Education Quote by Luke Ford

Ford’s line isn’t really about bad professors; it’s about the quiet rage of anyone who’s watched an institution protect the wrong people. The key move is the phrase “in my gut”: he’s staking the claim on instinct, not policy papers, which gives the critique a populist immediacy. He’s telling you this wasn’t an abstract ideological conversion but a lived, bodily recognition that something in the rules felt crooked.

The target is “a system that couldn’t fire its incompetents,” a blunt indictment of tenure culture, bureaucratic insulation, and the broader American allergy to admitting failure once credentials are stamped. “Couldn’t” matters more than “wouldn’t”: he implies structural paralysis, not a one-off moral lapse. The subtext is that accountability has been replaced by process, and process becomes a shield for mediocrity.

Then comes the needle: “and I had my share.” It’s anecdotal, almost petty on purpose, because personal grievance is often the spark that lights a bigger worldview. He’s using the most relatable entry point - wasted tuition, wasted time, the powerless student - to smuggle in a larger argument about entrenched systems: if education can’t correct obvious underperformance, what other sacred institutions are running on inertia?

There’s also a sly self-positioning here. By foregrounding “incompetent college teachers,” Ford frames himself as someone who learned despite the system, not because of it. The line reads like the origin story of a skeptic: suspicion of credentialed authority, impatience with institutional pieties, and a writer’s habit of turning irritation into an organizing principle.