Slveryder,
Actually, there are some good state schools — what are known as the ‘public ivies’ (think University of California, Virginia, William & Mary, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Miami (Ohio) and Vermont) and a few more public liberal arts colleges ranked in the top tier (e.v. VMI, St. Marys of Maryland).
The problem, which you don’t quite see, is that those of us who obtained liberal arts degrees in 30-odd years ago and more, are singularly unimpressed with what we see in recent graduates and undergraduates. Most of us are parents, we have children who are in or have recently finished college, in many cases at elite private colleges and universities. We have a pretty good idea what our kids and their friends knew when the started college, we’ve been talking to them all along as they’ve gone through college, and we see the results of surveys of college graduates knowledge of things most of us take for granted. Many of us think we have a pretty good sense, based on recent experience and contact, with what students are and are not learning. And, while we see the kids in the sciences really having learned a great deal, a lot of us see a whole lot of kids in the liberal arts who don’t know 1/3 of what we were expected to know 30-40 years ago, who can’t write worth a damn, and who are not capable of sustained logical argument.
It’s easy to say if a student wants to learn, they will. What we object to is the university having been transformed from a place conducive to learning, with faculty actively engaged in directing students into learning the Western canon and thinking about it seriously, into a place where English majors don’t take a Shakespeare course and students of history don’t know any.
