Also, regarding the importance of English, I thought Professor X's essay was, ironically, a little muddled. I think it's very important for people to be coherent writers. On the other hand, having read The Pickwick Papers or being able to do scholarly research seems pretty useless unless you're an academic. I think Prof. X should have dealt separately with these two issues, since he really weakens his own argument by mixing them up. I wonder if there would be so many F grades if he just taught remedial writing for two semesters. Maybe Mrs. L would have improved more if she didn't have to spend time learning the internets and researching a topic like the MacArthur/Truman example.

On the same track, people always argue that college is supposed to "teach you how to think." I learned how to think by arguing with annoying, belligerent academia-types and to a lesser extent by understanding some basic mathematical logic. I think law school is structured to teach people this way, but most other disciplines just seem to assume that reading excerpts from Plato (or Dickens) is enough. Does this actually work?

“Plus, I didn’t understand the issues,” Mr. Whitehurst said recently. “In retrospect, it looks like he identified an important issue and came up with a reasonable solution. But it was Greek to me at the time — preferential interest rates on bonds? I didn’t know what he was doing, except that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”

Why is it that people who say stuff like this always end up managing lots of people?

In September 2004, more serious flaws in the boat conversion program became obvious after the first one, the Matagorda, was launched. As it traveled in relatively heavy seas from Key West to Miami, large cracks appeared in the hull and deck.
...
Bollinger (the military contractor that performed the conversion), it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. “The computer broke for some reason,” said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. “Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?”