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Storytime. Growing up broke in Hawaii and going to a rural public HS, arriving in Princeton for college was total culture shock. Everything was so *weird*, but since Hawaii is such a unique place, I thought maybe that's just what the mainland US was like. https://twitter.com/JlibDoesEcon/status/1337860401120247810
One of the many strange things was that the alumns were super-involved, with a lot of complaining about how much better things used to be, standards had fallen, nobody studied Latin anymore, etc...
A lot of this was pretty explicitly gendered and racialized, with grumbling about changes since "co-education." The wounds were still raw in the late 80s, because women were first admitted in *1969* and there were still lawsuits over admitting women to the "eating clubs".
Whenever black or hispanic students were featured in the alumni magazine, they got (and printed!) letters complaining about how affirmative action had ruined the school, with the letter-writer griping about how their grand-nephew had not been admitted.
I recognized this as BS, but the constant repetition of the complaint about how much more rigorous the school had been in the past insinuated itself into my thinking, and I kind of accepted it as true without even realizing it.
So, one of my many on-campus jobs was at the archival library that housed all the senior theses, which every student needed to complete. They reorganized and I had the job of moving all the theses from one set of stacks to another set of stacks on the other side of the building.
I went in chronological order, starting with recent theses: thick 100+ pages books, many on topics that I knew I didn't have the background to understand and clearly doing original research. After a while, I noticed they were getting thinner.
The farther back I went, the shorter the theses were. Not only that, but the topics were much simpler. By the time I got to the early 1900s the theses were still leather bound, but short overview essays. Not a lot of Latin then either. The lost rigorous old days...weren't.
So, treat these assumptions of civilization declining with the skepticism they deserve. Some of it is ideology & motivated reasoning. Some of it is a cognitive bias: hard stuff we learned that is now less common is a lot more salient than the hard(er) stuff that took its place.
"Erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally", really? Easy to throw that around, and ego-flattering for the older folks, but I'm going to need some empirical evidence for that -- pretty sure it's the exact opposite.
