How advanced is the rot?

This advanced:

Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than 1,300 students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petition asking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.

The students say that between their activism work and their heavy course load, finding success within the usual grading parameters is increasingly difficult. "A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting," Megan Bautista, a co-liaison in Oberlin's student government, said, referring to the protests surrounding the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer in 2014. "But we needed to organize on campus as well — it wasn't sustainable to keep driving 40 minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically."

And they're couching this garbage in a we're-paying-customers argument:

"You know, we're paying for a service. We're paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it," student Zakiya Acey told The New Yorker. "Because I'm dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems — having to deal with all of that, I can't produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways."

Listen, you little twerp. Until about five minutes ago, those paying college tuition understood that the "service" involved getting introduced to rigorous standards and being challenged to manage their time well. They understood that erudite grownups were going to take the empty space between their ears and fill it with some knowledge of particular fields. And they understood that "activism" and getting arrested was no excuse for not being prepared for their final exams.

Any creating of a nation resembling the old United States of America from the smoldering ruins of post-America is going to involve creating an educational system from the ground up. The one we had is now a joke, a network of playpens, a sewer of nonsense.