A Huge Serving of Academia Nuts
As we survey the intellectual scene today, what appears perhaps most disconcerting is the spectacle of the modern Western university. There is nothing sacrosanct per se about the university which, like any human institution, can profane its founding principles and grow corrupt and oppressive. The German universities of the 1930s, for example, despite their long tradition of rigorous scholarship, were by no means citadels of informed thought and genuine research, but outright propaganda factories, preparing students’ minds for the absurd theories of National Socialism, the restriction of free expression, and the absorption of sundry false doctrines.
The university may as easily become an engine of indoctrination as a generator of intellectual vitality or a transmitter of knowledge. Here we must remain skeptical of slogans and professed ideals, for the principle of “academic freedom” can be misused as a cover for illiberal thought and slavish conformity to a ruling ideology.
In a 1965 essay entitled “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse inspired a generation of teachers and students to embrace this principle of epistemic subversion. “The restoration of freedom of thought,” he argued, “may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior.” Translation: in the name of “freedom of thought” and under the rubric of “academic freedom,” independent judgment is closed off and critical reflection emasculated, making the university safe for ideologues and spin doctors. By “restrictions,” of course, Marcuse was thinking selectively — he meant imposing a moratorium on conservative thought and teaching. Leftist and socialist doctrines were given carte blanche.
While avoiding the diabolical extreme of the German paradigm, this is more or less what is happening today in many of our erstwhile seats of learning. “The defenders of what now passes for academic freedom,” writes Manfred Gerstenfeld, “should largely be seen as an elitist interest group that tries to protect acquired privileges … enabl[ing] universities to present the current, ostensible academic freedom as a moral value, whereas actually it is an expression of extreme corporatism.” The pedagogical bias which it fosters “includes elements such as political correctness, the promotion of ideology, the distortion of knowledge, and the protection of the hate promoters and falsifiers of knowledge as well as other malfunctions of campus administrations.”
The fact is that the university, as we now know it, has become a major contributor to the dissolution of the foundational values upon which the life of the West has been erected. Under the mantle of diversity of opinion, free expression, and the unfettered exchange of ideas, it has even given the dais to homicidal despots and enemies of the state — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being welcomed at Columbia is only the most publicized such mummery — while protesting against and even prohibiting conservative thinkers and patriots from speaking freely and engaging students in discussion.
This administrative/pedagogical disease has now penetrated to the very minutiae of everyday existence on college campuses. In an article for Pajamas Media, Adam Savit reports that during the University of Maryland’s Palestinian Solidarity Week held in March 2009, it was not the inflammatory words of speaker Mauri Saalakhan, who conflated Israel with apartheid and disputed its right to exist, that created a backlash, but legal dissenting fliers posted by a group of Jewish students. Savid comments, justly: “our colleges have become a preserve of reactionary liberal orthodoxy, with facile phrases like ‘diversity’ belying an oppressive ideological conformity.”
David Horowitz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, ruefully points out that he and other conservative speakers are now accompanied by bodyguards when they address campus audiences. Physical assaults against conservative spokespeople have become common practice, whereas, he continues, “I don’t know of a single leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students, who are too decent and tolerant to do that.” In his 2007 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz estimates that 10% of the American professoriate, or 60,000 academics across the country, preach ideology rather than teach scholarship.
Horowitz may have underestimated. In its 2009 report on campus speech codes, “The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses,” the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recorded that 77% of public universities and 67% of private universities were in violation of the First Amendment of the American Constitution, restricting the constitutional right to freedom of expression. Cui bono? Certainly not genuine liberal institutions and true intellectual scholarship.
I would disagree that the “academic left” are desirous of “meekly surrendering” to Islamism, or socialism, or any other authoritarian/anti-intellectual belief system. It would be more accurate to say that they are all in favor of aggressively attacking our civilization in support of same.
I believe it all reads back to the fundamentally “Eastern” orthodoxy of the “progressive” movement. Their primary philosophic roots are in Eastern, mystical beliefs, ranging from Sufi to Islam itself. They do not like science, as it keeps coming up with answers which they resent- not to mention technology that revolts them. They believe that all decisions must be made on the basis of “feelings”, not facts. And they want to worship Sun, and Earth, and Water. (That’s called “deep ecology” in the real world.)
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably a student of ancient history. The dichotomy between the modern day “progressive”, especially in academia, and the rest of our society, is precisely that between the Persia of Darius and Xerxes, and the Greek city states, circa the 5th Century B.C.
The Persians were mystics, who sought to exterminate or enslave the Greeks because they believed that they (the Persians)were destined to rule the world. The Greeks, who pretty much invented rational thought, found no rationality in the Persians’ demands. The result was inevitable, and fortunately for our civilization, the Persians lost.
Now, two and a half millenia later, we are confronted with the same problem. Mystics seek to rule us in the name of… something they cannot adequately explain, or even articulate, except to insist that their way is inherently and irrefutably superior. And if the rest of us know what’s good for us, we’ll shut up and do as we’re told.
I wonder how Leonidas, Miltiades, Pausanias, and Aristides would react if told that the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Plataea were now being fought all over again in our civilization- with our own academics, and even many of our own leaders, playing the part of the Persians.
My guess is that they would not be amused.
clear ether
eon
I always felt sorry for David Horowitz, and I know what I’d do if I saw someone attacking him. He is a real asset to the United States.
Agree. There is sinister self-perpetuating effect in the actions of the universities’ lefties – their views and deeds are amplified by their pupils, who have been throughly conditioned for accepting various “progressive” doctrines: non-judgmentalism, cultural relativism, open-mindedness, etc.
As far as as Horowitz’ remark, remember Animal Farm and what happened after Jessie and Bluebell came with some cubs – they retired in the barn, I think, then, after a while the cubs emerged as the pigs-dictators’ ferocious enforcers.
There is a solid causal relationship between the Berkeley-in-the-sixties tenured “teachers” (like Bill Ayres) and the vindicative X-ers and millennials which perpetuate and enforce their mentors’ anti-American, destructive world outlook.
What, no mention of Glenn Reynolds?
Keep your kids away from the social sciences and “fill in the blank-studies” type degrees. This seems to be where most of the Marxists are hiding.
Other places can be polluted by them as well, but they seem to be prevalent in sociology.
If these kinds of classes were taught by people like Thomas Sowell, who famously teaches a Marxist ideology class at Stanford, we would be better off. Instead of trying to socialize them to Marxism, people like Sowell get their students to critically think objectively using the scientific method about subjects.
Empirical facts would show that Collectivism, Marxism and Socialism don’t work.
The only thing worse than the universities are the churches.
Mr Solway,
I cannot find Russell’s speech with the following statement:
Jean-François Revel cites a 1937 speech in which Russell declared that “Britain should disarm, and if Hitler marched his troops into this country when we were undefended, they should be welcomed like tourists and greeted in a friendly way.”
Please give Revel’s reference or your own research for verification. I suspect the context is in reference to Great Britain not being prepared for war in the 1930s and the (then) recent memory of an entire generation of young men wiped out during WWI. I had two great aunts that never married because there were no men available at all.
Regards,
Ken Fairbairn
Hey come on, babe
Follow me
I’m the Pied Piper
Follow me
I’m the Pied Piper
And I’ll show you where it’s at
Come on, babe
Can’t you see
I’m the Pied Piper
Trust in me
I’m the Pied Piper
And I’ll show you where it’s at
Marxists are drawn to education because it
provides them with a pulpit to preach from
and an income for someone who has no
marketable skills for the real world.
Assaults happen because other opinions and
truth are a threat to their position and
esteem. Misrepresenting or leaving out
facts counter to their ideology is essential.
