U.S. Universities: Education or Indoctrination?
It’s difficult to find anyone to publicly admit they believe our nation’s institutions of higher education should not serve as free marketplaces of ideas, where any and all topics can be openly discussed. After all, such an opinion runs counter to the basic nature of the university ideal and would be massively unpopular with the public. Nobody wants to think that he or she is paying for his or her children to be indoctrinated rather than educated.
Unfortunately, on campuses across the country, the line between indoctrination and education is being blurred and ignored on a daily basis. Even more appallingly, students and faculty members are victims of enforced campus orthodoxy. One of the most recent examples comes from Virginia Tech, where the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences recently voted on a proposal that would make a demonstrated commitment to “diversity” a mandatory part of tenure and promotion reviews. And Virginia Tech offered a hyper-politicized definition of diversity seemingly calculated precisely to leave those who disagree politically with the university out in the cold:
We, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Diversity Committee, use the term “diversity” to mean the desirability and value of many kinds of individual differences while at the same time acknowledging and respecting that socially constructed differences based on certain characteristics exist within systems of power that create and sustain inequality, hierarchy, and privilege.* The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences is determined to eliminate these forms of inequality, hierarchy, and privilege in our programs and practices. In this sense, diversity is to be actively advanced because it fosters excellence in learning, discovery, and engagement.
Advertisement* These characteristics include, but are not limited to ability, age, body size and condition, class, color, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, geographical and cultural background, health status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, and veteran status. [Asterisk in original.]
That’s right: Virginia Tech was telling prospective tenured faculty members that if they were not sufficiently committed to eliminating “socially constructed differences” and inequalities based on characteristics including “body size,” they were not wanted.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=81361&sid=23611201&con_type=1
Robert Shibley,
You have been mislead by information that has lead you to believe the opposite of what you SHOULD believe. You have convinced yourself that a pretend ‘truth’ is a tiny fraction outside of your ‘comfort zone’ to bother and fuss you up a bit.
Take a deep breath and realize ‘we are in control of the vertical, we are in control of the horizontal’…
Mellow out and enjoy the ride into oblivion…
Ding
Dang
Ding
Dang
GONG
(how’d I do)?
I am not sure I understood the Virginia Tech definition of diversity at all. Does eliminating treating people differently based on their “body size and condition” mean that football players now have to come to class like everyone else? Or everyone can skip if they have an “academic advisor”? And “eliminate these forms of inequality, hierarchy, and privilege”, how does that relate to ability? Is this the current generation’s attempt to slow down the smart kids and not have their achievement make others feel bad?
Holy Cow, Batman. Sounds like these programs are focused on trying to achieve equal outcomes. It seems that schools should be focusing on content and context. Once the students leave school they will be exposed to society’s ranking of all types of things that can look like inequality, hierarchy, and privilege. Like a job for instance, where it will not be enough to say “but I’m TRYING REALLY HARD” when not meeting performance expectations.
So, you are arguing against a statement that says everyone should be treated equally? Did you not see “political affiliation” in that list? And who, by the way, do you think universities should treat differently?
Many parents over the last four decades are greatly responsible for this mess. They essentially told their children to mind their own business and stay out of harm’s way. The sons and daughters were to ignore the crazy teachers and simply focus on obtaining the credential that would lead to a good paying job. And let’s not forget something else: there is a tacit agreement between the leftists and conservatives. The latter place a higher value on the school’s basketball and football programs! They are more than willing to throw the regular students under the bus to achieve the reputation for athletic excellence. The leftists informally leave the programs alone. Last but not least, both the parents and the students are grateful for the lowering academic standards. The prospective employers may not know that the high grades are phonier than a three dollar bill.
Many employers DO know that grades dont matter. When I graduated with my first degree in 1986, GPA’s above 3.0 were worth putting on the resume. When I went back to school for my second BA and MA, my 4.0′s were worthless. Basically, all I had to do was show up and hand in assignments for my 4.0
To get that good-paying job, esp. if your major is not in the hard sciences, you have to do (a lot) more than get good grades.
But the “faith” that college degree=$$$ has not quite been broken … yet.
American Universities have compromised their credibility with their PC libtardism and greed,in the same way that the media has.Ultimately, on-line learning will replace /destroy these expensive and obsolete bastions of anti-intellectualism and marxoid indoctrination,just as on-line blogs have replaced “news”papers.Good Riddance!
Mr. Shibley:
” Virginia Tech was telling prospective tenured faculty members that if they were not sufficiently committed to eliminating “socially constructed differences” and inequalities based on characteristics including “body size,” they were not wanted.”
This appears more to be the diktat of the “Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Diversity Committee”…whatever standing this body has to make such job requirements, and whether the Hokie Administration is bound to follow whatever the “Diversity Pimps” blurt forth, is a matter that is debatable.
The people of Virginia are ultimately the employers of the “tenured” faculty at VajanyaTek. I would hope that the taxpayers of the Old Dominion decide that their state-supported colleges should celebrate diversity by not having a “Diversity Committee”,(or it’s members), at all.
We have subsidized Leftist and anti-American indoctrination in the colleges through Education spending and Government tuition grants.
Higher education should be subsidized only where it is of direct benefit to the society that foots the bill. All too many degree programs, however, turn out scholars with little or no realistic job prospects.
Why are we paying the tuition to educate a person who is going to be unemployable in the field of study we have paid for?
I would “market means test” Federal and State Tuition assistance. If you REALLY want to get a Bachelor’s in Latin, then by all means do so, but pay for it yourself.
