"'Governor,' a Reporter Asked, 'What Is an Intellectual Luxury?'"

"Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. 'I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally,' he said, 'like learning how to swim by falling off the end of a dock.'
"Whole academic programs in California and across the country he found similarly suspect. Taxpayers, he said, shouldn't be 'subsidizing intellectual curiosity.'
"That phrase quickly brought Reagan scorn. The following week the Los Angeles Times editorial page warned that his budget cuts and 'tampering' with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions.
"'If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,' the editors wrote, 'then it is nothing.'"


Dan Berrett at The Chronicle of Higher Education traces the decline in support for liberal education.