I had some extreme leftist profs way back
in the 1970′s and you could see this already.
Stuff like ridiculing students openly in
class for having different opinions and
arranging vocal protests to disrupt guest
speakers they did not like.
The sad thing is that the indoctrination, soft-headed thinking and emoting has crept into the science departments as well. As an employee of science department of a major public university, I get to witness this insanity first hand. One of the more recent offerings that we were ‘encouraged’ to attend was a seminar on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Issues in the Classroom. The first obvious problem is where are the straight and normally gendered folks, but we’ll leave that alone for now. Now this seminar was an offering for science teachers, not the mushy headed liberal arts types. The gist of it from the materials I got my hands on (I refused to attend this travesty) was that GLBT student don’t feel welcome in the classroom and we need to engage them and talk to them about their feelings and make an effort to be inclusive. The obvious question is why the sexual practices and feelings of students are a concern of either the professor or other students? We’re there to teach science, they’re there to learn science–what they do when they go home isn’t part of that process. But clearly if they can make sexuality and feelings the primary issue in the classroom as opposed to science, they’ve won a major victory over rational thinking.
Emotive science also rules the day when it comes to global warming hysteria. Everyone is trying to suck at the taxpayer teat to get research funds, and the tax payer apparently values global warming research. So there’s a rather continuous stream of seminars based on a long chain of assumptions about how if the world continues to warm at this ridiculous pace (umm, except that it isn’t warming), some poor little fish that lives in a stream will go extinct (because obviously it can’t adapt–biologists only believe in evolution until it runs up against their guilty for being human worldview).
The science departments are populated by very sharp, brilliant minds who, for the most part, subscribe to absurd political beliefs outside of their field. Which is why we wind up with guys like Stephen Chu or John Holdren, who are good physicists, but utterly naive when it comes to policy. No doubt a lot of this is because many scientists are, in effect, government employees (even though they actually compete for government funds), and so their livelihood is dependent on maintaining the trappings of the socialist state.
So while Solway brings up valid points, I think the battle is lost and the rot goes too deep. The contagion is just too far spread even in the departments that ought to have rational thinkers. You can’t even hire more conservative thinkers since conservatives would never voice their opinions during a job interview and they’d probably keep quiet until they got tenure. There’s just no way for the grown ups to take control anymore. The only positive I can point out is that many students realize the indoctrination for what it is and they manage to get through while keeping their beliefs intact. But it’s kind of sad when students are wasting their time and money just to get through a propaganda class.
I graduated at the top of my class with a double major from a good college; I did not enter graduate school because I couldn’t take one more minute of the postmodern gibberish being peddled in every department and by nearly every instructor, at all times. Even the visiting lectures were hopelessly corrupted by the barbaric and unlovely LitCrit jargon: “Jane Austin and the Deterritorialized Gaze: Possession, Feminism, and the Other in 19th Century England” I’d rather watch TV, thank you. I spent my entire time reading the great critics and scholars of the preceeding generations and largely ignored my professors; Harold C. Goddard has more thoughtful things to say about Shakespeare than all the current crop of pedagogues could collectively put together in their lifetimes.
Lastly, and I feel I can say this with authority, the university is the least free place to speak your mind in the United States. At any time you might slip up and find yourself before a tribunal of administrative jellyfish, being castigated by a howling lunatic from some immaterial discipline demanding your immediate expulsion. It’s not worth opening your mouth, because no one will even see the need to come to your defense. The hard and natural sciences sail along, imperiously indifferent to the fate of the humanities. By the time they realize that the barbarians have stormed the gates, and taken the city below, their floating island will have been over-run with the same hordes of irrationalism, misplaced sentiment, self-loathing, and muddleheaded thinking that doomed their sister schools. Once language is detroyed, it becomes impossible to even articulate the grounds of dissent, or remember when things might have been different.
One of the most pressing needs that conservatives and honest liberals have is to rebuild the university; not to create a new model, but to reinstate the grand one that once existed and must exist again if our common culture is to re-establish a fellowship with wisdom.
Why don’t you sue? Theese peole are using your dollasr (be they tax dollars or private dollars) to different goals than (education) than those thye were supposed to be spent on. They also cause you or your childean a prejudice since the time spent on propaganda will not be spent on teaching marketable skills meaning that you or your children will get worse jobs.
Sue the teacher, sue the university and don’t stop until they have lost their pants. If you can’t sue at least make well clear you will never make them any donation as long as they are allowing propaganda instead of teaching.
Universities should be about propagating the wisdom of the ages, which they actually accomplish in mathematics and science.
In the humanities, when the university abdicates its duty to helping the students understand where they come from, it becomes easy prey for all kinds of agents of subversion, who are busy cultivating ignorance so they can take the youngsters along some utopian road, which by definition does not go anywhere.
This is how windbags like Churchill are given all the props, as if he deserved any of them. Before sacrificing so much to pay for tuition and expenses, parents should take a look at what brew the universities are concocting.
“that familiar disposition which Czeslaw Milosz in _The Captive Mind_, drawing from the Arabic, characterized as _ketman_, the wimpish position taken by those who desire to be “at one with others, in order not to be alone.”
Few things cheer us fiends up more than off-the-wall neocomrades goin’ on at random about books they cannot possibly (?) have read.
And this after the _jihád_ careerists have had more than seven years to clue him in on _kitmán_ and _taqiyya_ directly!
Happy days.
So what then do we do about it? While a well written piece it’s kind of like telling me “the roof is leaking” while water drips on my head. I’m aware of the problem, how about some real solutions?
“Which is why, in the absence of a stringent auditing program applied to university curricula, hiring parameters, and administrative policies, the current intellectual devastation will likely prove no less socially destructive than it did in Graves’ long-ago England.”
Now how to go about this when the Administration of most universities is filled with these same types? Also their positions are protected by the socialists in the unions, legislatures, and government bureaucracies. This in combination with the fact that they are turning out more indoctrinated “believers” every year does not foster hope for a bright American future or a peaceful resolution. The rabid left grows more violent and bold in their attacks as time goes on. The assault on a senior citizen in CA after prop 8 got passed is merely one example.
I’m pretty sure that suing would fall under the hate crimes provision of that new bill they’re trying to pass. You cannot sue the protected classes if you are from the oppressor class. The courts are sympathetic to the university cause, and the government that controls the purse strings are sympathetic to the university cause. And, of course, the media is sympathetic to the university cause. Not to mention these are the very people who have perverted the language and the culture in this society. Attempt to take them to court on it and you’re going to be slandered as a racist, homophobe, extremist, etc.
Really the best thing is to vote with your money as much as possible. If your alma mater has become unhinged, don’t give them money when they do the alumni fundraisers and let them know why you’re not giving them money. Don’t send your kids to schools dominated by nut cases. Starve them for money and otherwise try to marginalize them.
#8 Fragmentarian. I always liked that 1966 song, the Pied Piper.
General comments. I find it humorous that Ward Churchill’s picture is at the top of this thread. Ward was fired from the University of Colorado following what some considered to be a right wing witch hunt. He angered the right with an obscure essay referring to the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmans.” I never read it, so can’t relate to whatever context he was using.
Anyway, there was an investigation powered by then governor Bill Owens and some very conservative righties in the state legislature. Came to light that Ward was a plagiarist in some of his other work and after a lengthy investigation, he was fired. He recently filed a lawsuit, which he won, but got a grand total of $1 in damages from the jury. Now, he is working the university to get his old job back. No final decisions yet.
