Mason Hartman

“Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age; but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.”
― Mark C. Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College

“Reacting students also indicated that they would be less likely to take future Reacting-type courses. The explanation, the researchers learned, was that Reacting students had worked much harder than their peers in regular seminars.”
― Mark C. Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College

“That same year [2001], young anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover as "Rebekah Nathan, undergraduate student" and lived in a first-year form at Northern Arizona University. She was repeating the study of anthropologist Michael Moffatt, who in 1977 had attempted to pass himself off as an undergraduate at Rutgers. Like him, she found virtually no evidence that students derived intellectual benefit from classes. They skipped more frequently than she had expected: in the one large course for which she had solid data, barely half came to class on any given day. The students in her dorm, moreover, almost never discussed academic issues — in class or outside of it. Small's 'most sobering' insight was 'how little intellectual life' mattered to students.”
― Mark C. Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College

“Who can say when subversive play will subvert its own rules? Sometimes a jester's wit might cut too close to the bone and the king would lop off his head. The uncertainty — that straddling of the boundaries of real and unreal — is a source of the peculiar emotional power of subversive play.”
― Mark C. Carnes, Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College