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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester

Do they actually do the reading? I went to a fairly well regarded uni and humanities students Would Not Read. A professor came from outside and was perplexed at how people would basically openly admit to not reading. He'd assume we'd be reading a book in a week or so, that was the standard expectation for him on starting the course. I would at least pretend to read the book (finding some relevant question to ask based on skimming through source material) but that was going above and beyond by the standards of my peers. I saw no need to go further than that, ordinal grading and all.

I think people who's last experience with a university system was 20 years ago or more should recalibrate, it's not what it used to be. There are all these articles talking about how Gen Z are basically illiterate retards and they're not wholly unfounded. My experience was pre-AI boom, so it's probably gotten way worse since then.