#10 TQ wrote: “emotive science….rules the day.” I’m not a full believer in global warming being caused by human action, but neither am I a skeptic. My point is this, not related to global warming. I don’t see much difference between the radical left pushing in universities whatever agenda it may have; versus the far right pushing creation “science” and intelligent design upon high schools. This is not “mushy headed liberalism,” but is the right wing equivalent of nut job quackery. Neither approach provides a balanced education.
14-
Put the bong down. You sound befuddled.
An idiot recently that “the only thing worse than the universities are the churches”. Oddly enough, there’s a hidden (and unintentional) truth in that inane statement:
“The universities are the churches.” And progressive liberalism is the religion. These alleged academics are the inquisitors, and Gaia help you if you utter – or even think – anything heretical.
If you went to a university like UC Berzerkeley or UNM and came away with a solid knowledge of a genuine field of study, it would probably be purely incidental.
If nothing else, you’d get the feeling that white people are evil & so are Jews, Christians and conservatives, women are opressed by our phallocentric society, sticking a fork into a fetuses’ head right up to partial birth is moral, American “whiteness is The Man™ keepin’ a brotha down”, and that faith in God is a sign of immaturity but faith in the Obamanation is a virtue.
Any dissent will tolerated with all the restraint of a Taliban troop coming across a girl wearing a bikini & makeup while eating a pork chop.
At my university, the sciences and humanities have practically nothing to do with each other. It seems that whatever progress is being made is all happening on the sciences side. As for the business students, for the most part, they are there so they can graduate and get a job. The standards are also completely different. Science students work harder, probably learn alot more, and seem to be more driven. Its very sad to see the decline of the humanities.
I’m pretty sure that suing would fall under the hate crimes provision of that new bill they’re trying to pass. You cannot sue the protected classes if you are from the oppressor class. The courts are sympathetic to the university cause,
After writing the first lines I remembered that the judges have gone through the academia filtering. That is why I pointed to plan B: the “No donations” policy. But it is not enough to merely refuse to donate, you have to tell the university that you will not and why.
17. SteveB/Colorado:“I don’t see much difference between the radical left pushing in universities whatever agenda it may have; versus the far right pushing creation “science” and intelligent design upon high schools. This is not “mushy headed liberalism,” but is the right wing equivalent of nut job quackery. Neither approach provides a balanced education.”
Students have a choice between the School of the Left, which embraces science as well as progressive thinking which can lead to radicalism, and School of the Right, which embraces Creationism at the peril of both science and critical thought, and which can also lead to radicalism.
If I to choose between the lesser of two evils, I would definitely choose an idiot professor who tries to tell me that Che Guevara was a hero rather than an idiot professor who tries to tell me that the world is 6000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
While attending a very liberal college in Illinois as a nontraditional student, I politely pointed out to my hippy liberal professor that there were 27 amendments to the Constitution after he had stated that there were only 26, the last being the voting age set to 18. The year was 1996. I had previously bantered with him on different subjects and we hung out together in the smoking area. But this time he asked me to come to his office after class. He then told me that I am to stop contradicting him in class in front of the younger students. Of course I told him okay but I was lying. I did more research and studied harder so that I could contradict him and back up what I was saying with references. At the end of the semester I received an A. I think maybe I was the one that was feared in the end.
#21-
LOL! Which professors, where, and how many of them per capita on campuses advocate the young earth idea you cited above?
Seriously- post them. We’d all like to know.
I suspect this problem cannot be solved until we — the American people — get over the idea that “everyone needs and should get a college education.” That folderol has acquired the status of an axiom — and we must get past it. The problem to which Mr. Solway alludes exists primarily in the humanities and soft sciences (although, as several posters have correctly pointed out, it has begun to infect some of the hard sciences as well). The question is: “What are all those young people doing in those sociology and queer studies and cultural anthropology classes?” The answer: “Killing time.”
Can anyone seriously argue that the typical student in either the soft sciences or the humanities is doing anything useful or productive? Can anyone seriously argue that years spent listening to lectures on feminism or black power or any of the other makework topics covered in these courses will, as a result, become a “better citizen” or “well-rounded person” or whatever the platitude of the day is?
The truth is that higher education in America has been grossly oversold, as Charles Murray brilliantly argues in his latest book. College education is right and good for some people, and wrong and bad for others. The sooner we accept that fact, the better off our country will be.
One huge consequence of scaling back on higher education is that we will end up with fewer colleges and fewer people teaching in colleges. At that point, the problem of indoctrination, which now seems unsolvable, will become manageable. Fewer and smaller schools, smaller enrollments, fewer faculty, more focus on serious subjects — all of this could be the beginning of something very good.
Let me introduce my husband. According to the DHLS, he is a rightwing extremist. He’s a gun owner, and gun carrier. He’s a fisherman. He believes– no strike that– he practices self-reliance in all aspects of his life. He loves Western movies, especially “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” He is forceful, but not a brute. He speaks his mind. He wears cowboy boots (he’s from Texas). He goes to TEA parties. He is a free market capitalist, and believes in a very limited role for federal government. He’s a localist at heart. He likes NASCAR. He’s a real Redneck. He refuses to watch the NFL any more because it makes him ill. He’s a big Red Stegal fan.
Anything else of consequence? Oh, right. He’s:
Professor and Head, The Department of Philosophy,
Professor, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Director, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program
Fellow of the Graduate School
at a major Research One public university.
He fights the good fight in every classroom, every administrative meeting, and every time he speaks at conferences. Please don’t forget that folks like my husband *do* exist in academia. How about someone showcasing these (brave) men & women?
If I need a big helping of wingnuts I can just come here or go to Fox
#11 uburoisc
I, too, am a refugee from the academic fever swamps, and I’ve never read a better or truer reader comment. You should be a columnist for Pajamas Media.
Conservatives are going to have to create separate universities (a la Hillsdale). This is a fight which can never be won at most existing public and private universities. We need a new approach.
“I suspect this problem cannot be solved until we — the American people — get over the idea that “everyone needs and should get a college education.” That folderol has acquired the status of an axiom — and we must get past it.”
I suspect that this is the root of the whole problem. The university I was a lecturer at admits students who never should have graduated high school, yet is constantly trumpeting its research achievements, which those same students pay for.
Ms. Attitude:
Re your “hippy professor” who didn’t like your contradicting him in class. It is apparently different in the hard sciences and math. As an older student, I pointed out chalkboard errors on the part of my math or computer science professors a number of times. Not trivial arithmetic errors, but logic errors etc.I also pointed out errors on Homework Answers posted on the Prof’s door.
I never got any request from a Prof to cool it. Their attitude was: everyone, professor and students alike, is held to high standards.
26-
Why am I not surprized want a big helping of nuts? To be sure, some nuts might do you some good…
Sorry. Was that too ballzy of me to point that out?
#21, Pastor of Muppets wrote:
“Students have a choice between the School of the Left, which embraces science as well as progressive thinking which can lead to radicalism, and School of the Right, which embraces Creationism at the peril of both science and critical thought, and which can also lead to radicalism.”
This is not true at all. Before the Left took over the universities lock stock and barrel, there was an apolitical university. Refusal to preach politics was the specific sin of the university that the New Left railed against in the 1960s and 70s, and was the specific reason why left-wing students and faculty overthrew it. This is a matter of history, taken from the mouths of the radicals themselves, and all you have to do to remedy your ignorance is follow the helpful link to the Marcuse essay that Evergreen still maintains. Or read a book dealing with campus radicals that contains quotes from those people: they will tell you themselves that their intent was to radicalize an apolitical academy.
Furthermore, where is the “choice” between Left and Right in the university today? The Right is locked out. Even a whiff of non-radical sentiment will disqualify a Ph.D. from a humanities post, and any evidence of doubt about “climate change” or its purported causes is enough to cause complications for scientists seeking academic jobs.
