"The students who make it to us (and especially the ones who end up in schools like Harvard) have learned exactly what they have to do to succeed..."

"... and sadly, that often has very little to do with becoming educated.... Instead, it’s almost solely about figuring out what will be asked (in papers, tests, and other assessments), learning that material long enough to produce it when necessary, and then moving on to the next thing."

That's an article about the cheating scandal at Harvard. It made me think back to this statement from University of Wisconsin historian Bill Cronin, that "he felt his job as a professor was to make his students 'fall in love with the world.'"

What I like about about Cronin's statement, as opposed to the quote from the Harvard-cheating-scandal article, is that it's the professor taking responsibility and not putting the blame on the students. There's also something wistful and weird about what Cronin said. It's wistful, because it's a vision of a job that can't really be accomplished, even as you might admire the prof for thinking of himself that way. It's also weird because... fall in love... and with the world.... Why the romantic/sexual metaphor? (I know there are forms of love other than eros, but you don't fall into them.) And why is the love object the world, rather than the subject matter?

Cronin's a historian, so maybe the world is the subject matter for him, and in that understanding, the lawprof's job is to make students fall in love with the law.

Or is it: fall in love with criticizing the legal system? I've got a lawprof right here: Elizabeth Warren, the lawprof Senate candidate who spoke at the DNC last night and told the world that the system is rigged:

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

Not love. Anger.

She's a professor at Harvard, that place where the students have figured out what will be asked and learned just enough to produce it when necessary and then move on to the next thing. Which is to say: politics. Do you love it? It's the world and if it's rigged, is it possible that the professors and politicos are outside of the rigging?