And tuition assistance and grants for post-graduate work should be banned outright. If you cannot continue your education with your slary and wages from your Bachelor’s, why would you chase down a Master’s or a Doctorate?
In order to teach the very same useless subject?
You were a chump to invest your time and OUR money in bunk, and now you want to snag the next tranche of suckers to learn something that doesn’t pay the rent.
Nobody owes you employment, no matter what kind of degree you’ve earned.
When we de-fund this nonsense, this nonsense will vastly diminish, if not cease.
Is ‘diversity training’ the best FIRE can aim at?
Geeeez! We’ve had nearly a half century of MARXIST indoctrination in American academia with irreversible effects. FIRE sounds like just one more country club conservative NGO trying to sound relevant by playing on the collectivists own field instead of defining the terms.
These characteristics include, but are not limited to ability …
Ability?? This is a university but it believes that evaluating based on ability is a form of discrimination. Does everyone pass? This school must turn out some real doozies in math and in the sciences.
David – Yep – that’s what I did. I tried not to laugh at the goofy professors, regurgitated back enough nonsense to get a decent grade and moved on. One parents’ weekend we went to service at the college church. The lefty Chaplain was giving a sermon about what a good guy Daniel Ortega is. My father laughed loud enough to be heard throughout the church. Later, he told me he heard the same sermon about Castro at Yale in the early 60’s.
My real fear isn’t the political nonsense of professors – students can always see through that. I fear that important things like Scientific Method will be thrown out of college curriculum because they conflict with liberal doctrine.
Indoctrination or Education?
The Duke 88.
’nuff said.
Boris,
The problem is not that the statement says everyone should be treated equally. The problem is that Virginia Tech would have required that all faculty members who wished to get tenure or promotions ACTIVELY WORK to eliminate “inequality, hierarchy, and privilege” based on the specific characteristics listed in that particular definition of “diversity.” Much of that active work is of necessity political. To argue otherwise would be to argue that, for example, Martin Luther King’s fight for racial equality was not political, when it certainly was. The question is not whether working to advance this definition of diversity is right or wrong. The question is whether Virginia Tech’s policies would have required that faculty actively promote certain political viewpoints, and it certainly did do that.
I had a professor that was convinced that Picasso was a misogynist. The whole dept. was of that opinion. Here I come with my newly minted doctorate and I say that Picasso was not a misogynist. In fact, I argue that Picasso was a great admirer of women and his problem was that he loved women too much that he could never be satisfied with just one. His art reflects his deep passions. You think I am getting tenure? Ha, I’ll be run out like Larry Summers.
“Many employers DO know that grades dont matter.”
But it often doesn’t make one bit of difference—because of the disastrous 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power. The judges declared that employers must not rely on test results not directly related to the work to be performed. Doesn’t that sound good? Alas, in the real world the attorneys warned the companies that they would be constantly spending vast sums of money on law suits to determine what is and is not relevant testing. Their answer: the hell with the emphasizing the actual knowledge of the job applicant. They instead decided it is safer to simply demand credentials. This awful court decision may be the number one reason for the absurd demand that one must minimally obtain a bachelors degree in order to get a good paying job. By the way, there are estimates that Griggs vs. Duke Power may have cost the American economy in the last 38 years over 3 trillion dollars!
“How many counter-revolutionaries have you exposed on behalf of the people, comrade? Not too many I see. Perhaps you are sympathetic to the continuation of the socially constructed differences that exist within the systems of power?”
The idiots in the LitCrit seminars have infected the entire Arts and Sciences Dept; the faster the funding for “higher education” dries the up, the better.
What if everybody graduated from BYU? Would that be better?
11. Old Soldier: “One parents’ weekend we went to service at the college church. The lefty Chaplain was giving a sermon about what a good guy Daniel Ortega is. My father laughed loud enough to be heard throughout the church. Later, he told me he heard the same sermon about Castro at Yale in the early 60’s.”
And I heard the same sermon from a righty pastor about Saddam Hussein in the 80s. What’s your point?
8. Bilgeman: . . . “Higher education should be subsidized only where it is of direct benefit to the society that foots the bill..”
And who gets to decide what is a “direct benefit to society”?
There is a widely held myth contending most people attend college to become well educated. This is, of course, pure nonsense. The truth is that they are pursuing a credential that will assist them in finding a good paying job. Parents really don’t give a damn whether their kids get a good education. They only want to make sure these youths are financially secure. Thus, the parents won’t become truly upset unless these credentials are deemed worthless in the open market.
As the father of four children that I have put through college I can state unequivobly that the system of higher education has been completely overrun with leftist fanatics.
One of my daughters complained to me that her Calculus teacher spent most of every hour screaming abount W being a fascist monster and didn’t bother to teach anything other than to make homework assignments. At first I thought she was being hyperbolic, but after repeated complaints, i bought her a pocket recorder. She recorded four classes each of an hour and a half, they averaged forty-three minutes of political screed and eleven minutes of assignments (yep, they never got close to the 90 minute class-length).
When we went to the Dean’s office regarding the matter he was never available until I e-mailed him the recordings and implied that I was going to contact the media. After a long discussion he basically explained that he could do little about the Prof as he was tenured but would place my daughter into a class with a less strident teacher. I told him that this was only aceptable as this was my daughter’s last year and I did not wish to compromise her graduation.
My other children have encountered similar problems with their teachers to a somewhat lesser degree.
I don’t object to the instructors having an opinion, I object to them having an opinion on my dime. They are not getting paid to preach politics in place of the contracted lessons. We should veiw them as other people that are contracted to provide a service, you would not tolerate your plumber preaching policitcs, why a professor?
