Extra, Extra

Regarding SIU, now seems as good as time as any to quote Fussell from his excellent commentary in the Class book.

"As one citizen exulted in the 1870s: 'There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and thirty-seven in Ohio.' Here's (in America) it's as natural for every college to want to be a university as for every employee to want to be an 'executive,' and every executive a vice president.

The result? State colleges and teachers colleges all over the country were suddenly denominated universities, and they set to work, with the best motives in the world, ripping off the proles. Southern Illinois University is a good example of the genre. Formerly a mere teachers college, it now enrolls 26,000 students and has its own 'university press,' although it's located in Carbondale, Illinois, a backwater without significant intellectual meaning or cultural tradition. The giveaway is that the largest number of bachelor's degrees issued by Southern Illinois University is still in 'education', an immediate sign not of a university but of what used to be called, more modestly, a normal school."

I doubt Fussell would be surprised at this revelation.