Without Lifting A Finger

Ok, I found the quote because I was reviewing quotation mark usage. I uncovered a bit of the author, Henry Steele Commager. Then I got interested in the context of the quote. Here's a little bit of that (the part quoted in an early post is highlighted):      What is the explanation of what must be called the mucker pose in so much of higher education in America--of its anti-academic and anti-intellectual character? It is twofold. First is the widespread illusion that education is something that goes on in the classroom, something that comes by way of a "course" that a professor "gives" and a student " takes." This leads to the natural conclusion that when the classroom is closed, the process of education is over, and that the professor might as well go home and tend to his garden, the student might as well go to the Union and watch television. It is no exaggeration to say that if all lectures were abandoned, Oxford and Cambridge would go on much as...

Henry Steele Commager (October 25, 1902 – March 2, 1998) was an American historian who helped define Modern liberalism in the United States for two generations through his forty books and 700 essays and reviews. [1] His principal scholarly works were his 1936 biography of Theodore Parker ; his intellectual history The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950), which focuses on the evolution of liberalism in the American political mind from the 1880s to the 1940s; and his intellectual history Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). In addition, he edited one of the most influential compilations of American historical documents, Documents of American History , which went through ten editions between 1938 and 1988 (the tenth, and last, coedited with Commager's former student Milton Cantor .) He won attention as one of the most active and prolific liberal intellectuals of his time, and...

Was flipping through An American Rhetoric by William W. Watts. Found this example of using quotation marks "to call attention to irony." Don't know who Henry Steele Commanger is, but I liked it (the entire entry is worth typing out). Seems to go against the current stream. b. First is the widespread illusion that education is something that goes on in the classroom, something that comes by way of a "course" that a professor "gives" and a student "takes." --Henry Steele Commager, "Is Ivy Necessary?" Saturday Review (quotation marks here are the equivalent of a mildly ironic so-called and make that overworked word unnecessary)