Another time, I was a graduate teaching assistant for a professor who taught one of those huge 200-student survey classes. It was an astronomy course that always filled up because it sounded like a fun way to get that science credit out of the way. So, as this professor was preparing me to teach the class for 2 weeks while he was out of town, he said something like, “Now, what you’ll be going over is star formation, which I’ve already covered twice with them this semester.” I asked what he meant and he said that he had honed the entire course down to 4 repetitions of the same material – star formation. The university needed the revenue from those huge survey classes and made them as attractive as possible. And this professor went right along with the economics of the situation.

So, yeah, I was nodding my head through the entire article. I just wish I had some idea how we, as a society, keep from being devastated by this pervasive attitude. I don’t.