What Is College Good For? Absolutely Nothing
The lazy river may seem like the most pleasant of diversions, but it is that rare feature of American life capable of eliciting bipartisan outrage. Those of us who do not enjoy lazy rivers condemn them, especially if their cost figures into the tuition we pay for our children to attend an institution of higher learning. No, the lazy river is not yet a staple of the American college campus. But there was a time when science laboratories on campus were rare, too.
What is a lazy river? Imagine the backwoods of Arkansas, midsummer, bank crowded with cottonwoods, willows bowing to the muddy water, fish are jumping, cotton is high. That is not, in fact, a lazy river. The lazy river is not especially concerned with ecologic detail. Imagine instead an ordinary swimming pool stretched into a sinuous strip. Give it a gentle current. Hand the kids inflatable tubes. You now have a lazy river. As do many—probably too many—American university campuses.
The lazy river has recently become emblematic of what ails higher education, with the requisite New York Times denunciation—“No College Kid Needs a Water Park to Study”—published in early January. It is a symbol of excessive cost and decreasing educational returns on investment. More broadly, the lazy river is a sign of American indolence, of our collective postindustrial lassitude, the nation that once tamed the Mississippi now slumbering poolside, scrolling through Instagram. Our rivers, along with our spirits, no longer surge.
Now comes the inevitable Then again. Complaints that American college students are pampered wasteoids were around long before an Orlando Sentinel columnist said the University of Central Florida’s proposed $25 million athletic complex—including, of course, a lazy river—was “a sign of whacked-out times.”
Suspicions about the American university are nearly as old as the institution itself, which began with the founding of Harvard in 1636. Benjamin Franklin, who never attended college, visited the campus in 1722. He wasn’t impressed. In an editorial published that year, he mocked Harvard as “the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius,” students “learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir'd at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.” And that was long before the University of Virginia started offering a course about the HBO series Game of Thrones.
Eighteen years after Franklin’s letter was published, he started his own institution of higher learning, the University of Pennsylvania, where students would “learn those Things that are likely to be most useful.” This mission continued well into the 20th century. “Now it is very much a pretrade school,” The Harvard Crimson said in 1956, “while the other Ivies uphold...education for education's own sake,” adding rather cruelly that the “Penn undergraduate is not especially concerned with his courses.” Ouch.
A decade after that assessment, a wealthy and cocksure scion of Queens, New York, transferred from Fordham University, in the Bronx, to Penn. The school indeed gave Donald Trump a practical advantage, though perhaps not quite in the way Ben Franklin had intended. When Trump ran
