I know I’ve been on a lot about the academic establishment lately, but my travels have unfortunately taken me there. With each new encounter, I’m more convinced of the truth of Orwell’s dictum, “You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could say something so stupid.”
Anywayz, via The AmLaw Daily, a vicious and delicious putdown of the academic regime north of the border by one Robert Martin:
“Each fall, a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada’s universities. A few years later, they move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees,” Martin writes, courtesy of The Guardian.
“Canadian universities are closed and fearful institutions, which actively enforce uniformity on their members.”
Martin is especially worked up about tuition rates at Canada’s law schools. Pointing to a tuition hike to $20,000 in 2001 at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, Martin says the move opened the way for other law schools in Ontario to follow suit, setting prices that he writes are “both extortionate and fraudulent.”
“If tuition fees were to bear any resemblance to the inherent quality of what was being purchased, they would likely be set at the level of $12 per year,” Martin writes. “There are two phrases that can be used to describe every law faculty in Canada. The phrases are ‘feminist seminary’ and ‘psychotic kindergarten.’”
Heheh. Now, I’m not ready to tar America’s law schools with that brush, but as a general point about our own university system, the shoe looks like a tighter fit every day.