December 7, 2022 | The College Fix
On December 7, 2022, EPPC Senior Fellow Stanley Kurtz was consulted for a piece by Dace Potas of The College Fix observing that though 87% of students claim that college is “too difficult,” they refuse to study more. Kurtz believes that this phenomenon shows how college students nationwide ought to adjust their expectations of the collegiate workload in order to better understand their material and excel in the workplace:
“Students first need to adjust their expectations about the nature and purpose of education,” Kurtz said, responding to the minimal effort put in by students, despite many thinking they are working hard.
“In a proper college classroom, students come to understand that there aren’t enough hours in a day or years in a lifetime to drink in or grapple with the choices offered by the greatest pieces of literary, philosophical, or religious thought,” he said.
“Professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way should be rewarded with promotions, prizes, and praise,” Kurtz said. “Colleges should compete to hire them. Administrators who discourage, punish, or dismiss professors who are ‘difficult’ in this way—like the professor of organic chemistry fired by NYU—should themselves be dismissed and replaced.”
Read the entire piece with The College Fix.
Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Beyond his work with Education and American Ideals, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates on a wide range of issues from K-12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).