The market place of ideas within the university has always been a very controled placy because ideas have always been their currency. They have always been the least free place in the United States. Back in the nineteenth century the US University used to be denigrated by the European University because the American Universities insisted that all papers be published under the department head’s name and not under the name of the person who actually did the work.
Baby step forward we got rid of that!
not so fast: At what college chapel did you hear that sermon?
Nobody wants to think that he or she is paying for his or her children to be indoctrinated rather than educated.>>
=============
This statement is patently false!!!
There are many religious universities and colleges where parents send there kids so that they can learn to become good Christians, Jews, whatever.
There are also a number of universities such as Columbia, Berkeley etc that are known for their pronounced extreme left wing positions so I am sure that a number of exteme left wing parents try to get their kids in those schools so that they can be further indoctrinated in extreme left wing thinking.
William Ayers – Profeesor of Early Childhood Developement, Univ. of Ill.
Need I say more?
1. I hate – HATE – the “share” button at the bottom of the article, as I repeatedly accidentally roll over it with my cursor on my way down to the comments section, and the damned thing pops down and stays down. Fix it, PJ. It’s really getting on my nerves.
2. “College Education” – and oxymoron. I graduated from high school in ’75, got married, had kids, then decided to go to college, which I graduated from in ’95. The crap they taught was pure hooey. “Humanities?” Gimme a break. “Philosophy?” Gimme a break. These starry eyed kids would enter these types of classes, believe they are the recipients of “higher education” and “profound thinking” and come away full of arrogance and a false perception of reality.
3. If our public schools were actually doing their job, our kids would be DONE by the 8th or 9th grade. The rest of it is pure B.S. and doesn’t prepare them for entering the work force or the real world at all. College just adds another 4 years of wasted time to their lives.
4. If you REALLY want your child to learn a marketable skill, get them off their butts and out from in front of the video games and put them to work. Let them work and earn money for awhile. After a little bit of growing up, they’ll figure out what they want to be and find the right resources for the best training in that field.
5. College is not the only answer to learning, and in fact, it is no longer the answer for continuing education. How many kids do you know who have spent four years of their lives being indoctrinated into the leftist culture, got a degree in “Touchy-Feely Lovemongering” and are still working at McDonald’s and Starbucks three years later?
6. There is a college here in Washington state, Evergreen State College – a real four-runner in the idealism of utopia, where students don’t receive grades. They might come out with crap degrees, but at least they feel good about themselves!
7. Trade schools, tech school, voc schools have so much more to offer our kids. Some of the very best teachers I’ve known have been the voc/tech teachers, who did not spend 4 or 5 years of their lives wasted in getting drunk and non-learning. They got the training, got the job, and later were able to teach what they knew to others.
Geez… I’d better go write my own blog about this.
“not so fast:
What if everybody graduated from BYU? Would that be better?”
As an atheist, it would be infinitely preferential to me to be governed by Xtians, Mormons, and/or Jews than Marxists or Islamists. At least the former have morals and ethics I can mostly agree with that they at least pay lip service to, while the Marxists have no morals or ethics whatsoever and the Islamists make Hitler look like a really nice guy.
William F. Buckley, over 40 years ago, when the Marxists were not yet in complete control of the universities, said he’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.
And this article only addresses the situation at the university level. How do you think the students get softened up to take this garbage without fighting back? That’s right, even the K-12 schools are filled with this leftist trash, from the unionized teachers to the textbooks that revise history to be more “diversified” and “tolerant”. Indoctrination that the gay lifestyle is neat, that America is a fascist imperialistic bully, that capitalism exploits poor people and socialism is good starts in Kindergarten now.
William Ayers, that grotesque slimball friend of Obama’s, who matter-of-factly said that 25 million Americans might have to be killed if they couldn’t be re-educated, is a hero to the educational establishment and his primary influence is on teaching at the K-12 levels. He’s been down in Venezuala sucking up to Chavez and advising him on how to re-educate his subjects.
Remember the Annenburg Challenge, the foundation that Obama and “some guy in the neighborhood” named Ayers ran for years and wasted $100 million without a shred of improvement in the schools? That was designed specifically to politicize the educational programs of grades K-12.
To the left. What a coincidence.
Here’s another example:
African Studies/Africana/Black Studies: A course where you can get a doctorate by being familiar with rap…music?…, Malcolm Little, Kwanzaaaaa, African lore & history (to the exclusion of S. Africa), and clothing that kinda makes it look like you ate a box of crayons & proceeded to throw up on your pajamas.
Whiteness Studies: Is it the other end of the spectrum for white culture?
No, no, no; It’s where you can do all your homework & get credit for citing examples how white people are pure evil. That’s about it, but it’s not racism. It IS racist of YOU, however, if you say it’s racist.
“not so fast: At what college chapel did you hear that sermon?”
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Our relationship with Saddam, at the most, was a matter of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I cannot imagine a chaplain favorably citing this monster in a sermon.
“There are many religious universities and colleges where parents send there kids so that they can learn to become good Christians, Jews, whatever.”
There is a major distinction that you are conveniently ignoring. The Judeo-Christian traditions respect intellectual honesty. They sharply distinguish between empirical data and matters of faith. Not so regarding the radical leftist who categorical perceives rational thought to be a con job perpetuated by the ruling classes.
The religious colleges are infected with the same indoctrination as more conservatives colleges. My kid is graduating from Pepperdine, a supposedly Church of Christ school. The values and beliefs he was taught by his professors are so contrary to those of our family that we’re now faced with a few years of de-indoctrination, just to get our level-headed kid back.
Its a travesty.