This “choice” that you claim simply doesn’t exist, either in the past or presently.
There seems to be a market-based effect working here – the growing dearth of male students in higher education. Except for private on-line schools, which are booming.
Polack Lit, I’ve read Milosz and I think David Solway’s reference is spot on; in order to get along in a world where any little slip means curtains, wise men resort to wearing elaborate masks to conceal their true thoughts from ideological fanatics. A big part of the work of Leo Strauss argued that wise men must always conceal what they mean to say from the authorities, and that most of the great works of philosophy are written in some degree of code. During most of history, saying something controversial would mean summary execution, or worse, so men of reason learned ketman to preserve their lives. The great Muslim scholars that the lunatic religious fanatic Muslims brag about had to largely conceal their ideas and beliefs from the same religious orthodox clergy who would have murdered them for heretical ideas. Things haven’t changed much in Islam.
And why would you think Mr. Solway hasn’t read Czeslaw Milosz; most educated men have. “The Captive Mind” is one of the most important books of the 20th Century, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. His uncle, the great poet Oscar Milosz is a little more arcane (but I suspect Mr. Solway, being a poet, has probably read his work as well).
“This is a fight which can never be won at most existing public and private universities.”
Amen. The already established schools must be abandoned. Their goofy professors are too protected legally. Reformers don’t stand a chance. But I cynically don’t think anything is really going to happen until the soft science credentials awarded by the intellectual whorehouses are ridiculed. Most parents could care less if their child becomes truly educated. They just want to see them obtain a good paying job after leaving college.
#35 David Thomson:
“Most parents could care less if their child becomes truly educated. They just want to see them obtain a good paying job after leaving college.”
This will change when employers, who now require bachelor’s degrees for many jobs where only a high-school diploma was considered necessary in the past, start to realize that the applicants who have been to college are even more poorly-adjusted (and sometimes more illiterate) than those who haven’t.
#25 Marica: Very impressive spouse! It says a lot about him personally to be able to achieve all of that within the confines of the current liberal education system. I had my son read your post to know that he’s not the only Conservative college kid that has ever existed!
On to your question as to why people like your spouse aren’t celebrated? Well, unfortunately for several reasons including the fact that the MSM would much rather focus on issues like if Perez Hilton thinks Miss California should have her crown taken away or what TeleBama and Michelle did on their date night at the White House or if Arlen Specter has any more trash talk about the GOP. Those sorts of things that feed the liberals are always in vogue and always seem to garner more attention than say, international relations between Israel and Iran or the fiscal crisis or anything that might have any bearing on the safety and security of the US population.
Just be sure and tell your spouse that there ARE those of us (especially with college-aged kids) who are ETERNALLY grateful that there are professors out there willing to stand up for an idea instead of falling in line with the zombie-eyed masses. Silently we thank him. Please pass that on.
Alan ABQ:
“…If you went to a university like UC Berzerkeley or UNM and came away with a solid knowledge of a genuine field of study, it would probably be purely incidental…”
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, Al. I’m told on good authority that there is some fine work in mathematics being done at “Berzerkeley.”
David Solway:
You overlook an important point. This problem extends beyond our borders.
In another age, the British ran the sons of prominent foreigners through their public schools and universities and created little brown Englishmen who went home to rule their native lands and pursue policies beneficial to Britain. Two generations of Hashemite rulers in (Trans)Jordan are a case in point.
Contemporary foreign graduates of American universities by the thousands go home to their native lands with nothing but contempt for democracy and the American way.
Mushminded leftist academics are digging America’s grave.
#21:
“Students have a choice between the School of the Left, which embraces science as well as progressive thinking which can lead to radicalism, and School of the Right, which embraces Creationism at the peril of both science and critical thought, and which can also lead to radicalism.”
There is an engineering term to describe this passage: “horseshit”.
1. The left does not embrace science, except to champion the parts that support their agenda, without understanding any of it. A lefty uses “Science” the way a fundamentalist would say “God”, to indicate something they can’t understand, but have graet faith in.
2. Progressive thinking? This term should always be in quotes, since when applied to leftist ideology it refers to the opposite of progress – and thought. “progressive” ideas all seem to lead backwards, to an all-powerful state. That’s regress, going back to absolute rulers, not progress.
3. It’s improper to fault the “School of the Right” for a loss of critical thought, since the left betrays absolutely no comprehension of the term. I constantly hear lefties bemoan the lack of “critical thought” on the right; I never see them demonstrate any themselves.
35. What are you basing your statement that “most parents could care less if their child becomes truly educated”? Do you have some documentation to back up your statement?
A comprehensive education makes a person substantially more well-rounded and engaged with the world. The recent conservative habit of mocking intelligence, deriding education, and belittling even getting a college degree is pretty disheartening.
I guess that Mike Judge movie “Idiocracy” is already coming true with the crowd on this blog.
Erasmus – The crowd here is not interested in education but in learning how to parrot the wingnut line. A good eduation teaches you to question, not regurgitation. That is why they hate any institution that values real education
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, Al. I’m told on good authority that there is some fine work in mathematics being done at “Berzerkeley.”
That’s probably true. The hard science departments are still worthy of respect. It’s the softer disciplines that have gone to hell in a hand basket. A liberal arts degree is often a joke. This may be especially true regarding courses with “studies” in their name.
Che T-Shirts out sell Pinochet Tshirts 1,000,000,000 to none on college campuses. Chile is a thriving democracy in part because Pinochet took the bold step to free the economy. Cuba is a economic waste basket.
Students need to open their eyes and look around realize they are being spoonfed crap by professors.
They should make professors at state universities take an oath of loyalty to the United States, or better yet require military service. If they want to be America-hating hippies, they can do it on their own dime.
#40 “Erasmus”:
He’s correct about parents’ concerns: They want their child’s degree to be his meal ticket, and most are not even aware that at one time, a college education was intended to train students to be well-rounded and fit to be leaders in society.
For decades, most universities have not had the least concern with providing a well-rounded (aka liberal) education. Utilitarianism is the order of the day in curricula and in the marketing plans for selling the curricula. Of course, individual professors or academic departments can and do have their own agendas. But what the university is selling–and what students and their parents are buying–is meal tickets.
It is still necessary for most people (inasmuch as founding and operating a successful enterprise of your own is beyond the ability and inclination of most people) to obtain at least a bachelor’s degree, because most employers demand it. But the value of those degrees is plummeting, and if things continue as they are, eventually a bachelor’s degree will come to be seen as a detriment, rather than a prerequisite, to job seekers.
The old goals of the liberal arts education are dead and gone from nearly all our universities. What killed them was the thoughtless egalitarianism that insisted that not only did everyone have a RIGHT to attend college, but that everyone MUST do so; and the more recent takeover by the ultra-left-wing.
Restoring the liberal arts to the colleges won’t happen, because it would mean DEATH to the Left. The “Idiocracy” is coming about because students attend school for 16-24 years without ever learning a thing, except perhaps for left-wing dogma. No one’s mocking intelligence. We’re mocking sophistry and just plain old stupidity that CALLS itself intelligence. No one is deriding education, but we are deriding people who call themselves “educators” who are no such thing. No one is belittling getting a college degree except those few people who realized they were better off without it.
What these people are contemptuous of in academia is that very lack–even the reversal–of that well-rounded ideal that you want to convince them can still be had there.
P Lit, that is interesting to see an islamic description that exactly describes what I experienced during my years in San Francisco and now recognize with my once intelligent and thoughtful step-daughter. After a master’s at Portland and another at Denver U, she now despises everything American even while not having the knowledge or language to defend her position. She is now a professional artist and assistant professor so is beyond redemption.
