Best Few Sentences I Read Today, University Edition
19 September 2008 at 8:46 am Peter Klein Leave a comment
| Peter Klein |
Fred Schwarz, writing about University programs to have incoming freshmen read and discuss a particular book (usually a propaganda piece like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed but in this case Garry Wills’s tedious Lincoln at Gettysburg):
I dislike the whole idea of making everyone read the same book. . . . Why do college administrators persist with schemes like this? They usually say they’re meant to give students “something in common.” So administrators spend half their time dividing students into groups by race, sex, religion, and so forth, and emphasizing their differences; then they spend the other half devising programs, workshops, and silly ideas like this to help everyone overcome them. Nothing surprising there; running a university, like many jobs, is largely a matter of making work for oneself.
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