The American College Man is slowly falling into the lowest dregs of intellectuality.

Granting of course that there is so much more to assimilate than ever before in the history of man the fact still remains that one almost needs a Ph.D. to brush his teeth correctly.

Times used to be so that all one needed to be totally superior was a B.S. I have come to some conclusions with regard to today’s philosophy of culture and intelligence.

People are as smart as they were in the time of Adam but you would sure wonder when you walk by rooms in the men’s dormitories. Fish bowls, surrealist paintings, rugs, cheap books, lofi’s, cigarette smoke, and dominoes dominate the scene. Is this an atmosphere of study, learning, and culture? All this enhances the mind like an A-bomb encourages peace talks.

Let’s get practical. Ask your best friend to carry on an intelligent conversation on some current development in education, psychology, religion, science, or politics. It’s hard to find a really interesting, informed conversationist today. “Castro. Oh he’s the fellow down at that resort selling sugar to the Russians …”

We are collapsing into a pornographic lethargy of Rock and Roll, cheap abstractionist literature, cowboy television, procrastination, and “I just do not give a flip” type of thinking. Call me an alarmist or a subversive indeterminate but the clues of this are all around us. The time has come when we, the future leaders of tomorrow, the citizens of a fantastic world of scientific wonder and confusion must recognize the problems of our universe and not just shrug off responsibility with a “Dad’s paying the bills” attitude.

Our parents are not always going to be around to goad us to our jobs of studying and learning; we owe a debt, a large one, to them and to our one common Father, “to show ourselves approved …

John C Mansur
sophomore, Tulsa, Okla.

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Editor’s Note: This letter was re-published in the October 24, 2003 edition of the Optimist.