Mechanical education

I've been ranting about the industrialization of education for a while now, but I have never seen it documented in such unapologetic clarity:

"Until roughly the middle of the last century, the American college was mainly a school for training clergymen, lawyers and gentlemen...The men who set the tone in these colleges were considered, and considered themselves, an intellectual elite. The training was often narrow, and it was circumscribed by often rigid standards of gentility. This narrowness led to estrangement from the social and economic realities of the country at large.
...
After the Civil War, when industrialization began to make major strides in America, a new type of university emerged. Instruction and research in scientific and technological subjects were required by growing industry, and they began to achieve ascendancy over the traditional academic disciplines. 'So,' to quote Veblen [I fucking LOVE Veblen], 'the university of that era unavoidably came to be organized as a more or less comprehensive federation of professional schools or faculties devoted to such branches of practical knowledge as the ruling utilitarian interests of the time demanded.'"

From "The Men of Ideas", by Lewis A. Coser