It may be even worse than you think. I had my son properly educated at Abingdon School in England one of the top 10 single sex private schools in the country. Much to our dismay, instead of going on to Oxford as he should have, he chose to go to the University of Southern California where he encountered a number of semi-literate professors. One egregiously incompetent Professor of English that he had to suffer insisted that the words sudden and spontaneous meant the same thing, which they do not. She also marked him down for using the passive, which conveys a different meaning than the active voice in certain situations and is highly legitimate to use if one actually has a complete understanding of the English language and all of its nuances and subtleties. On another matter I have a brochure from Columbia University's Middle East Department which conveys a deep-seated ignorance of not only English but of Western Civilization in general that it is more than appalling considering that it was produced coming out of one of our so-called top skools. I still cannot believe the intellectual mediocrity that went into the drafting of it.