#27 geokstr: this is why our daughters went to a private Lutheran school. I didn’t want their primary education to be one of leftist baloney. They actually learned how to read and write at their school! You know what the school’s crazy philosophy was? “If they can’t read and write, they can’t do any of the other subjects either.” Wow – radical thinking.
#28 AlanABQ: I’ll add “Women’s Studies” to that list of useless classes.
not so fast,
You forget to mention that those religious universities do not receive public funding.
Why should my business pay taxes to support a school that is training all it’s student’s to think that my business is evil?
Moogie I would add anything that has a class description of “________ Studies” Those fill-in-the-blank courses are always BS. It seems that colleges are devoted to providing employment for the useless degrees they grind out and therefore make such nonsensical classes part of the requirements.
Frankly, what other work can a person with a Masters in PostModern Industrial Philosophy find?
#19 not so fast:
“And who gets to decide what is a “direct benefit to society”?”
Is that you with your new name, grody blog slave?
No matter.
To answer your question:
How about the CUSTOMERS.
#34 anton:
“Frankly, what other work can a person with a Masters in PostModern Industrial Philosophy find?”
The field’s wide open isn’t it?
“You. uhhhh, want FRIES with that?”
“That’ll be 20 bucks for that pizza, dude.”
“Where to, pal? LaGuardia? No problem!”
And of course, the United States Postal Service.
Any and all of these ocupations are noble and perfectly respectable ways to make a living, but not a one of them require a degree to do so.
35 Bilgeman . . . What’s up with the slave crack? Lots of hostility for a simple question. What do you mean by customers? Do you mean taxpayers? Or people who hire college graduates? Do you mean actual customers or consumers who determine what’s in demand in the marketplace? Not clear on your meaning. And please, if you can’t remain civil, don’t bother to respond.
This is all true and all irrelevant. As long as the elite colleges and universities act as gatekeepers for entrance into our social, economic and political elite, they will have 8-10 applicants for every place and they will go on doing things exactly as they are now, because they hold tremendous power over the lives of our children.
#19 Not So Fast
#19 Not so fast:
The taxpayers –the ones who support the ever-proliferating campuses (lie the new UCI law school in Irvine California whihc is offering free tuition for all three years to its first entering class).
There is unfortunately no direct taxpayer input to what colleges teach. Hence the musrooming courses in gender studies, queer poetry, etc when groaning taxpayers are being flayed even more to support pensions for underworked tenured profs.
You know if there were some “on the street committee” of taxpayers, half the crap on campus wouldn’t be taught. That does not mean Americans are “anti-intellectual”– far from it. The US taxpayers, esp the poor ones, have always been big backers of schools and colleges. Math, english, science, history. But they aren’t stupid: they would not support independent department status for gender studies, any more than they support no knock warrants by the police who they also support.
Private colleges can do what they want with their money: public ones ought to be a bit more responsive to the public.
Obama’s the prime example of the basic function of the U.S. education system; (Also known as Day Care for Adults). He’s got diplomas for attending. That’s the bottom line for our “political activist industry”. Indoctrinate individuals with how valuable and charming they are, regardless of their intelligence or competence; Of which the latter is completely missing from our Campaigner in Chief.
40 Thanks Blackwell. I can agree with getting back to the basics.
Virginia Tech is one of the nation’s premier engineering schools, but this pronouncement is apparently from the “Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Diversity Committee”. Time for the engineering and hard sciences departments to secede from the rest of Va Tech, and let the “human sciences”, feminist studies, and assorted touchy-feely mush departments fend for themselves.
Can’t remember if I told this here before or not…apologize if it’s repetitive: A close friend after burning out on Wall street took his PhD to a large midwestern university as adjunct faculty…he had excellent reviews from both his students and other teachers.
When a tenure tracked position opened…he interviewed…but the job went to a “critical theorist”…he checked with a friend on the interviewing committee and was privately told that…some on the committee feared he MIGHT BE A REPUBLICAN. They didn’t want one on those.
I’m not kidding.
Part of the problem is that many employers insist on a degree from a “real” university, and won’t accept graduates of University of Phoenix or University Extension programs. Here in the Bay Area, we have UC Berkeley extension which is actually rather free of indoctrination as it is taught by people who actually work in the field. The Extension certificates mean that the student has taken all the core courses, but none of the “fluff” usually required for a BA. University of Phoenix has proctored exams, but still most employers won’t accept the degree. I work for government. We have discussed this many times, but our political appointees insist that only “real” degrees matter.
#43 Scott: “we have UC Berkeley extension which is actually rather free of indoctrination as it is taught by people who actually work in the field.”
This was my point above, that some of the best teachers I’ve known have been the voc/tech teachers.
It should be noted that much of the baloney courses, the “________ Studies” courses have no discernable use outside of the academia where it is taught. The subject is debated and dissected in the vacuum of the college campus, never to serve any useful function outside of those walls. The content of these courses serve no other purpose than to be used as a tool to teach the content of the courses.
Oh, at a price of $35,000 per year.
Let us not, under any circumstances, contribute to our alma maters. I don’t. I saw this coming back in the early to mid Eighties when I was an academic Marxist. The entire academic establishment is infected with these people. Deny them funding. It’s the only weapon we have, short of rounding them up and shooting them. De-fund them and save ourselves bullets.
“Part of the problem is that many employers insist on a degree from a “real” university”
The situation has definitely worsened since the disastrous court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power. Knowledge per se is now of secondary importance. Credentials are all that really matter—and these pieces of paper are only respected if you have proven to be something of an intellectual whore.
Formal diktats may be abandoned but the tenured socialist professors will still enforce diversity and moral equivalency in their classrooms, with smart students reluctantly degrading themselves by going along with it rather than be D-graded.
