If they have no interest in knowing the information for its own sake, that sounds like a problem with them, not with the university.

I make it a habit to learn as little as possible by rote, and just derive what I need when I need it. This means my knowledge is already heavily compressed, so if you start plucking out pieces of it at random, it becomes unrecoverable fairly quickly. As near as I can tell, my knowledge rarely vanishes for no good reason, though, so I have not really found this to be a handicap.

I'll admit that I haven't seen the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but how does it compare to Romeo and Juliet in terms of comedy? Shakespeare's real talents lie not in mawkish sentimentality, but in clever wordplay and character-driven humor; this is true even of his plays which are supposedly "tragedies".

So, it seems that Eliezer's working definition of an intelligent person is "someone who agrees with me".