Kirk Foresaw It All

“Our trouble, instead, is that the people who run universities, though called presidents and deans, think of themselves as businessmen, often, and endeavor to apply ‘business principles’ to the higher learning. They talk of satisfying the consumer—that is, the student, or the student’s parents—and of cost analysis; they think of the university as a species of factory, turning out units efficiently; and their whole view is quantitative, not qualitative.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 3]

Stolen from Brad Birzer over at The Imaginative Conservative just so I could spite the anti-idea people who want to restrict access to other people’s thoughts on the internet (or some such libertarian thought).

But I digress. My real point is to say, “It is astounding to me how foolish we become when we try to live in a world reduced to quantity.” It does not work. It does not even help.