The Socialists have long since taken over “higher” education and the Triple A team – Alinsky/Ayers/Axelrod – are working hard to bring it to the elementary and pre-school level, with Obama as the Red-Diaper poster boy for the value of early indoctrination into the joys of Marxsism, Castro style.
Will everybody stop saying “leftist? The SOCIALISTS have long since taken over the univeristies and colleges, and having destroyed free-thinking education, the SOCIALISTS have now taken over the White House and are proceeding, hell-for-leather, to destroy our free-market economy and rewrite the Constitution in a SOCIALIST format.
They would much rather you just call them leftist Democrats, it is so much less offensive, accepting, morally equivalent, less threatening.
And please. no more Tea Parties. They are so unaccepting, so
threatening.
This ain’t going to be no Tea Party!
“Obama’s the prime example of the basic function of the U.S. education system”
Barack Obama earned a law degree from Harvard University. However, this does not necessarily mean he is another John Adams. It merely proves Obama can probably pass the typical state examination. I am also convinced that overall he is a shallow and poorly read individual. The man does not seem to be that highly developed intellectually. It is unlikely that he can read a serious book. Has anyone actually perused Obama’s two books? They remind me of a third year college student shooting their mouth off on subjects far beyond their competence.
Can’t remember if I told this here before or not…apologize if it’s repetitive: A close friend after burning out on Wall street took his PhD to a large midwestern university as adjunct faculty…he had excellent reviews from both his students and other teachers.
When a tenure tracked position opened…he interviewed…but the job went to a “critical theorist”…he checked with a friend on the interviewing committee and was privately told that…some on the committee feared he MIGHT BE A REPUBLICAN. They didn’t want one on those.
I’m not kidding.
===================
I receive discrimination along with bigoted _suspicious looks_ all the time. Like every library I go in to; Along with every other official building.
Female bureaucrats have taken over: they are elitist snobs, bigoted –anti male, entrenched, and smug.
I am red headed(though the attractive type), 6’1′ healthy looking, often bearded or just scratchy/mustached looking, dark eyebrowed, bright eyed white male from, central NJ coastal urban/subUrb.
I tell you my looks and location here so as to give you a heads up.
Like I said it is especially bad at _libraries_ and government buildings. The female bureaucrats don’t want any ‘work mules’ or “other” intruding on their little coven havens that chrisendumb has set them up in.
(The discrimination I experience in everything is on top of being horribly raised as an only child by a selfish, abusive single female parent who didn’t [know how to?] raise me worth a damn [hail feminism], in an ethnic neighborhood. Ie I didn’t have a silver spoon and “opportunities”.
…So my prospects ain’t too go here.)
Variations ie –biological specimens– like me use to be literally kings only a millennium or so ago (I’m a child alpha male, starting line up everything, class artist, genius IQ). That is how far we’ve come with this civilization/jesus nonsense. And it has more damage to do before it is stopped.
Just an example of the utopia we’re creating through hijacked foolish white male efforts and selfless-ness.
44 Increased Mather has a good point, and I’d like to ask an obvious question:
There exists mandates at some universities that prohibit, to one degree or another, the hiring of persons who might be Republican or otherwise conservative. I say at some universities, but to be more accurate, it’s almost an unwritten rule across the board in academia.
So why aren’t there lawsuits against these institutions for discrimination, especially the ones like VT & Berserkeley, where diversity is rammed down everyones’ throats?
Apparently, diversity is only valuable unless it actually represents values!
In all fairness, remember the positive things that the emphasis on social sciences has accomplished.
They have created a new science called “Environmental Science”, a field that we never knew existed. We just thought it was “love of nature”.
Now it is a “science” – AND a Profession – grinding out thousands of graduates every year – courageously offering themselves to make ours a a better world by going directly. with no knowledge or experience in the business world, into the government or private enterprise to tell us how to keep everything green and free of “greed”, i.e. profit.
Another dramatically successful SOCIALIST ploy to take down Capitalism and free enterprise. Applauded by those who benefit from the very principles and practices they are eagerly destroying.
AlanABQ:
“Diversity” to a leftist means that any group of people must LOOK LIKE the bar scene in Star Wars. However, they MUST all THINK alike. Diversity of ideas is an alien concept to the PC crowd.
When Clinton decided to parse the meaning of the word “is” under oath to protect himself against a sexual harassment suit (that he was given a free pass on by the feminists), it was just the tip of the iceberg. The left, since it has no particular core principles other than achieving power and controlling others, has been leading the charge to totally redefine the meaning of that now worthless piece of scrap paper called the Constitution. “Critical Legal Studies” is now taught in all the law schools, and it means that the Constitution and laws passed by state and federal legislatures mean whatever the left wants them to mean, the clear intent of the Founders and legislators be damned.
The only thing Orwell got wrong in his novel “1984″ was the year.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Truth is…
ad nauseum.
It’s enough to make a life-long atheist like me say – “God help us all now”.
Truth be told, if one is not planning on securing an engineering or science degree, the efforts and costs involved in receiving a liberal arts degree are akin to throwing ones hard earned money down the toilet.
As someone who has always valued higher education I do not make this statement likely. IF my sons had not opted for engineering degrees at MIT and Caltech (in 2006 & 2007 respectively)I would have preferred they learn a respectable trade (construction or electrician comes to mind) instead of majoring in indoctrination studies.
