftermath. Riots and boycotts by student radicals, the decline in core curriculum requirements, the loss of nerve by university presidents and administrators, galloping grade inflation, together with the influence on research and learning of such radical campus ideological fads as Marxism, deconstructionism, and radical feminism all contributed to the declining quality of America's best institutions from what they had been in the middle years of the 20th century. /
Er, what? I'm not following any of the author's points here. The introductory paragraphs read as a barely coherent rant against every major event that's occurred on university campuses since the 1950s. While I agree that not everything has been to the benefit of academics, I definitely disagree with the author's point that American universities reached their peak prior to World War 2. Pre-war, there were institutions in Europe and Britain that could match American universities; post-war, American universities were far ahead of the rest.
The author clearly has an axe to grind. I suggest just skipping the introductory paragraph and concentrating on the main claim: the pursuit of non-academic diversity has a major negative impact on the academic quality of most major research universities in the US, but CalTech is rare in resisting this.
The site's down so I can't read the context this was taken for, but:
1. Exploring more than middle-class American political ideologies isn't an example of a decline in learning for the same reason learning only Java or C# makes doesn't make anyone a better programming student.
To belabor the point, this is an awful, awful pun involving the literary deconstructionist movement mentioned by the previous poster that both Derrida and de Man were members of. My apologies for polluting the internet.
He did not say that American universities peaked in the 1930s and '40s - he said they had reached world-class status. Later improvement relative to Europe was as much mostly due to Europe's self-destruction and brain drain.
Er, what? I'm not following any of the author's points here. The introductory paragraphs read as a barely coherent rant against every major event that's occurred on university campuses since the 1950s. While I agree that not everything has been to the benefit of academics, I definitely disagree with the author's point that American universities reached their peak prior to World War 2. Pre-war, there were institutions in Europe and Britain that could match American universities; post-war, American universities were far ahead of the rest.