SELF SELECTION. Some people describe the world.

The introduction of Murray Sperber's Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education divides students into four basic groups, of which only one, the smallest, being scholarly/intellectual. This group has probably always been the smallest, but has always represented the majority of the professors, with a few exceptions like Party Girl. Professors are almost set up to feel a certain disdain for their students, as the other categories are not especially attractive, as they consist chiefly of social butterflies, vocational drudgers, and slackers.

College faculty are self-selected from a different subset of the population than the great mass of students. Big deal. That's true of accountants and engineers and model railroaders and golfers and patternmakers. (I hesitate to labor the obvious: why go into a line of work that requires you to interact with a variety of curious, in all the senses of the word, young people? Get to know them as people. They'll surprise you.)

Does it have to be the case that college faculty also self-select for pusillanimity? What is the point of enjoying all the protections of tenure if the best one can do is post anonymous whinges at Rate Your Students?

So why not get involved and change things?

As a result, the general intelligence of students probably is at least somewhat lower than it was, say, 50 years ago, but more importantly, the outstanding students are simply swamped by the masses.

Why? Have your faculty councils and department chairmen acquiesced in a dilution of admission standards that somebody has sugar coated as access? Clearly, the policy isn't working. Say so. Change it.

Numerically speaking, the outstanding students are still probably around, even if they don't seem as prevalent because there are so many of those "other" students professors don't much like—the ones not in Sperber's category of intellectuals.

Did that happen by accident? Who consented to offering retakes of high school, sometimes for college credit, and defended it as remediation? What incentives were your faculty councils, department chairmen, deans, and provosts, responding to when they proliferated content-free courses and majors and explained that such offerings boosted retention? Don't go along. Speak up.

Are you complicit by your silence in the fraud? When the proliferation of image consultants, failed scholars, schmoozers and hack politicians engages in an orgy of self-congratulation and praise and refers to it as a favorable assessment, where are you? Posting anonymous whinges? Call "nonsense" and name names.