In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial. Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise. Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” For a thousand years,… pic.twitter.com/F5FS6lzlts — Shadow Intel (@TheShadowIntelX) May 22, 2026 Toward the end of my time as a graduate assistant -- more than 50 years ago, in fact -- the whole purpose of a four-year degree began to clear up for me. Those of us who were teaching freshman comp were acutely aware of how many of the papers we got were plagiarized, and it must have been not too far from 100%. The students were going through the motions of submitting them, we were going through the motions of grading them, and everyone expected an A. I finally got so fed up that I found an obvious case, and I started the formal process of bringing the student up on honors-code violations. This caused a major problem, such that my faculty ad...