Unfiltered Story #281887

My dad attended an engineering college during the later years of the Vietnam War but never completed his degree. When I enrolled at a different engineering college decades later, he related to me the two major events that led to him quitting.

The first incident was a semester-long disaster. The professor informed the class that all of their homework problems from a specific textbook. The problem the class soon discovered was that the college did not have a single copy of the book nor did any of the nearby bookstores. The professor ignored all complaints about this and continued to assign problems from the book, tanking the grades for every student in the classroom.

The second incident was a historical footnote: The Student Strike of 1970. All across the country, college students walked out of their classes in protest of the war. Despite this, his professors did not acknowledge the country-wide event in any manner and continued as though nothing was happening.

In the end this killed my dad’s passion for learning and he ended up a lifelong blue collar worker. While happy with the life he built, he’s admitted to me that he regrets never getting the chance to really apply himself mentally, all thanks to an inflexible college.