Oh, and Ms. Attitude, I also had a hippy professional at a little university in St. Louis who could not sustain true dialogue without resorting to belittling comments. There were a couple of other “instructors” with similar problems but they at least weren’t full professors. Every chance with all of them, I’d verbally dismantle their hypothesis. Improving oneself is a compelling experience but it was clear all that was available from these yahoos was credit hours. The learning needed for life and work was occurring during life and at work.
Show Obama, Reid and Pelosi the tea party protests were not “astroTurf” but they were the beginning of a massive movement against massive Government growth and the control that comes with it. Tell them to Empower Individual Americans to take responsibility for their own lives and for the individual to have control over the direction of our country Sign the petition for Individual Empowerment!!! http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Indv1776/petition.html THE ONLY THIS WILL WORK IS IF YOU COPY AND SEND IT TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY THAT YOU HAVE THE SAME OPINIONS AS YOU. ALSO COPY AND POST IT ON OTHER NEWS SITES, BLOGS, EMAIL IT TO ORGANIZATIONS ETC
#18 AlanABQ
GOOD ONE!
“What killed them was the thoughtless egalitarianism that insisted that not only did everyone have a RIGHT to attend college, but that everyone MUST do so”
The unintentionally awful 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power, also made things worse. It was only supposed to compel employers to use test questions that were relevant to the listed job. These companies were told by their lawyers, however, that the wording of the decision would open them up to endless lawsuits. Their answer: forget the per se testing—and simply demand the prospective applicant possesses the minimum of a bachelor’s degree. Some economists estimate that this particular court decision has cost the American economy three trillion dollars over the last thirty-eight years!
#50, David Thomson:
I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting.
The GOP might win elections by making college courses and bloat an issue, but it would distract them from opposing gay marriage and trying to overturn Roe v Wade, so….
@#1
You’re not very familiar with Eastern thought or modern univeristies, are you? Good luck to you if you’re going to try and make the claim that scientism isn’t deeply rooted in academia, because it’s a ludicrous statement.
“The recent conservative habit of mocking intelligence, deriding education, and belittling even getting a college degree is pretty disheartening.”
The university has become so dumbed-down that a college degree holds almost no value whatsoever. The problem with the modern university isn’t that it’s too rigorous or demands too much critical thought, quite the contrary, it requires neither–unless you make the decision to stay in the hard and natural sciences. Mathematics is still mathematics, but the instruction of history has changed a lot since Jacques Barzun was teaching at Columbia. In the quest to give everyone who has nothing better to do a college education, the standards have been so abrogated that the university represents almost nothing whatsoever. At this point, a person of middling intelligence and the ability to simply show up can sail through an undergraduate degree with top grades and still be drunk and stoned every night. Ask Harvey Mansfield, perhaps the finest scholar of Machiavelli and Tocqueville in the country, what he thinks of Harvard’s vaunted standards; he gives two grades, the one the get from grade inflation, and the one they deserve.
The first thing the university needs to do in order to regain it rightful role in society is to tell 2/3 of their charges that they aren’t college material. But the egalitarian morons who have spent the last 5 decades turning the university into a miasma of porn, drugs, slovenliness, bad taste, and infantile ideas isn’t about to tell all those paying (well, not really, but that loan debacle in on the horizon as well) customers they’re too dim to read Aristotle and benefit from it.
What we are mocking and deriding is the risible counterfeit to education and intelligence that passes for shinola among the leftist cognoscenti. They simply say the word “education” like it’s some holy incantation that, when mixed with tax dollars, produces a thoughtful citizen.
Universites give out “Doctorates” because they INDOCTRINATE.
WEll DUH!
Juvenal, thank you.
Marica, sorry I didn’t study with your husband, he sounds like a fine man. He must feel like Gary Cooper in “High Noon” most days.
So many of the ‘leftards’ ignore the fact that:
A. Their president calls himself a ‘Christian’.
B. A huge percentage of Hispanic and Black Democrat voters are Christians/Catholics.
C. The United States Constitution was written by God believing men.
~
Oh wait. I get it now! Only ‘Conservative’ Christians are evil and bad. All Leftists Christians are pure and good. -How ‘enlightening’. We’ll just ignore the fact that many Lefty Christians are against Gay Marriage and Abortion. Shhhh.
52. Blackwell:
“The GOP might win elections by making college courses and bloat an issue, but it would distract them from opposing gay marriage and trying to overturn Roe v Wade, so…”
So…
Good idea! But we wouldn’t forget about the other issues & of course, we’re trying to “roll back the clock” on civil rights.
Also, you forgot to mention that we’re a bunch of Nazi rednecks with guns & religion. Seems like you trolls are slipping a bit…
Maybe you should go to school!
#40-
“A comprehensive education makes a person substantially more well-rounded and engaged with the world. The recent conservative habit of mocking intelligence, deriding education, and belittling even getting a college degree is pretty disheartening.”
Wow. So much smear tactic packed into such a small paragraph. I’m not sure whether to point out the contradiction, the outrught lies, the propaganda behind that… statement?… or the obvious lack of a “well rounded” education; you’re inability to engage people here maturely makes it noticeable.
Looks like you did attend school! And they say clown college is passé…
uburoisc, I agree with the previous poster. You ought to be a columnist here.
As for my own thoughts: Perhaps we ought to pull the plug on the humanities, social sciences and fine arts colleges of our state universities for a generation or two. And more than a few law schools, too.
What do we have to lose? The VDHs and the Mary Grabars will have no problems finding employment but the nutcases will have to justify their projects to someone who knows what a bottom line is.
“#50, David Thomson:
I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting.”
The college dropout Bill Gates became the head of Microsoft. This occurred because he was one of the founders of the company. It would, however, be next to impossible for him to work his way up the company ladder. Lawsuits would be inevitable especially once he was promoted over a “protected minority” possessing more credentials. Griggs vs. Duke Power is the U.S. Supreme Court decision that is virtually unknown. And yet, it has profoundly impacted millions of lives for the worse. As a practical matter, ability had to take a back seat to credentialism.
One need only compare the comments here that I’d say were mostly Conservative/Independent to the comments on the Huffington Post or Slate which are mainly Liberal/Left. PM’s comments are well thought out(for the most part) and coherently written whereas the HuffPo/Slate comments are lowbrow, chest thumping “we winners and you not” sort of dialogue. Doesn’t bode well for that expensive liberal education if they’re pumping out more illiterate sheeple.
Antonio Gramsci would be so proud of today’s university.
Thanks, TurfMonster. VDH is one of the finest scholars I know, and perhaps the most prescient essayist writing in America. If he returned to teaching, I’d return to graduate school, whatever the subject.
What needs to happen is conservatives (and liberals who still deserve the estimable designation) who want their children to receive a true, comprehensive liberal education in the best sense of the word, should pull their funding and support from dead-end schools filled with phony scholars teaching dubious disciplines and either buy out existing schools or found new ones. Then persuade honorable men like VDH to direct the curricula and run the school the way a great college should be run. More Jeffrey Hart, less bell hooks; Harold Bloom, yes, Cornell West, no; Thomas Sowell always, Fredric Jameson not a chance. You get my drift. There is no education in reading the writings of fashionable twit like Jean Baudrillard or a buffoon like Andrea Dworkin when you could be reading Eric Voegelin or Jane Austin instead.
