well i gotta say that the one word exam was an extraordinarily beautiful idea, one that has wrapped within it a whole conception of education. one reason i assume it's over: it's precisely the opposite of what kids seem to want or demand in their personae as products of our schools, which is, quite simply, to be told extremely clearly and elaborately what is expected. students used to come to my office making arguments etc; now there is only one question: "what are you looking for on this paper?" they want extremely detailed and elaborate "prompts" and they want a mechanical procedure for getting an 'a.' they are nice. they are sincere. but they are morbidly authoritarian personalities, destined merely to capitulate. this makes the leftist view that we are disintegrating into a bunch of individualists just seem bizarre. i would say that the culture of standardized testing, and the mechanical, external, entirely institutional relation to knowledge maintained by experts of obama's era and ilk, could be predicted to have exactly this result, to produce personalities that want above all to be subordinated.

that is what our education system is for, now. and let me say this again: obama has no better or different ideas on education than bush: for both, it's just a bunch of hoops, just a bunch of circles to be filled in: it is anti-human; it treats children as inanimate objects. also i would say that the personality of our college-age people constitutes a danger of a future of political authoritarianism, which will take a kind of mellow form: it will be al gore world regulation, but endowed with as much power over us as possible, which is really the key motivation. all we want to know is what obama or whomever may exercise power over us, wants.

But first they have to take the exam. It consists of 12 hours of essays over two days. Half are on the applicants’ academic specialties, the other half on general subjects, with questions like: “Do the innocent have nothing to fear?” “Isn’t global warming preferable to global cooling?” “How many people should there be?” and the surprisingly relevant, because this is Britain: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”

i don't know what my students would do if they had to sit down to a test and were unexpectedly confronted by questions like that. nothing much, i believe. and the faculty wouldn't be much more comfortable administering them: how do you norm an exam consisting of the word 'style'?

let me admit, however, that it may be that these instruments attract me simply because i feel that i would (have) do (done) well on them. the one-word or extremely open-ended essay plays to my strengths: improvisation, riffing, drawing wide and compelling and yet completely arbitrary connections etc. put me in an intellectual situation with structure, answers, procedures, and i'm liable to be worse than mediocre. put me in a field and encourage me to play, and i do good.

p.s. the moral character of any orgy is improved by a nazi party theme! i think there is no nobler human aspiration than the eroticization of genocide.