For that is precisely what happens when one ventures into the halls of ‘humanities’ departments, places that are humane to only those who are lockstep with their ideas. It matters not a whit whether one attends Harvard or a lesser known State University. What does matter is that the schools have become more or less-emphasis on more-like boot camps. One can barely have an opinion of ones own if heaven forfend it strays from leftist, multicultural dogma. I have never witnessed such pernicious intimidation on our campuses as what has been transpiring for at least a decade. In reality, the seeds of indoctrination had been planted since the 1960′s.
That being said, woe is to the parent who still believes that their offspring will be going to college to study the great works of literature or western civilization. If they think that their kids will learn how to extrapolate ideas for themselves without fear of professorial backlash they better rethink their game plans.
I would not believe what is happening if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. At the end of the day parents ARE consumers of their kids educations. IF enough of them act responsibly and demand real value for their dollars it is possible that education will revert to what it is meant to do-educate, not indoctrinate. If not, they are wasting their money and run the risk of their kids turning out to be leftist automatons. Forewarned is forearmed.
The problems in K-12 are no better. In the 70′s the idea was schools without interior walls. The way is it was explained to me, as I went to one of the last schools without walls in my district, was that the walls supposedly prevented a young mind from expanding, or some such hippie crap like that. In reality it made learning more difficult and gave teachers headaches. One teacher may have a well behaved class, the one next, not so much. Then there were teachers who would yell, big headache. The whole school could hear that. Needless to say, a couple of years after I moved and went to a more conventional school, they put in walls.
The next big issue was self-esteem. And we are still dealing with this one. The idea was that people ended up in prison because they had low self-esteem. Therefore if we boost a child’s self-esteem while still in school it would lower the numbers in prison. So the theory went. What do we have in return? Why a bunch of whiny, self-indulged people who consistently look to the government to “free” them from life’s harsh lessons. We don’t reward based on merit anymore, just because you “tried” is good enough. How many out there have seen people, especially the younger ones, crying in the cubicles because the boss actually gave out constructive critcism? No one realized that when you reward for truly good work their self-esteem is naturally improved. But you also must have consequences for the bad work. The “professionals” kinda forgot that. Then there are the sports leagues that don’t keep score and say everyone is a winner. No wonder we are where we are as a nation.
Now the latest fad to hit the schools is the smaller classroom. When the increase in budgets didn’t work the administrators and professors decided it must have been classroom size, and lack of funds. Of course funds have always been a contentious issue ever since the first public school. So what do they do, hire more teachers. Smaller classrooms would equate to increased academic success. Right. Then explain why No Child Left Behind was passed. If the schools actually taught, this abomination would never have been necessary. And yes, I know it was a Bush and Republican passed bill. The only thing smaller classes yielded was more teachers, higher payrolls(therefore higher taxes), and increased dues paid to the various unions. Then there is the socialist/statist text books. Don’t need to mention more than that, as that issue has already been touched upon.
These were all meant to better the education experience. Problem is they don’t educate. And then we send the kids off to college to suffer the higher level statists/socialists just so they can obtain a degree to ask that immortal question: “Do you want fries with that?”
“Another dramatically successful SOCIALIST ploy to take down Capitalism and free enterprise. Applauded by those who benefit from the very principles and practices they are eagerly destroying.”
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So what?
———-
The conformist male brain is a funny thing…
If anti capitalism “socialism”, unwittingly, ignorantly, destroys our society and therefore pulls the rig out from underneath liberal society that would be a good thing right?
The conformist male brain is a funny thing.
All you know is that “me male” should compete and achieve to prove me carry burden and buy love; and grandpa’s rules for that competitive game, in his day, were ‘capitalism’ and therefore me like that, even though me no like what liberal society –made possible by capitalism– has become.” “uh-oh: me confused”.
If you told the lending institutions that students who declare bankruptcy could discharge their student loans as well, then lending institutions would have to look very carefully at who they choose to lend money to.
Why give 100k to a graduate student in Wimmin’s Studies when the student has less than a 1/10 chance of ever earning enough money to pay back the tuition. If the planned course of study cannot withstand economic scrutiny, then why lend money to them? Let them scrounge up the money on their own. Besides, it would probably put a huge dent in the absurd rate of tuition increases when the “free money” supply in federally guaranteed loans dries up.
If I were a bank, I’d loan money to someone who wanted to be an accountant or an engineer, but a Chicano/a Studies idiot? Not a chance.
AlanABQ, because when you go to court, you will soon find that the judge, the lawyers, and most of academe share certain prejudices, and your case will be laughed out of court.
For the most recent evidence, see the case of the New Haven firefighters; the case is indefensible, the white and Hispanic firefighters were screwed, but yet the Left lines up to defend gross discrimination against them because they learned that certain minorities do not have power, and, therefore, cannot practice discrimination against the group (the dominant white system of power) that does. Yes, it’s pure BS, but all of it was studiously learned at the local university long before it permeated the rest of society.
The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences is determined to eliminate these forms of inequality, hierarchy, and privilege in our programs and practices. In this sense, diversity is to be actively advanced because it fosters excellence in learning, discovery, and engagement.
I watched that F.I.R.E. tape yesterday, the required indoctrination of dormitory students at the University of Delaware. (since, under duress, suspended)
Billy Ayers could have written the handbook they were using.
The girl Kelsey makes a great point on how diversity, inequality, hierarchy etc. are so etched into the students’ skulls through such…indoctrination…that they start to think of people in terms of ethnic, religious, sexual, racial…(fill in the blank) when they meet them instead of just people.
We need to get the notion of a liberal education back to what Victor Davis Hanson, for instance, shows it to be every time he picks up his pen and puts his ideas to paper. One thing that would help is to identify those professors who are like Dr. Hanson and to protect them from the corrupted rabble that has taken over our universities.
