Same as it ever was:

Only a few of these denominational schools were equal to good second-rate grammar schools, Lindsley charged, and he scorned their “capacious preparatory departments for A, B, C-darians and Hic, Haec, Hoc-ers–promising to work cheap, and to finish off and graduate, in double quick time.”

The quote is from Richard Hofstadter, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955, p. 212. Hofstadter is known today as an historian of populism and anti-intellectualism, but in this instance he turned his gaze on the development of academic freedom and the beginnings of American higher education. In this case, Hofstadter is quoting Rev. Philip Lindsley, an 1804 graduate of Princeton and later president of Cumberland College (which became the University of Nashville).

So when I rant about the low standards and fly-by-night nature of most of your for-profit “universities and colleges,” at least I’m part of a grand historical tradition.

WF