HowlerKarma, I'm so sorry to hear your DD is having such a depressing experience in college. I would still like to believe, though, that you are wrong that all colleges are like this now. The best of the small liberal arts colleges, because they *are* small, are able to cling to their own vision of why intellectual pursuits are worth pursuing.
One aspect of the problem is the pressures on professors. Although I wouldn't want to go back to the bad old days of no accountability, we are all now a little too scared of having to justify our evaluations of student performance. A student unhappy with a grade, who believes that you have been unfair or biased or used impossible standards (like requiring them to actually *think*, instead of providing cook-book instructions for how to get an A), can drag you through the university's appeals process and suck up an entire term's worth of your productivity, even if they have no case. Multiple-choice exams for which you have provided "correct" answers during lecture are SO much easier, in terms of lack of blow-back.
