What, according to James Thurber in My Life and Hard Times, marked the decline of education in the Middle West and why?I am unable to comprehend...

In his autobiographical volume titled My Life
and Hard Times, the American humorist James Thurber mocks various aspects of
his experiences as a student at Ohio State University.  In general, he mocks the fact
that during the time he studied there, the university was emphasizing activities that
had little to do with true education.  One of these activities involved military
drills.  The First World War was taking place at the time, and students were expected to
participate in military practice so that they would be prepared to participate in the
war if necessary. Ohio State was at that time a “land grant” university (a school
intended, by the state and federal governments, to focus on practical education rather
than on the traditional study of the liberal arts). Military training, according to
Thurber, was required of the students at land-grant
institutions.

In the paragraph you’ve asked about, Thurber
says that because Ohio State was a land grant university, “two years of military drill
was [sic] compulsory.” Yet the students drilled with outdated weapons and studied
outdated military tactics. They learned about how to fight effectively in the Civil War
– an event that was over fifty years in the past:

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It was good training for the kind of warfare that
was waged at Shiloh but it had no connection with what was going on in
Europe.

The students'
military education, then, was anything but “practical” in the truest senses of that
word. The students showed no enthusiasm for participating in such training, and Thurber
jokes that some people even suspected that Germany (America’s enemy in World War I)
might have paid for such training so that American forces would be easier to defeat. He
further jokes that the people who held these suspicious were afraid to voice them
openly, lest they be imprisoned as German spies.  The illogic of potentially imprisoning
such people is just the latest in a long string of examples Thurber provides to suggest
that thinking during this period was “muddy” (that is, confused and
obscure).

The university, which should ideally be a place
of lucid, higher thought, had thus become a locus of illogical thinking.  This is why
Thurber jokingly asserts that this period marked “the decline of higher education in the
Middle West.”

James Thurber, My Life
and Hard Times (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933),
71.