Modern communication technology has already made college obselete. When I started work (1991), training was regularly conducted with instructors in classroom settings. Today, training sessions are facilitated through networked computers. The training is incredibly effective and convenient. Streaming video, prepackaged training sessions, high quality documentaries, wikipedia, etc… are all more effective formats for providing education than the traditional classroom setting. The convenience and costs have already forced corporate America to abandon the traditional model.
I have a masters degree, and have spent my fair share of time in the classroom. Bottom line is that the modern education methods are significantly more effective. The current University system has a 10 year window to re-invent itself or it will be in the same situation as the newspapers. This issue will work itself out, jus like liberal corruption of network news is working itself out. Technology will break the politacl stranglehold liberlas have over education.
All I can surmise is that this retard fell out of a tree on some college campus, so they hired him.
6. sheesh:
“The only thing worse than the universities are the churches.”
- Oh those terrible churches always preaching nonsense to us like values, love, compassion, and how to live a relatively sane and happy life by following those weird Ten Commandments !
What I’ve noticed is that college educated people with umteen degrees are often nothing more than educated nuts. That–and snobs to boot. In my view common sense is far better. And then get the education.
#63 steveg,
You are quite correct in that observation. The Communists have taken over and we are living in dispiriting times. Right now, it seems as if we may be too late in realizing the takeover that has happened. This has been planned all along. I am sure some of the old Communists living in their dachas east of Moscow or on the Black Sea are lamenting the fact that they should have hung on just a little longer. And then it would have dropped right into their laps.
The Obonga administration is full steam ahead now. There is no threat of a Senate fillibuster to stop him and the Democrats. They can have pretty much what they want.
2010 and 2012 are absolutely crucial for the nation’s identity. If we don’t pick up significant seats in 2010 and then get it all in 2012, good bye America – the one we knew only fleetingly as we grew up and for most of our lives. It will be gone. It will no longer exist as a distinct nation, being absorbed into global governance and submission.
Maybe the shadow or any other wedge (read that as a “simple tool”) can take time out from their comic book collection and give all us wingnut mouthbreathers a few examples of whatever flavor of left wing,big government “progressive” countries that have actually worked to the advantage of the citizens of that country.How about just one example?
To paraphrase Ralph Peters,when I find myself in a room full of leftist intellectuals,I feel a nostalgia for the khmer rouge.
To ensure she gets a real education I supplement my daughter’s 30k a year education with emails among me and my brothers on history, politics, current events, economics, etc – her uncles are highly educated and argumentative – its great stuff – I would rather pay them the 30k then the bozos teaching her at ____ Univ.
I have built four companies and am starting a new one. Most of our hires come out of graduate programs in business, engineering and the sciences, and some with liberal arts backgrounds. Doesn’t matter – the quality I hired years ago eclipse what I see today. What a shame and what an expensive shame.
I have also taught as an adjunct faculty member at a presitgious university. Having lunch in the faculty lounge made me gag. The pomposity and adsurdity of many of the conversations was something to behold. Did you know that Constantine was really gay, and his conversion on the bridge was a realization of his true being, and that his dive into Christianity was only a way to beard the truth from others. Did you know that the ills of western civilization are due to its patriarchal nature? Did you know that Gaia is alive with its own spirit and the denial of that spirit is what causes natural disasters? Did you know that Homer was really a woman and the odyssey was about her search for the soul of mankind?
Pass the salt please.
rockwood john;i agree that technology is a big gain in that aspect.i also think it will have a significantly positive effect on gettng out the conservative politcal message in general.facts and reason are on our side.the intertubes…end run around leftist academia and the msm!
#71 Gordo..Thank You, I have not laughed so hard in a week.
#67…
No feeding of the trolls. Thank you. =)
#61 David Thomson:
Can you imagine how different Gates’ life would be if he had been “smart” and stayed in college and then relied on someone else to give him a job?
#71 Gordo:
“Did you know that Gaia is alive with its own spirit and the denial of that spirit is what causes natural disasters?”
These are the people who claim “science” as a birthright, and (like #40 “Erasmus” above) deride objections to this quasi-religious nonsense as “anti-science.”
Of course one of the ironies is that even though, as David Thompson points out, serious and worthwhile work continues being done at elite campuses in the hard sciences, the professors who teach those courses are still largely susceptible to the leftist group-think that dominates elsewhere on campus. Friends of mine from college who majored in things like computer science or engineering or who went on to do graduate work in those fields eventually ended up being indoctrinated by the ridiculous left-wing cant that dominated the campuses where they were studying. I’ve observed this numerous times, and it is also true at the university where I work now. There is one professor, a geologist, whose technical research is apparently held in high regard, but who is also one of the biggest environmental activists on campus, and who is busy trying to find ways to force his extreme environmental views on everyone on campus.
One of the reasons for this is that people who study the sciences or engineering often know too little of history or philosophy or other matters that might make them less inclined to buy into the conventional wisdom that dominates our leftist campuses.
I fear it is too late. Who is going to pass this legislation – the Democrats?
All well said MR Solway, but your observations are not exactly coming as revelation. It’s been about a decade since I first applauded David Horowitz’s crusade, and almost 20 since I myself survived the federal republic of Kent State in Ohio.
As my nephew (a 17 yr-old HS Junior) readies for the plunge, the family has been musing. If you get into the weeds as a parent or a concerned contributor, there are some interesting albeit glacial transformations afoot. Some universities are actually taking the issue seriously and trying to invite conservatism back into the fold.
While an idiot like Chamberlin or a high profile firing like Summers @ Harvard gets the most press, I want to add to 24. altalena’s apt reference to Charles Murray. Both he and Horowitz have attacked the entrenched leftism in various ways – one as a brilliant scientist and the other as a determined insurgent whose basically ‘switched sides.’
There are two points both raise that Mr Sloway barely mentions.
First, higher education is astromically expensive. When one includes the most disturbing result that many of our best corporations continue to go shopping globally for talent – because they claim they can’t FIND WORTHY AMERICAN GRADS – it’s painfully obvious that a lot of money is wasted catering to leftist losers finding a comfy santuary in our universities.
Second, this financial meltdown devasted the largest university endowments, endowments that were the top twenty ranked by UN standards against countries GDP, many would be rightly recognized as nations not simply ‘uniquely private spheres’ as comrade Chamberlain is fond of proporting when justifying his rank philosophy.
Since the sixties – when the left took over – there has remained a social commitment in policy and dollars. But those private endowments still ballooned flush with contributions. But when you get past those large well known endowments – Harvard/Stanford/U of Penn ect ect ect – it’s a different story than in the 40′s, 50′s & early 60′s.
The extreme leftism has driven away contributors. The english dept of my alma mater – KSU – is now getting run more like the Sociology Dept’s ‘Center For Peaceful Change’ when I was there in the 80′s. Why? Because they dont get squat from private donors – and the Administration clues them to their actual mission – ensuring undergrads get a remedial aquaintence with the english language.
And when we are hit with difficult economic times as now – do universities really do a downsizing like private business? Fat chance. All three major universities here in Az ran the shrill arguments in public of ‘devestaing cutbacks’ that ‘threaten the quaility of education’. Sure some prof’s who should have been canned decades ago got pushed into early retirement – but real cutbacks are a farce.
They idle some capital spending (slow or cease expansion) and pass the costs onto students and parents who pay for them.
It is a searing necessity that many students who could become needed engineers will wind up fast tracking through a community college to fill a health care job with too few current qualified applicants.
And that Silicon Valley type corp will continue shopping globally for imported (cheaper) talent. It sapps us as a nation while bleeding us of a future. Maybe now that there has been a seminal event – reorienting Americans toward the kind of savings and frugality their grandparents naturally adheared to – the left will get left out at the Academic orgy.
