Fight Your College to Get an Education?

A certain Mark Edmundson, who seems to be an English professor at the University of Virginia, wrote a monumentally annoying and pretentious essay for the Oxford American from which I have picked out this passage to argue with:

If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people. . . .

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months.

Besides the obnoxious "I am in the university but remain intellectually and morally superior to it" pose, this is utterly foreign to my experience as a student or a teacher. To get an education certainly takes hard work. It involves seeking out opportunities for learning and avoiding easy wastes of time. But fight against your college and your professors? In college I met only teachers eager to teach me anything I could learn, and who encouraged every interest I expressed. The American professoriate has its faults, but by and large professors welcome engagement with any student who genuinely takes an interest in learning. They see so many who have no interest at all except in getting credentials, and even that perhaps only to please their parents. From what I have seen, all students have to do to get their professors' attention is walk up to them and say "I really want to learn X."