The lesson learned by students is probably that you can succeed at anything if you know the currently-approved jargon.

Ah, yes, I looked up his bio, this guy is a Dartmouth alum.

So another privileged conservative kid from the Ivy League -- the WSJ seems to hire a lot of them these days -- manages to endure 4 years (or more?) of one of those awful campuses, suffering through lit-crit courses, grade inflation, the ennui of emailing through insufferable classes -- and survives to tell of the horror of it all.

I have an idea. If the Ivy League is so awful, show some principle and go to Hillsdale or Thomas Aquinas or St. John's, and you'll probably avoid all that stuff that is so oppressive.

Or better yet, don't take "science studies" or lit-crit; don't bother deconstructing your way to a degree.

Take PDE's or thermodynamics or molecular biology or some relativity or quantum mechanics (or all of the above). Yes, you can find all of that stuff in the Ivy League, in abundance.

I suspect you'll find the grade inflation much less of a problem, the urge to text message in class much diminished. You may even find yourself with your head barely above water. No ennui at a time like that.

Of course, you probably won't be able to look forward to a career making snide remarks about higher education for the likes of the Wall St. Journal.

From the article it appears that the course was in 'freshman composition.' It is unlikely that students had completely free choice of which section of this course they took. In addition, it is well within the realm of possibility that most of the available courses were designed to challenge frosh for their silly beliefs in things like experimentally testable reality.

For all we know, the most aggressive students were the ones who were on track to take physics, chemistry, biology, math and engineering, but the also had to take freshman composition and got stuck with a science studies nonsense. These are not whiners, they are thinking about what the instructor said and appropriately noting that she was speaking nonsense. In other words, they took her seriously enough to actually think about what she said and comment on it. In many ways, just ignoring the meaning of what she said to get the good grade would have been even more disrespectful in the sense that failure to care was really failing to engage in what was being said.

Yes, it is true that students could go to Aquinas, but their science courses would not be of the same type as available at Dartmouth or other top schools, private or public.

Note also that this kind of nonsense can be found across the range of colleges and universities. It is not just at expensive, exclusive private schools. I think it is likely that E. O'C has seen this at Penn as well. Probably not with the pathetic instructor suing the students for her hurt feelings and stress, but still in place.

If one wants to propose an alternative interpretation of all of this, it is that somehow an article from the Onion got into the WSJ, but that would only reinforce the opening line of the piece, "Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world."

Well I had the impression our victim had suffered through more than a freshman comp course:

"lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" ... It received an A ... Where the standards are always minimum, better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism ..."

But if it was a freshman comp course, of which there are probably many settions, why not switch sections? Especially if the professor is really this wacked out. Did anybody try going to the department head or dean or provost? Or if it turns out so bad after the freshman year, transfer to a school more to one's taste? If one can make it into Dartmouth, surely there are other options as well, we're not talking community college vs. pushing a broom.

And you're right in pointing to

'the opening line of the piece, "Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world." '

I take exception to such a remarkably stupid statement. It is as dumb as the stuff the left spits out about coporate executives, or the Bush administration, or the military. In fact a lot dumber.

I have disliked it from the left for decades, and I'm beginning to feel the same way about supposedly conservative outlets like the Wall St. Journal.

Perhaps I just need to move on to something else.

I don't know what it suggests about a student's character if s/he stays in a class s/he knows is not providing a proper academic challenge.

Sure, there are required courses. But any student with foresight and basic planning skills won't wait until his junior year to take freshman comp. And it's quite easy to learn on any campus which sections are taught rigorously and which sections are pure fluff. (Like the astronomy course I dropped as an undergrad when I learned that it was mainly about reading a textbook and taking publisher quizzes on the textbook.)

Jargon is of course not limited to academia (although it is probably worst there, at least in departments outside the hard sciences.) I have a post up at Chicago Boyz on some interesting work done by Laura Rittenhouse on the analysis of jargon in CEO annual letters...also linked from my blog.

It's kind of interesting that these studies find a negative correlation between financial performance and jargon-ridden prose in business. It's kind of reassuring, actually that clarity and content pay, rapidly, in the business world, and their opposites pay a price, rapidly.

There is plenty of jargon in the natural sciences but generally it has a purpose, it is necessary for clarity of expression, especially in mathematically-laden fields.

Actually, pithy non-technical expression often goes a long way in science. Think Einstein's "God does not play dice". The late John Wheeler's "black hole".

One final thought: a lot of the books in the business section of any popular bookstore are full of social science thinking and jargon. A lot of pop economics and especially pop psychology and sociology. B-school and the social sciences departments of an Arts+Sciences college within a university have much more in common than is often supposed.

Mike...Lucy Kellaway had a wonderfully snarky article in yesterday's Financial Times suggesting that much business jargon is in fact descended from late-1960s hippie-speak.