Don’t let your kid go six figures in debt to a school that wants to poison his mind with marxist cant. Shop for integrity. They are out there, just in the minority.
Was it not Stalin or Kruschev who said, “give me a generation or two of America’s youth and I can destroy that country”? The colleges have done a great job of sowing the seeds of America’s destruction. In the series “From Atlantis to Mecania” at Brussels Journal, the author compares these left wing elitists to pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The colleges are turning our youth into left wing pods full of loathing for their country and Western Civilization in general. These pods are being spit out of the universities by the hundreds of thousands, going on to become America’s powers-that-be. There is nothing to be done to turn these colleges around. It would be like trying to remove a cancer that has spread throughout the body.
71. gordo:
I had the same reaction to what I heard at the local Tea Party.
My Dad is a retired Dean of a major University of California campus. I love him dearly but have clashed with the bizarre values he espouses. To me, UC was just a Disneyland to support professional students – er… teachers. Not only a subsidized meal ticket, but an ivory tower conferring social status on those who limit their aspirations in the outside world.
When I attended the University the first thing that I asked him about was the curriculum’s dramatic departure from relevance. There wasn’t one class in the Humanities (my major) where you could learn a skill useful in the outside world. He was proud of that; it represented he lofty heights they had attained. Someday, he said, I would appreciate the fact that UC presents a completely alternate reality that would “expand my horizons”. But my little brain just was not ready.
The temptation to make college an end in itself pervaded the culture. It was obvious that UC was just a teacher mill, with social status determined by “Degrees”, certificates conferred upon those who had avoided the outside world the longest. Stay another couple years. Get another degree and lord it over the rest of us. Don’t leave to the dark side, where you would lose the halo of academia and become one of the Fallen.
“Professors” – or, professional losers unable to function without a rigid communist support system – turned me on to my first joint as I went to a party to find the teacher sprawled with the chicks at the dorm. My own Dad prided himself on hooking up with college chicks well into his fifties. Without any attempt to hide it. Hey, if it feels good, do it.
We all know about the intense social forces acting within academia to fuel resentment against the outside world. Perhaps it is impossible to fully manage or contain them. However, as academia is self-policing, they will continue to slip farther and farther away from relevance with little reason to do otherwise.
I wonder about the benefits my own kids will get from college. I know that degrees are used as a measuring stick for people by the professional world. We all know, however, how very little a degree says as well.
I managed to escape the indoctrination during my college years in the mid to late nineties, mainly from going to a commuter school (20,000 students that had a 30-40 hour a week job to get to after class instead of a protest or a lecture on the virtues of Marxism) and majoring in biology, where the only indoctrination came from the teaching of evolution as indisputable scientific “fact” instead of the flawed, unprovable theory it actually is.
I never thought I’d consider this, but at this rate I may have to actually discourage my children from going to college, and to instead learn a viable skill and encourage them to be entrepreneurs.
I can’t help but wonder if university is once again becoming, as in “East of Eden”, the place you send the fragile, sensitive kid who fails at honest work and can’t do anything else.
Just for kicks I went to Brown U’s website and checked out their curriculum on American civilization – it had only one course on classic American literature (thoreau and hawthorne and nature) A sampling of the rest
Women, writing, power
Back to Bondage – Black women
Sex, Love, Race: Miscegenation, Interracial relations
The sixties without apology (I love that one)
Color me Cool – comic books and graphic novels (wow)
Female Maladies: Women and Mental Illness
The Cultural Logics of Intimacy in America
Women On the Move
Please, Please Me
TV and culture
All this for 45k per year – Brown recently changed the name of Columbus Day to something else because the U determined he was a bad guy
Brown is a great example of liberals gone wild. Comic books? TV? What a deal — and what a great preparation for the future in, well, I don’t know, maybe academia. “Hey, what did you get your PhD in? “TV” At least a graduate of this fine insitution should be able to color between the lines and multi-task remotes.
The photo of Ward Churchill makes me want to puke. How many frauds like Churchill are in academia?
I still remember vividly the comments made from lunatic left professors shortly after 9/11. A professor in Texas made the statement, “Anyone that bombs the pentagon has my vote”, and there were many more even more outrageous. As far as I’m concerned, these are the most disgusting people in America, if you exclude a couple of hundred members of Congress and the media.
Someone above said the only thing worse than the universities are the churches. I say, today’s universities are the churches.
Air2air writes:
“To me, UC was just a Disneyland to support professional students – er… teachers. Not only a subsidized meal ticket, but an ivory tower conferring social status on those who limit their aspirations in the outside world.”
Ding-ding-ding another winner! And the more prestigious the school the bigger the amusement park. And when you come to realize what you’ve said about the university is the truth, and you listen to people say the names of these institutions with a breathless air of reverence like they were holy places of great learning and culture, and you know that no-one will ever believe you if you told them what you know, that is the moment when you either trust yourself and rely on your critical judgment and become a genuine independent thinker, or you get back in line and bleet out the chorus of empty praise. The university today is almost a litmus test of whether you’re really paying attention or not.
Gordo, Brown University is a sewer of dead souls. Not even souls in embryo, but beaten, deformed, rotten dead souls, what Nietzsche would call “the bungled and the botched.” It is typical of what the humanities have become at every campus, filled with men and women who are an anathema to wisdom.
80. sheesh – pretty lame come back.
I live in Thailand and my children will never see a North American or European university. I will not pay to have my children poisoned by environuts and communists. My children even at a very young age have been taught to hate that evil system of Tyranny and why. They only have to look North to Laos or East to Cambodia and Viet Nam for a perfect example of the evil wrought by Socialism, which inevitably leads to Communism. I personally hold the view that a good communist is a dead one.
Skip the Bull S— of attending a “University”, learn a Technical Skill that will allow one to be in demand and when ready, start your own business and become independent.Be a risk taker and believe on your own ability to be your own boss. That is not being taught in any University in this country. None.
There are a few real Technical Universities, Illinois Institute of technology is one, a real technical school. Take a Apprenticeship as a Tool Maker, Carpenter, Bricklayer, Surveyor, etc, anything but Liberal Arts and Law. You can learn how to run a business by “Doing it”. Stay away from the Socialist.
This is the only way one can survive in this enviroment.
The University education, except maybe Engineering and Science, are a waste of time, and MONEY. The Arts and Humanities, are crap. You can learn what you need to know in a few books, and avoid the Liberal Drabble from the socialist in all universities.
Plus, Political Correctness is driving a spike into the heart of the university society.
Is it any wonder that the younger generation of voters went for the empty suit who himself has been surrounded by Marxists his entire life, as he himself admitted in his own books?
The only thing Orwell got wrong was the year.
No one’s mocking intelligence. We’re mocking sophistry and just plain old stupidity that CALLS itself intelligence.
Exactly right. I have all the respect and admiration in the world for genuine scholars like VDH and Thomas Sowell (and historian David Hackett Fischer, who is politically moderate and has written wonderful books about colonial and Revolutionary-era America. I highly recommend his book “Albion’s Seed” which contains insights about colonial America that still have relevance today.)
But true scholars are rare in today’s academy. Wisdom has been replaced with snark and desire to seek the truth has become lust to indoctrinate.
I too dropped out of graduate school in the early ’90′s. I was fairly liberal when I started but one class too many of feminist/Marxist/deconstructionism sent me over the edge. Instead of reading the great works of Western Civilization, I was spending big bucks to waste my time reading trendy, worthless drivel like bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin and Derrida.
The funny thing is that many humanities professors scoff at the very idea of reason as a “Eurocentric” concept. And when you scoff at professors like that, know-nothings like Herb (Exhbit A in the lineup of PJM trolls who confuse sophistry with intelligence) accuse you of being “anti-intellectual.”