In the meantime, what fred said in #47 will help out a lot: Defund them – that will force many of them out of the education business, where they shouldn’t have been in the first place. And I would add that we need to identify who the idiots are that are promoting this harm and have them removed. More VDHs and no Billy Ayers in academia, please.
Not so fast – don’t confuse Bilgeman with complicated questions. He has a one track mind. He can only regurgitate the wingnutery answers no matter what the question is. No independent thinking there!
As an incoming student at “VajanyaTek”, as Bilgeman puts it, I believe FIRE and members of Tech’s conservative student body would greatly benefit by taking advantage of the of the diversity of “political affiliation” angle by aggressively petitioning for the promotion and/or hiring of stringent CONSERVATIVES in the Liberal Arts and Human Sciences department.
Perhaps an organization on the Right could be put together over the next few years that would actively help find aspiring conservative professors jobs at some of these colleges in order to make them more politically and ideologically “diverse”. Once granted a job — and heralded as protected and formerly oppressed political minorities by our side — the de-programming of America’s K-12 college-bound graduates can begin and maybe, just maybe, we can turn the tide on the dumbing down of my generation.
Time to tear down the oppressive Leftist privileged hierarchy! Let the infiltration begin!
Higher education is a product that you pay for and if you do not like a particular product you can choose another. Many universities are indeed left leaning. Nobody is being forced to attend. If you don’t like the ideological slant of a university then go somewhere else. Every university has its own particular flavor. This is a good thing not bad.
I can tell you that as a graduate student any student with conservative points of view having the expectation the university (I attend) should bend or cater to those views is going to have a very hard time academically. In fact, there is an unspoken rule that they should be cut off at the knees early. Having been a reader in numerous classes I can tell you that those sort of undergrad students are graded harder. This, in turn, impacts their GPA down the road. Overall, the result is less success had they chosen a university more in line with their way of thinking. This won’t ever change and it’s too bad for those who think it will.
Hey “the shadow,” Bilgeman is quite on point and what r u afraid of?
Taxpayer funded education is a resource like anything else. Left to professors alone, we’d doubtless have even more majestic campuses and higher paid professors. And if left to cops alone we’d soon have nothing but police and no warrants The public that pays for it ought to have a more direct role in what is taught. That public voice is what campuses fear, while insisting that the average voter is sophisticated enough to vote for a president, get an abortion, second guess a CEO–but somehow not decide against a funded department for gender studies. I say open up the campuses to sunlight. Let the voter paying for it have a greater voice.
Maybe this will clarify things…
“There’s only two things I hate in this world: People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” -Nigel Powers
Or maybe not.
The “indoctrination” starts much earlier than people realize. I have a child in elementary school, who in kindergarten asked me if I had paid my taxes. He said that it was my civic duty (his words, not mine) to pay taxes, so that we could make sure that his teachers got paid. Unfortunately, he has 12 years of this mandatory “education” left to go.
That should say it all.
#63 Hokie Student:
“I believe FIRE and members of Tech’s conservative student body would greatly benefit by taking advantage of the of the diversity of “political affiliation” angle by aggressively petitioning for the promotion and/or hiring of stringent CONSERVATIVES in the Liberal Arts and Human Sciences department.”
Good God…why would you ever want to do THAT?
I would think you want to one gay get a REAL job and earn some REAL money.
Make all that crapola into electives…watch their enrollment tank.
If’n they want to pursue a degree in something unmarketable, they should enroll in YooVeeeAy.
#65 A shadow:
“Hey “the shadow,” Bilgeman is quite on point and what r u afraid of?”
Work.
It sounds more like fat people jokes have simply been getting out of hand on campus, you know, stuff like: that guy is so fat, he leaves footprints in dry concrete; she’s so fat that when she stepped on the scale it said, “To be continued”; or he’s so fat, he has his own solar system; and so on….
70. BC:
It sounds more like fat people jokes have simply been getting out of hand on campus, you know, stuff like: that guy is so fat, he leaves footprints in dry concrete; she’s so fat that when she stepped on the scale it said, “To be continued”; or he’s so fat, he has his own solar system; and so on….
========
That’s not good.
But it is not an example of “reverse discrimination” in liberal run havens. It is regular old fashioned in-group out-group sadism.
It is an example of how liberal utopia wasn’t able to solve previous issues.
Liberalism –when it comes down to it –is really now just a largess funded breeding machine for husbandless, ‘sub intellectual’ [-ahem], female ethnics.
33. anton:
not so fast,
You forget to mention that those religious universities do not receive public funding.
They don’t pay taxes, either.
Bring back apprenticeships!
Learn from The Best, not The Marxists.
That is true college reform.
Most graduate students don’t pay their own tuition- they either teach classes, assist in research or have scholarships/fellowships. As for me, I’ve yet to run into such drivel in my classes, because I’m an Engineer. Even the people I know who are seeking a BA degree are doing so only because they need a Bachelor’s Degree, but it really doesn’t matter which one they get. Political Science majors going into the Marine Corps, Liberal Arts majors trying to get into medical school (yes, they will let you do that if your GPA is good enough and you have Physics, Organic Chemistry and Biology on your transcript).
Mmm…just a little suggestion from Down Under. I think Virginia Tech should focus on securing their campus, rather than promoting politically correct objectives. Safety first.
Exqooze me? Remember the money changers in the temple? Remember the whip? Apologize. Or I’ll make the seas start rising again.
