One wacko professor is not the issue. Dartmouth is entitled to make the occasional mistake, but it should have a mechanism in place to correct its mistakes. Of course, if Dartmouth were to correct its mistakes, there would be nobody left to do the teaching. Maybe this would be a good thing. The world doesn’t need Dartmouth — it will handle life perfectly well without it.

It’s probably important to understand that Dartmouth has a big-time inferiority complex. Dartmouth (and to a slightly lesser extent Cornell and Brown) has always been considered second-rate by the Ivy elite. So if they have professors who claim god-like authority, from Dartmouth’s perspective this is probably a good thing.

In my dream world, the number of kids going to college would be only a tiny fraction of the current number, and high school education would train everybody else to become useful members of society. College students would not automatically be inducted into the society of the rich. College graduates would not be assumed to be smarter than everybody else. Society needs some scientists and medical doctors, rather more than we have today, and a few lawyers and intellectuals, rather fewer than we have today. College should provide those. Most people in our society do not need prolonged training, and are better suited to learning on the job.

I have a few contrarian opinions, one of which is that one of the greatest disasters to befall this country was the G.I. Bill of the Truman administration. It was the first of the “feel-good” bills that have come to symbolize our political process, and its unintended consequences include destroying high school education in America. It used to be that you could get a decent, well-rounded education in high school — lamentably, that is no longer the case. Good teachers no longer aspire to teach high-school students — they want to teach college students instead. What’s left is a void that has been filled by hacks for the most part.

I could go on about this, but I’ll take a break instead.