Anybody who spends any amount of time in a humanities program today knows who the real anti-intellectuals are.
#’s 88, 89, 90, and 91,
Every one of you states an aspect of the problem quite well. When I read comments like those it picks up my spirits.
Donna V,
I hated deconstructionism. Thankfully, when I was doing my MA in Philosophy at Loyola of Chicago in the mid-Eighties (when I was a Jesuit seminarian)I did not have to study much of them at all. Nevertheless, I did try to read, on my own, Derrida and Lacan. Utter nonsense. People actually think that drivel is brilliant? I can well understand if one had enough of it and threw in the towel. If I was compelled to lap up Derrida and have to say “Please, sir, I want some more!” in order to get a good grade or even be deemed presentable in a doctoral program, I think I may have quietly left the room.
Semiotics is bullshit. Better to spend time with Aristotle and Aquinas, among others.
Talking about Derrida, Lacan and their followers brings up an important point:
The corruption of language is everywhere rampant, and, even though the problem isn’t intrinsically political, guess which political side it benefits?
This is exactly why I am not impressed with the credentials of someone like Barack Obama. Obama supporters tout him as some brilliant sage because of his academic background, yet he hasn’t a single accomplishment of any real importance that would lead a person to believe such a thing. He spent his formative years in the company of far-left academics with just the kind of radical views this article presents.
These people have no concept of life outside their cloistered world of academia. They have no idea what it is like to work in a job with real accountability, and no first- hand experience managing even a small company let alone one the size of GM and worse seem to think ideological purity is more important than experience or basic competence.
Between the two I think Sarah Palin was far better qualified to serve as president than Barack Obama, she actually worked her way through college and held real jobs with real accountability to balance out the academic life. Obama’s life spent in the distorted world of far-left academia has left him perhaps the most dangerous president in history.
#92 Fred,
“If that young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why what a singularly deep young man that deep young man must be.”
These lines from a patter song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience” explain what puzzled you. Many people are inclined to mistake obscurity for profundity, and swoon over the brilliance of writers who are unable to write a coherent sentence, when what they ought to be doing is dismissing it as taurine dung. Herbert Marcuse is an excellent example. An even better one is Hegel.
When studying political philosophy as an undergrad I came to have a well developed loathing for Hegel. I thought he was writing nonsense. A couple of years later I discovered, reading Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies” that there were many smart people who agreed with me. Popper took one of Hegel’s half-page, single sentence paragraphs and removed the unnecessary modifiers, irrelevant subordinate clauses, repetitions, and contradictory phrases, in short all the goo and dribble. When he got done he found that what was left was: The phenomenon of heat together with sound is sound together with heat. Hegel went to all that trouble just to pen a tautology. We find similar trash purveyed as intellectual pearls all around us today. And supposedly intelligent people ooh and aah over such gibberish.
It all boils down to the Leftists are destroying us ,and we’re letting it happen. WAKE UP AMERICA!
It all boils down to the conservatives have destroyed us ,and it’s taking too long for the liberals to fix it. BE PATIENT AMERICA!
84. steveg: . . . ” A professor in Texas made the statement, “Anyone that bombs the pentagon has my vote”, and there were many more even more outrageous. As far as I’m concerned, these are the most disgusting people in America.”
Oh yeah, well I heard a professor in Utah say “If anybody sees a Muslim, hit him hard in the head with a brick and knock him out until we can check his immigration status.” And there were many more even more outrageous. As far as I’m concerned, these are the most disgusting people in America.
Although Obama is touted by the MSM and his lackeys as some sort of guru, he is nothing but a symbol of token emulation by these individuals and the university that accommodated him for the money and publicity they would receive.
And he patronizes the American public every day. To put it in language you liberals need to read; He’s a chihuahua that’s been told, and treated, all his life, that he’s a great dane.
…The German universities of the 1930s, for example, despite their long tradition of rigorous scholarship, were by no means citadels of informed thought and genuine research, but outright propaganda factories, preparing students’ minds for the absurd theories of National Socialism…
That damage, done to the once incomparable German Universities, not by the Gestapo but by racist and careerist academics (driving out Jewish scholars cleared out the competition and created many job openings for lesser German academics), has not been undone.
My daughter studies and teaches at a prestigious German University and I have, at least, some small inkling of the current worth and standing of German universities.
If you are a graduate student in mathematics, physics, or computer science, you’re far better off in tiny Israel or the US. Those who believe that the dumbing-down and politicization of the American academy by the left can be easily remedied aren’t facing the truth.
So, the question is, how do we take our Universities back? Also, are the lefties just the 60′s generation crowd or are the younger professors coming in to the humanities just as left? If so, how do we get them out? Kinda of reminds me of cockroaches, once they appear its hard to get rid of them.
My old man was a college professor and he would come home just shaking his head after the latest faculty meeting. He had a saying, “these liberals are so open-minded that their brains have fallen out.” He would also call them hypocrites because “… they proclaim they are the most tolerant, but if you disagree with them they become the most intolerant>” He believed the lefties were essentially fascists
Looking for the right thing to say about the piss-ant pictured for this article;
He looks like a perfectly good idiot that hasn’t found his village.
The liberals sure have “fixed” Detroit,Cleveland Phillie,D.C. and all the other cities they’ve been running for the last 40 or 50 years.They think they’ll be allowed to “fix” the rest of the country the same way.Not one of the trolls here or the “intellectuals” that indoctrinate them have ever lived in a country run by their fellow socialists and yet in their arrogance they have the balls to expound on the virtues of those societies.
I would like for one of these sanctimonious people to provide one single example that shows a successful example of a “progressive” government.Please enlighten me.
103 McBride . . . glad to. . .
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=225126&title=The-Stockholm-Syndrome-Pt.-2
what a nightmare!
I recently had a discussion with a marketing professor from a local state university, and was surprised that even faculty members at the business school have extreme left views. I was aware that liberal arts faculty are like that, but did not expect it from a business school professor. I defended the U.S. as an exceptional country that does not need to apologize to Islamic countries, and he responded with name-calling. Is that how college professors debate issues these days, by reverting to the juvenile technique of name calling?
I have read and followed the comments of this article since the 5th, and I would love to comment with one of my favorite movie quotes
See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you’re gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don’t do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a —- education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library. Good Will Hunting (Will to a Havad boy)
I however must disagree with Mr. Hunting on one thing, the education you would get by $1.50 in late charges would probably be superior to that which you get in your typical university. Which is why my husband and I educate our children at home, and we will continue to do so for the advancement of their knowledge and wisdom. As for a college education, that will be up to them. ie.Training in a technical field, starting their own business, or seeking an education fit for a true statesman such as George Wythe gave to at least 2 of our founding fathers, and several others who gave our country it’s hard fought start.
If you want to know what a real liberal arts education looks like research the education of Thomas Jefferson under the mentorship of George Wythe.
Thanks for the link sheesh,maybe it’s a white thing,but why aren’t the socialist wannabes buying one way tickets to Sweden.
107. McBride . . . Don’t be bitter.
You said, “I would like for one of these sanctimonious people to provide one single example that shows a successful example of a “progressive” government.Please enlighten me.”
I enlightened you. Yes, the reporter was black, and that apparently upset upset you. I’m sure you’ll work on that. As to your other ancillary dodge . . . . . . . ” . . . why aren’t the socialist wannabes buying one way tickets to Sweden?”
We don’t need to. Haven’t you heard, we’re socializing America. I’m afraid you’re the one who’s going to have to buy a one-way ticket . . . to Texas.