Mark Allen tells the story of how he fulfilled his history course requirement at Northwestern during the mid-1990s:

Looking over the catalog that particular academic quarter, the class that best fit my schedule was "U.S. History: 1865-Present."

Being the bloody flag waving, jingoistic, baby killing, homeless harrassing right wing Friend of The Man I am, I actually looked forward to this class. Until the first class. Our professor was an unreconstructed, unrepentant Marxist. Everything that happened in the U.S. for the last 150 years was interpreted through a lens of economic hypocrisy and brutal, often violent social repression. I stopped going to class because I could not stop myself from wanting to challenge the professor and her ridiculous assertions every single class.

When it came time to write papers, I was brave on the first one, writing an essay which criticized the programs of the New Deal as "makework, designed more to salve psychological rather than economic needs of the United States." The paper came back with this note in the margin: "Interesting, but poorly supported. Bet those WPA workers thought their paychecks in 1935 were psychological, too? C+"

I learned my lesson. I wanted a better grade, so I toed the ideological line. I wrote papers making conclusions which I did not ever believe, but knew the professor or her ideologically pure TAs would find palatable (the more I could regurgitate the better).

It was a deeply deeply unsatisfying academic experience with a subject I truly love and respect. I am open to alternate interpretations of U.S. history. I am willing to consider perspectives which do not always portray the events in American history in a positive and "rah-rah, go U.S." kind of way. But there was no genuine attempt to present anything positive in 150 years.

Things in 1994 when I took that class weren't as polarized as they are now.

When I was in college, I had a history teacher that proposed a very, um, "alternative" inerpretation of American history ...he obsessed over destroying ALL of the traditional cultural narratives that your basic history book proposes. The Indians kicked white ass, the founding fathers were craven wannabee-aristocrats, etc.

In the beginning of the semester I got into an argument with him, where he dismissed me in an annoyed/arrogant way. A week later, he gave us our first assignment, a paper that basically had to show how the native-Americans rocked the house, universally noble beings they were and all.

I regurgitated what I knew he wanted, and the guy called my name to call me up in front of the class to make an example of such a fine paper. When he put the face with the name, his eyes almost bugged out of his head.

I didn't believe the majority of what I'd written. But time after time, class after class, it was all an exercise in recycling the rigid predispostions and ideologies of the profs and handing it back to them with your signature. This gave you academic success.

Nearly every time I varied from this formula and stuck my neck out, I got a B instead of an A.

One way or another, it was certainly an "education."

Thoughts and caveats: Not all politically strident professors require regurgitation as a condition of good grades, and not all students who regurgitate their teachers' views are doing so because they feel their own views will be penalized. Some don't know what else to do; many don't even realize that there is a difference between parrotting your professor and thinking for yourself. There is a catechism-like quality to formal education that virtually guarantees that a great many students, and even a great many teachers, will categorically confuse the rote recitation of received ideas with a demonstration of genuine learning. Within this sea of confusion, there are plenty of students who try to game their profs no matter what their profs' politics happen to be--they assume, often rightly, that the best way to work professors is to flatter their narcissism by telling them what they want to hear.

That said, the stories above have an almost archetypal quality to them. They exemplify the manner in which, on today's grade-grubbing, grade-inflated campuses, one's marks are all too often marks of conformity to a prevailing intellectual--or anti-intellectual--norm. They also exemplify the unconscionable choice many students face: sell out and survive, or sink with integrity intact. College students should never, ever have to face such a choice. It's soul-killing, and it's a mindfuck. The point of a college education--and here I speak as an idealist and not a pragmatist--is to expand the mind and sustain the soul, not to teach young adults the self-destructive art of lockstep.