Confused in Va;
You might like to know that on the new citizenship test, under the section headed “Rights and Responsibilities” one of the questions asks which day is the latest day to send in federal income tax forms.
http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/100q.pdf
I believe the next bubble to burst — after the Internet and Housing — will be higher education. The market for college graduates is bad right now and its going to get worse as POR’s legislation takes effect. Parents would pay $15K to $35 a year for their kids to party as long as the “ticket” resulted in a decent job. When there are no jobs after graduation, and they realize that after four — even five or six — years their kid has no marketable skill at best, socialist brainwashing at worse, they will be upset. Word will get out. Universitys and Colleges will see their enrollments drop catastrophically. Which is fine by me.
Not so fast:
“What if everybody graduated from BYU? Would that be better?”
Yes. Yes it would. (And I’m not even a Mormon.)
The entire economy, from top to bottom, has been based on out-sized debt. For decades, there has been enough money flowing around to lubricate this contraption, and put bondo over the holes. But now the fundamentals of mathematical principles have come due, and the exponents are back with a vengeance. The university scam (the biggest in the country, bigger even that the financial scam) is finally going to be seen for what it is now that the money tree is denuded and dying. As another poster has wisely said, the apprenticeship model, the one that worked for centuries, is going to return, and the university scam will sit in the road and rot.
“not so fast:
33. anton:
not so fast,
You forget to mention that those religious universities do not receive public funding.
They don’t pay taxes, either.”
And public universities do pay taxes? Enlighten us with a link, please.
“So, you are arguing against a statement that says everyone should be treated equally? Did you not see “political affiliation” in that list? And who, by the way, do you think universities should treat differently?”
Mischaracterize positions much, Boris? They were arguing against a university trying to enforce an ideological orthodoxy. The notion that opposing a political litmus test is somehow arguing against treating people equally is silly. Why don’t you brush up on your reading comprehension before you imply someone is a bigot.
There is, I kid you not, a “Free Speech Zone” designated in front of the library at a reputable public engineering university here in the Midwest. It’s heartening to know there is at least one place on campus where civil rights can be practiced, even if it’s not in classrooms. (Can I please, please rename it the Public Outcry Zone???)
Of course this university also has the nerve to make budget cuts based on student enrollment in its programs of study. Three guesses which college is protesting that they should be immune (though they have historically been spared). . . and the first two don’t count. Guess the other colleges are the only ones who need to actively recruit and build their programs.
Okay, this “Free Speech Zone” is not as unusual as I thought. It’s still ridiculous, inane and pathetic, but I’m learning.
All I can say is how sad it is to see the intelligence of the Marxist endroctrinated students, get so one tracked in thought, that they can no longer “think” for themselves, but go in circles trying to find a way to justify what’s programmed into their minds and cannot clearly nor concisely demonstrate any other ways or possibilities outside of the box they have allowed themselves to be sealed in.
We need to get rid of all these poisonous Universities and simply turn them into online Universities where people simply get an education, submit tests and receive their degrees to go out and be productive in the work force, to reduce wasted, fuel, energy, brains and time.
We need to stop these sad misleading indoctrinations going on with strange college professors and their agendas, who often intentionally damage the academic record of some of the best and brightest due to non-conformity.
Schools are for learning skills, not for emotional indoctrination or thinking. There are things called support groups or online forums for that..LOL!
Better yet, they can create their own colleges for indoctrination and let the ones who simply want a career education – obtain it without all the unnecessary noise from miserable human parrots chirping on the floor, who want to program you to believe one way of believing life should be for all, without a basis of proof from experience of living a certain way.
How about we all create a fund raiser, giving grants to all those who believe in Communism/Marxism. With a mandatory ticket to fly them anywhere in the world where Marxism and Communism is strong for a maximum of 20 years (banned from returning to America) and then they can share their so called Utopia with the rest of the world and upon completion of the final stage of their indoctrination, when their 20 year experiment is finished, you never know, there may be a special Nobel prize waiting for them at the end of the experiment! They can be the first subjects of their indoctrinated experiment hammered in at these Universities, to compare and contrast what life was like going from living in 21st century America into the future living under communist rule..;)
Then try to give the rest of us an education on Marxism. Until then, I am tuning these freaks out! You should see the rise coming out of these people when you suggest something outside of their box, they can’t seem to handle it, but will, like a robot, intellectually go in the same circle and take you right back to where they started with such great skill too, very impressive. It’s only sad that their mind is just stuck on that one and only track, not open to other ways/possibilities of going about change..
It really is very sad to see such intelligence of some of these people get so warped into such a thought process. These people are intelligent, but seemingly mentally disturbed by the thought that anyone could think differently on any level and they are programmed not to see their own imbalance (a sign of weakness). They can intelligently rehearse all the scenarious that Marxist ways are great, regurgitate names of past philosopers and thinkers based on their indoctrination, but fail to demostrate any potential negative consequence or realities directly correlated with such a belief system, as if in complete denial of any other such possibilities.
You can see it in their faces that if you challenge their thinking, you can see, they are thinking, “I can’t believe you are saying this to me,” an almost expression of “how dare you”, but, they have the unique ability to shift quickly and think perhaps you are in need of a broader explanation and then will calm down and try to drown you in another well rounded intellectual speech about ways for you to see and understand the greater cause to think like they do..
It’s always quite interesting, but in someways disturbing to see that they think you are troubled because of their one track mind set, which cannot handle other possibilities other than the one way they think it is meant to work, based on someone elses’ past frame of reference or study.. Minus, person experience, or better yet, provide a mass group in history to proclaim happiness, peace and unity under such conditions.
How sad:(
They need a lot more than regurgitating works and philosophies of the past and brainwashing from their professors to convince me..LOL!
No Marxism in the USA..