College-itis: (n.)
4th December 2010
Freeberg creates a new word.
A mental illness in which a patient is simply unable to accept a situation in which another thinking person possesses a commensurately durable command of the relevant facts, and has pursued some valid and competent thinking process to arrive at different ideas regarding what it all means or what should be done. Persons suffering from this disease leap instantly to the conclusion that if you disagree, you have to be stupid.
So the College-itis patient suffers from something worse than a lack of experience. He ends up suffering from an extreme lack of appreciation for its very significance (other than, of course, his own experience taking the class which is all-important). The sufferer has been programmed to accept the concept of negative knowledge: Just as a person’s opinion might be dismissed as ignorant if it is formed prematurely, with a scarcity of observed fact or opinion to back it up — and then that person could be labeled “stupid” and ejected from subsequent discussions as well — the same goes for a person who has managed to gain command of an uncontrolled abundance of knowledge, or knowledge outside the body of knowledge that is approved by the authorities — knowledge outside the syllabus. That person is to be labeled exactly the same way the ignorant person is to be labeled, with no recognized necessity for distinguishing between the two, now or forevermore.