They focus on thought rather than on grades. But this obviously superior approach is the unheard-of minority. What we have instead are bureaucracies in all their hellish glory. Sociologists have documented it. It is the leveling down of the individual. USC's stiflingly enforced writing program is a direct example of this.
To me the glaring flaw is so patently obvious, that if one does not see the flaws of the program, she never will. It is so striking, that if one is numb to it (which so many in fact are) they are a lost cause for they have been irrevocably conditioned into believing the great lie of American culture. Every culture has its great lie, and the purpose of that lie is to deceive the populace, weakening, disarming the people of their strength, so that one percent of the people may control ninety percent of the wealth. Illusion is the ultimate weapon. We have the illusion of democracy when in reality we have fascism. So few people can see. "The Matrix" has some frighteningly real parallels to the world we now live in.
Basically, the USC writing courses demand one particular, rather subhuman writing style. People are given the gift of a unique perspective of life, yet this is restricted and punished in the academic world, , notably in the writing courses forced upon every student without exception. The somehow sanctified research paper is no more than mind-numbing regurgitation, with a lone, strict format that varies slightly from one professor to the next. I consider it an act of torture, for one must kill all aspects of who they are, their persona, the individuality, their life experience, in order to crank out a paper devoid of any expression of their own personality. The goal of these courses is supposedly to make the students better at writing. The students are forced to adapt to dehumanizing themselves to the point where the exercise of writing lacks enough personal expression to the point where the paper were as if it were written by a robot, possibly a with minimal flare as determined by observing the professor's particular desires.
