Godless has a post over at Gene Expression that I largely agree with (though I would have some quibbles), that is accordingly certain to enrage vast swathes of academia, particularly the pomos. He ranks various academic fields by required intelligence. Gender/ethnic “studies” comes out dead last, under gym.

I’m more interested, though, in a comment by one of his readers, which I think provides at least a partial explanation.

I always point out that the humanities have been largely destroyed in the last 40 years. I think if you had to master greek, latin and old english and write very detailed papers it would be a much more challenging field.

I think that elimination of the language requirement in general may have softened things up quite a bit (I know that I’d certainly have had much more difficulty getting my engineering degrees if they hadn’t done so–I perhaps might not even have made it).

But as other commenters point out, even the hard science curriculum has been dumbed down to some degree, particularly with the huge influx of computer “science” degrees in the desperate nineties. Several commenters point out the lack of familiarity with multi-variable calculus, even among the faculty.

I may have more thoughts on this later, but the comments are interesting even without any input from me.