What image does a first-rank college or university present today to a
teen-ager leaving home for the first time, off to the adventure of a liberal
education? He has four years of freedom to discover himself -- a space
between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable
dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate. In
this short time he must learn that there is a great world beyond the little
one he knows, experience the exhilaration of it and digest enough of it to
sustain himself in the intellectual deserts he is destined to traverse. He
must do this, that is, if he is to have any hope of a higher life.
Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind