An Anatomy of a Most Peculiar Institution
A Campus-full of Contradictions
Almost everything about the modern university is a paradox. It has become a sort of industry gone rogue that embraces practices that a Wal-Mart or Halliburton would never get away with. It is exempt from scrutiny in the fashion that the Left ceased talking about renditions or Guantanamo Bay once Barack Obama was elected, or a Code Pink goes after a NRA official in the way it would never disrupt a hearing on Fast and Furious. In other words, the university is one of the great foundations of the Left, and so is immune from the sort of criticism that otherwise is daily leveled against other institutions.
So let’s take a 10-minute stroll through the campus and learn why costs soar even as students are ever more poorly educated.
The Curriculum
A student’s life on campus is a zero-sum game. For each elective like “The modern comic book,” or “Chicana feminisms” or “Queering the text,” students have no time (or desire to) take more difficult and instructive classes on the British Enlightenment or A History of World War I or Classical English Grammar. (Yes, despite the relativist, anti-hierarchical university, concepts really do exist like “more instructive.”) The former are mostly therapeutic classes, entirely deductive, in which the point is not to explore an intellectual topic by presenting the relevant facts and outlining the major controversies, while sharpening students’ inductive reasoning and empirical objectivity, as well as improving their English prose style and mastering grammar and syntax in their written work.
The result is perhaps a fourth of the liberal arts courses — many would judge more like 50% — would never have been allowed in the curriculum just 40 years ago. They tend to foster the two most regrettable traits in a young mind — ignorance of the uninformed combined with the arrogance of the zealot. All too often students in these courses become revved up over a particular writ — solar power, gay marriage, the war on women, multiculturalism — without the skills to present their views logically and persuasively in response to criticism. Heat, not light, is the objective of these classes.
Why are these courses, then, taught?
For a variety of practical reasons: 1) often the professors are rehashing their doctoral theses or narrow journal articles and are not capable of mastering a wider subject (e.g., teaching a class in “The Other in Advertising” is a lot easier than a systematic history of California); 2) the quality of today’s students is so questionable that the social sciences have stepped up to service the under-qualified, in the sense of providing courses, grades, and graduation possibilities; 3) the university does not see itself as a disinterested nexus of ideas, where for a brief four years students are trained how to think, given a corpus of fact-based knowledge about their nation and world, and expected to develop an aesthetic sense of art, music, and literature. Instead college is intended as a sort of boot camp for the progressive army, where recruits are trained and do not question their commissars.
So the new curriculum in the social sciences and humanities fills a need of sorts, and the result is that today’s graduating English major probably cannot name six Shakespearean plays; the history major cannot distinguish Verdun from Shiloh; the philosophy major has not read Aristotle’s Poetics or Plato’s Laws; and the political science major knows very little of Machiavelli or Tocqueville — but all of the above do know that the planet is heating up due to capitalist greed, the history of the United States is largely a story of oppression, the UN and the EU offer a superior paradigm to the U.S. Constitution, and there are some scary gun-owning, carbon-fuel burning, heterosexual-marrying nuts outside the campus.
If we ask why vocational and tech schools sprout up around the traditional university campus, it is because they are upfront about their nuts-and-bolts, get-a-job education: no need to worry about “liberal arts” or “the humanities” — especially given that the universities’ General Education core is not very general and not very educational any more. Yes, I am worried that the University of Phoenix graduate has not read Dante, but more worried that the CSU Fresno graduate has not either, and the former is far more intellectually honest about that lapse than the latter.
Note here the illiberal nature of allowing highly paid faculty to indulge their curricular fantasies at the expense of indebted students who pay a great deal for a great deal of nothing. Is there a provost or a dean in America that can say to faculty, “That is not a real course, and so won’t be taught at our real university”? Does the shop foreman let the welder choose his own project?
When I was in college (at a different CSU than the one where you teach) I quickly discovered that acquiring a degree is much less effort than getting an education. By carefully selecting your instructors you can complete the coursework with minimal effort and a high GPA.
I am going to assume the reason you neglected to mention the sciences: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, etc. is because the majority of those courses are immune from liberal bias. The answer is the answer, the procedure is the procedure, and the reaction is the reaction. From that, I would add that while yes, the majority of my courses were free of bias, it was especially difficult taking the ‘humanities’ courses, with the announced point of diversifying my education. Few of my professors, or even my fellows, were open to apply the same method of logic that worked for every math course I took.
Here’s the non-cynical truth, ‘drunkcynic’, and this Israeli blogger is more than familiar with the (mis)educational system – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/21/the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-in-a-time-of-immoral-relativism-the-havoc-wrought-by-leftist-academia-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/.
As such, you are precisely on target!
The sciences were being systematically demolished by some humanities programs, eager to apply “interdisciplinary” methodology in order to undermine the authority of all the sciences with “cultural anthropology.” See http://clarespark.com/2010/01/03/this-witch-is-not-for-burning-science-as-magic/. Scientific authority might be bogus, but the same humanities professors went on to rehabilitate mysticism and vitalism.
The unfortunate reality is that the rot is still advancing, and it is moving into the sciences. The requirement for mathematical knowledge still keeps the vermin largely at bay in the “hard” sciences, but there are now “interdisciplinary” programs like Environmental Science and Sustainability Science that are nearly as corrupt and debased as Sociology. The saying is that anything called “Studies” requires very little study, and anything called X Science is not scientific..
Agreed. The rot is definitely seeping into the sciences, mostly led by environmental activists and radical lefties. The whole area of climate “science” is so corrupt that it’s going to take other more respectable fields down with it. The research money for “global warming” is being dished out like candy, and other disciplines are starved, so to get their fair share of the pie, they strive and pander and pimp their research out to “the cause.”
The concept of “post-modern science” is seriously being advanced by academicians who don’t have the patience (or perhaps the intelligence) to study complex physical systems. Post-modern concepts pretend that in complex natural systems, such as the Earth’s climate, you can whip out some statistics and make grandiose future “projections.” But luckily for them, the “projections” aren’t falsifiable. They only have to demonstrate statistical “skill.” No one can ever falsify a computer climate model, apparently.
Statistics are used with tremendous accuracy in quantum mechanics. However, Newtonian scale complex systems don’t necessarily behave by the same rules as do subatomic particles. But in climate science, that whole issue was apparently claimed as a “gimmee” longer than a 30 ft., check, a 60 ft. putt.
I’m still waiting for some libturd to tell me how having a “diverse” class in the STEM courses improves what is being taught and learned…But evidently former Justice O’Connor and the others seem to think it is important.
As an “older’ commentor, PhD in applied math, I would like to throw in another view. My generation used slide rules. We learned about computers (in their infancy) and put a “Man on the Moon.” By the way, we read books to learn about the sciences, not computers. I was an early advocate of using computers to demonstrate concepts, e.g., Sine wave amplification, rather than text book graphs. My consulting business was in computers and telecommunications (for which I recently sold a patent). In teaching “the sciences” we are still pre-eminate. But more and more, we are teaching our adversaries. Are foreign students taking “liberal arts;” Femine studies, transectual lit, etc. I don’t think so. Are they borrowing money to learn these things? Again, I don’t think so. We need to get off our ASS(es) and get back to being serious!
I viewed most of my humanities as non-free-thought accomodation of the dictator at the front. I learned from those who allowed thinking, I memorized temporarily from those who didn’t.
There were standardized tests that I could take back when I was pursuing my BSEE to allow me to get out of the general ed courses. I took them all and passed them. It was necessary, because the EE curriculum was absolutely brutal – I can’t imagine a harder course of study. Furthermore, reading history and classical/classic literature was fun, and I didn’t need a mountain of pre-packaged, dumbed-down courses to explore that.
I confess that my EE studies made me a bit of an intellectual snob. I remember how I could not resist laughing out loud when encountering fellow students who not only couldn’t handle basic calculus or even algebra, but didn’t know how to calculate a percentage or ratio. I also didn’t see the point of having 4 year programs for specializations like political science, business or most of the other non-science/math centric disciplines. It seemed to me that working in a business, law firm or politician’s organization would be more instructive than the rather simplistic, arbitrary and artificial constructs that were drilled into student’s unjudging, noncritical heads.
The point of a liberal arts degree was to form a well-rounded individual who would be able to adapt & reason in any environment. In yesteryear the coursework for your BSEE was considered learning a useful skill. See the difference.
Unfortunately, nowadays there are very few colleges that offer an excellent liberal arts program. One now has to major in the natural sciences to get their money’s worth from the university system. But does that mean having a natural science degree indicates a well-formed & well-rounded mind? ——- No.
“The point of a liberal arts degree was to form a well-rounded individual who would be able to adapt & reason in any environment”
1) Well rounded? According to whom?
20 Abe Lincoln never got a liberal arts degree, nor Julius Caesar, nor George Washington….ad infinitum.
Show me one liberal arts major who graduated in the last 60 years who is a match for any one of them, and I’ll buy your stupid assertion.
If I get something from Shakespeare that my half-baked professor does not, I may fail the course today. Because they’re all lazy humps. They can’t “adapt and reason” themselves. How do you propose they TEACH someone else to do so?
Apparently you are not well-versed in history, a subject required in a liberal arts degree.
Julius Casear most likely had tutors instructing him on topics related to a classical liberal education that included geometry, philosophy, rhetoric, Latin, Greek, & any other subject appropiate for an aristocratic child. BTW the university system was invented by the Catholic Church, about 1000 yrs after Casear.
Lincoln may have only received a primary school education but he obviously was a well-read person. His reading not only included the bible but also the classics of the Greek & Latin era. His speeches & debates were phenomenal & could not have existed without a liberal education even if he was self-taught.
The founding fathers of the United States were one of the most educated persons of their time. All had a liberal arts or classical education. Washington was a self-taught man. Recreational reading for such a man at that time included the Greek & Latin classics.
So tell me again what your attitude is about a classical liberal art degree?
But that’s just his *point*. You *don’t* need to go to university to read books or learn languages. I majored in engineering, but along with my math and science textbooks I’ve also got shelves stuffed full of books on politics, economics, philosophy, history. I’ve also studied languages independently (I’m working on improving my French, and I’m working on learning Hebrew because I enjoy using it when talking to my Israeli friends). You don’t need a professor to learn the liberal arts, you just need a good bookshelf and some discipline.
I’d be willing to bet that Lincoln had a better liberal arts education than any batchelor level liberal arts major in the last century. It was called being well-read back then.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t hate the liberal arts. Learning how to write eloquently and studying history and literature are fine things. But liberal arts degree programs should be tiny compared to science, engineering and math programs, simply because there’s very little you can do with even an excellent liberal arts education except teach.
Let me give you an example. Right now, I’m typing a message that will go out over the internet to be posted on a website. If we start asking questions about how that’s done and dig down to the root, you will see how even the sharpest, best educated liberal arts major in history will be simply unequipped to deal with the technology-driven world in which we are today. In fact, let’s follow the question chain – what is the internet? Well, the internet is actually a communication medium created from the packetized protocols used by interconnected computers. How does that actually work? Well, the computers share information with each other so they recognize each other and can reliably exchange coded information. How do the computers do that? Well, computers are built from microchips that run software that organize the operations of these chips and support dedicated software for internet communication. But wait – how do the chips do this? Well, the chips consist of integrated circuits that are designed to hold and process digital information and exchange that information with other chips at high speed, using standard protocols. OK, but how do these integrated circuits do this? Well, the integrated circuits are composed of transistors that act like mechanical switches with no moving parts, using voltage differences to signal Hi or Low electrical states that can be interpreted as a code, kind of like Morse code. Hold on a second – how do these transistors work? Well, they are composed of silicon deliberately and carefully contaminated with other elements that change the electrical conductivity of the otherwise neutral silicon over distinct regions where the contaminants are implanted. Uhhh……so how do the contaminants change the electrical properties of the silicon? Well, if you look at the periodic table of the elements, you can see on the far right are the noble gases, which are very poor conductors, and in the middle are various metals, with those on the right of the middle area being the best conductors (copper, gold, silver, etc…)In between these non-conductors and good conductors are a bunch of elements that are……semiconductors, most notably carbon and Silicon. And the final question: what makes these elements good or bad conductors? At this point we would have to delve down into quantum mechanics and general atomic theory in order to discuss valences, atomic numbers and weights, and even touch on things like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Ya see, Jeannine, all of these things are VITAL to genuinely understanding technology and developing enhancements, improvements and radical new inventions. Even the atomic level matters – if you want to be a good analog circuit designer, you need to understand the concepts behind a bandgap reference voltage, which means you have to be very familiar with quantum theory. If you want to be a memory designer, you need to understand the quantum theory behind ‘tunneling.’ And not just the designers, but the product engineers, test engineers, quality engineers, and applications engineers need to understand the stuff as well.
So: you just have to believe me, Jeannine, when I say that even the most brilliant liberal arts person in history will FREAK OUT when confronted by this kind of stuff. Their lib arts education has value, but on a personal level – not on the level of actually doing constructive things that involve building, maintaining, creating and repairing things.
I hope you also now understand why the engineering geeks you encountered in school were such misanthropes. Studying this stuff takes a lot of commitment, and will drive you utterly crazy during your college years. :-)
Stallion’s experience as an EE was my experience as an ME. And I went to a fairly CONSERVATIVE school. (BYU) Engineers are funny like that ;)
I know all about the internet. My husband was 1 of the original civilian users way back in the 1970s, unlike Mr Al Gore. Many 3rd generation programmers, (COBOL) were liberal arts graduates. Steve Jobs & Bill Gates although both did not graduate, were liberal arts majors. Liberal arts majors can adapt.
Again what you describe in your posting is a skill set. Large ideas are generally thought by those who have a well-rounded education. A typical engineer makes these large ideas a reality. I don’t know of any billionaire engineers. If I’m not mistaken David Goldman of this website has a music degree which is part of the liberal arts.
Now I’m not saying that the quality of a liberal arts degree has diminished dramatically. It has. Yet there are still some excellent liberal arts programs (Thomas Aquinas College & Wyoming Catholic College, 2 examples)out there & we shouldn’t poo-poo them away.
It’s cool that you are familiar with the application level stuff for the net and have done some high level language programming, Jeannine. Few people who have today’s lib arts degrees have the courage to engage with those things, and you are to be commended. :-)
I think your comments about Caesar’s education are perfectly on target – a real education is both very broad and simultaneously rather deep.I think I’m on safe ground when I say that for the last 30 years, the great majority of university-level institutions have failed their students in that regard. Undoubtedly the engineer propeller-heads could do with a solid dose of reading Toynbee, Shakespeare, Livy, Gibbon and another dozen of the giants in history and literature, as well as being forced to improve their jargon-heavy writing styles to communicate more simply and clearly with others. What I think it takes to step outside of one’s comfort zone is courage to do so on an individual level. In that respect, it’s not just many universities failing their students, but also students failing to show the character and maturity to rise to challenges, and failure on the part of parents to inculcate their kids with the necessary discipline, modesty and will to achieve, as well as failing to push their children’s elementary, middle and high school organizations to do the same.
As to billionaire engineers, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
Those names ring a bell?
I never bothered with a degree, making money was much more attractive. To the extent that I have an education past high school it is liberal arts and technical training. I disagree with your fundamental premise that liberal arts education is unnecessary. How much is necessary is open to debate. I think a decently rigorous high school education should adequately prepare the free person with knowledge of their culture, heritage, history, and law. That and a decent upbringing should prepare a person. Unfortunately, neither the high school nor the decent upbringing are a certainty and in many communities not even a likelihood.
I’ve dealt with lots of engineers and other technologists. Sorry, you guys are a mile deep but an inch wide usually. I could count on engineers and other technologists to do a pretty good job of executing what they were instructed to do. I couldn’t count on them, couldn’t even expect them, to think about whether they should be doing what they were instructed to do. If I was the boss and I instructed one of you guys to develop the most effective way to dispense Zyclon-B, you’d set right to work and figure out a really good way to dispense Zyclon-B. If I was the boss and I instructed you to figure out a way to rapidly and efficiently dispose of large quantities of animal flesh, you’d hop right on that task too.
I’ll keep the what to do part of public policy with people like me. What I want from you guys is your phone number when I need you and enough logical skill and knowledge of your trade to be able to call bullshit on you.
“I’ll keep the what to do part of public policy with people like me.”
Arrogance in a nutshell. Everything wrong today starts with your attitude. People who feel more fit to rule than the “peons” are first class garbage.
I’ll keep the what to do part of public policy with a random name from the phone book or the first cabbie at the nearest stand rather than with you.
And here is revealed the real problem with the “educated” and that is they have learned nothing from the bloody history of the central planners or the failures of the Progressive model of society managed by credentialled experts.
Despite your assertion to rule based on your status of a credential earned a bare 4 years out of your parents house, you are not remotely qualified to rule over anyone, not in the slightest. The closest we come to that is the graduates of the military academies, who haven’t been polluted with leftwing groupthink, the neo-Marxist race/class/sex politics, moral relativism and intellectual bigotry more suited to totalitarian political regimes, and not what was once considered a “University”.
I’ve found most modern liberal arts majors a mile wide and a centimeter deep with not much in the way of original thought. They all parrot the same worn PC platitudes.
I’d trust an US Army private with more responsibility that a modern liberal arts graduate.
@YKW and Sgt Ted-
You guys really ought to try that reading comprehension stuff. You both must have an exercise program based on jumping to conclusions.
Oh, and Sgt. Ted, I’ve been afflicted with lots and lots of Retired Military Officers (RMOs) exercising their lavish veterans’ preference to get government jobs; most are just ordinary bureaucrats who don’t have much experience deciding which suit and tie to wear each day and some are scummy, manipulative weasels. Sorta like any other random group.
All your comments in this thread have been excellent, Art. :-)
You are correct that a Liberal Arts education will not help with technical skills. What they do help with is verbal reasoning skills (very different than the spatial thinking required of most technical fields). In repairing a truck engine, you want spatial skills and mechanical knowledge. In managing a truck repair business, you need to know the applicable laws, the psychology of the mechanics and other workers, the probable market changes as a result of social factors, and regulatory inspections. Those all require verbal skills.
The value of a Liberal Arts education is negligible in a technical role but valuable in a managerial one. That said, many times, a person can educate themselves better than a classroom will and degrees must be looked at with skepticism until you know who the key professors were (“You studied under Prof. Myopia whose most famous work is a condemnation of civilization. Good luck finding a job you like”.)
The dirty little secret is that it is a total con-job to claim you need a liberal arts degree to run that shop.
It is a total con job to say that you need a liberal arts credential to do it, a liberal arts education is essential, something you can get reading by lamplight before the fireplace as Lincoln did.
Well STALLION, not to be catty here, but you expended 651 words in your follow-up explanation of the superiority of a BSEE. The most important lesson I took from my presumably useless BA is that if one can’t express a concept in 500 words or less, preferably less, don’t bother. Brevity matters.
Properly edited, using consistent pronouns and precise language, you would have been more effective had you only written, “Right now, I’m typing a message that will go out over the Internet to be posted on a web site. If we start asking questions about how that task is accomplished, we would discover that even the sharpest, best educated liberal arts major would be unequipped to fully explain the technology-driven world in which we live.”
And you should have stopped there. Your point required a mere 56 words including a hyphenation.
“…there’s very little you can do with even an excellent liberal arts education except teach.” C’mon, even formulas are brief.
[ppppsssst!! ....it's "formulae"....]
When I was, Gasp!….an… Econ.! major at Sewanee in the early 1950′s [an era long gone with the wind if there ever was one...] we had to hand-write exam answers [apparently that's called "cursive" now!] in lined bookets called Blue Books, and Dr Eugene Mark Kayden would preface his four or five lengthy hand written questions on the chalk board with the words, “Tersly explain…..”, a subject for which whole libraries had been created in the past. And, we did it. Somehow. He had a hawk’s eye for B.S. and let us know it. Tersely.
We sat in creaky straight backed cane chairs and wrote out our answers with….fountain pens…(I still have the one I used) seated at a long board at which seven of us were widely spaced. We had an Honor System which would have cost us big time if we even so much as glanced horizontally while thinking….most of us stared with sweaty palms at our booklets during thought-pauses. And, some of us even smoked cigarettes.
The whole scene was wonderfully all male Victorian; we upperclassmen wore black academic gowns if we maintained an overall B average.
I’ve no idea what goes on there now. Don’t really want to know.
Brevity is useful, but not in this case. Every single one of the Q&A pairs I made in my statement implied a great deal of in-depth knowledge on a very broad variety of subjects, including (but not limited to) mathematics (including boolean algebra, partial differentials, time/frequency domain transitions and probability theory), physics (including electromagnetism, the particle/wave duality of light, and quantum mechanics – hell, we even had to study special relativity), chemistry, computer science, thermodynamics, and materials science. The layers of knowledge that have to be learned and the abstract concepts that have to be grasped to be an effective contributor to high tech are staggering to even the most brilliant people who enter the sector. That’s why I felt compelled to write it out in such a lengthy manner. Of course, you still might be right, especially considering your excellent comment on formulae (which gave me quite a chuckle :-) .)
I know it’s “formulae” Charlie, but standard usage now permits cactuses, campuses, etc., rather than cacti etc. It causes many to cringe, so someone either gets offended or confused, myself included. Your description of an all-male Victorian-flavored college classroom of yore makes me happy; wish I could have attended.
Also, I wasn’t disagreeing with Stallion; I actually agree with him entirely. Good writing, after all, is the result of experience rather than a degree. Frankly, a weekend seminar focused on grammar and editing held at a local hotel conference center would probably accomplish far more than a degree program in writing, and it would cost a lot less.
STALLION said, “But liberal arts degree programs should be tiny compared to science, engineering and math programs, simply because there’s very little you can do with even an excellent liberal arts education except teach.”
Perhaps you don’t know that a proper liberal arts education typically requires courses in the natural sciences and mathematics as well as logic. Usually students graduate with either a BA or a BS. Graduates of good liberal arts programs find them to be excellent pre-professional preparation. At Hillsdale College, where my son attends, pre-med is one of the most popular programs with students majoring in biology or chemistry.
My son is a politics major at Hillsdale with a computer science minor. He started tearing apart and programming computers before he hit puberty. He plans to work in political technology when he graduates next year with a BS. Trust me, he understands how the internet works and I don’t see teaching in his future…I see technology.
I’d suggest you open your mind a bit. A well-done liberal education teaches a student how to think, how to reason, and how to express himself. If he can combine those things with a moral/theological/spiritual education, the possibilities are endless.
Actually, Paula, I don’t disagree with you – a PROPER lib arts education has a good dose of hard science and math in it. From what I’ve seen of many of today’s lib arts majors, though, it doesn’t look like they’re getting that education that they should be getting.
Your son is a sensible kid – that minor in Comp Sci says much good about him. :-)
Stallion, my post was all in fun and I sincerely meant no disrespect. I was an editor/writer for many years, and slicing things down to the essentials was my business. An editor is a craftsman (a good one is anyway); we cut and combine and eliminate all excess wherever possible. My goal is “punchy” reading. As I said in subsequent posts to others, I do agree with you. And have a super New Year sir!
From the opening pages of “The Great Gatsby”
As for the Liberal Arts teaching how to think, that is laughable. What is required is an enforcement of rigor. That comes not from the curriculum but from the being taught to order your thoughts. That can be guided by the Liberal Arts professor, or should I say used to could, but it is forced up on the student in the hard sciences and engineering. There is no more difficult taskmaster than the “right answer.” Either you develop the habits of “thinking” or you fall behind in confusion.
This is not to say that one should become limited. A wide-ranging curiosity and exploration of the world reveals exciting problems to which your deeper learnings can bring new solutions.
I recall, about ten-plus years ago, entering a Cal State campus library, whose interior walls were decorated with over-sized and framed public service announcements touting the values of reading. There were Whoopi Goldberg and numerous other then-celebrities holding books under quotes such as, “Read! It’s Good for the Soul,” and other nonsense. Granted, these might be useful in the juvenile sections of the public library, but on a university campus? And this was before the complete conquest of digital media. Outrageous.
College and why I hated it… I asked ‘em if I could just pass a competency test, pay four years of tuition and pick up my degree on the way out (folk weren’t amused– downright offended, in fact).
Re:
“College and why I hated it…”
You’ve absolutely no idea how sad it is to read such a sentiment.
My four years at Sewanee [1950-54]were absolutely, without question, the most wonderful, best years of my life.
College has changed… it was like having my adulthood revoked and an unwanted hippie second childhood I was supposed to enjoy if I were a good person imposed upon me, and that was 1988- 91. It’s even more like “the world’s largest playpen” today.
As my non-university educated father, a retired Coast Guard aircraft mechanic said, “They’re a bunch of educated idiots.”
Seems other people, some of note, agree with your dad’s assessment of liberal arts faculty members and other troops for the New Age Army of Progressivism wherever they’re found.
If I remember correctly the planners, the architects, engineers and PR brotherhoods of the Progressive Ideology called their instruments in the planned Change/takeover of nations and societies to their ends Useful Idiots.
To paraphrase Orwell, no idea is so foolish that intellectuals won’t lap it up.
Or an even better paraphrase might be ‘there is nothing so evil that some academic won’t be pushing it”
During my life time I have studied literature and philosophy in four different countries and taught in three. In all cases I was richly awarded studying with outstanding scholars, even in the US of my youth. However, in the US I found myself as a beginning prof. in the incipient phase (so old am I) of the emerging situation that Hanson has described. Women-politics almost ended my career (unfortunately I was not transgender), even though I had in my first 6 years published more than 8 other colleagues in their life-time (most stopped publishing after receiving tenure). The battle was brutal because it was ideological against me. I have sat in on uni. decisions as to who gets tenure to discover that one candidate was deservedly rejected until he revealed himself to be of a minority–>immediate early tenure and promotion. Long retired in Europe I read Hanson’s article with sadness, yet pleased that I am not involved anymore.
I will chime in a bit of confirmation. My eldest son received straight A’s from a notable university until the last semenster. He found his education to be useless, quit the uni. and went on to ground a business becoming a multi-millionaire. He adored hiring (and firing) business majors for minimum wage. (He is now trying to protect himself from the Obama onslaught and is not hiring, not even illegals.) My mother came from Hanson’s haunts, e.g., Fresno and thereabouts, i.e., she came from a small Chowchilla farm in the early 1900′s, spent the first nine years of learning in a one-room school for all grades, attended a convent school for 3 years and went on as one of the first women to major at the Uni. of Calif, Berkley with straight A’s in Latin and math (thank goodness as she got me through math). Her education, despite the lack of gov. subvention (sic), was superior to mine 30 years later and mine better than my children. Thinking back I can trace the decline and, if Hanson is right, fall of quality American education. Also, my favorite Californian born philosopher is Josiah Royce, just post-gold rush days, who was mostly taught at home. Royce went on to become at Harvard one of Americas best philosopher of the time. So schooling at home or self-schooling can be valuable.
One would hope your son would have the integrity to not hire illegals in any case. Those who do are no better than the criminals in the government who force us to provide for them. Employers who profit from professional dishonesty and leave expensive social messes for others to subsidize are not admirable.
In our farming community various excuses are made — I can’t profit otherwise; I can’t find the labor. It’s all pure bull. If these business owners really cared about solving the problem, they could grow a spine, tell the truth and work together for solutions. Twenty years ago they did just fine without the illegal population we have now. I have no sympathy for anyone who forces me to support the illegal immigrants who fill Section 8 housing around here (a baby or baby-momma does the trick), run drugs, destroy neighborhoods, shoot each other, create no-go zones two blocks from my house, get tacit exemptions from the county for maintaining their property as I am required to maintain mine, even as their behavior destroys my property value (shepherded by an army of loud, race-screeching activists), double school costs with the need for special educators and bilingual everything, dramatically reduce the number of public jobs for citizens who do not speak Spanish, and work a few months a year while finding ways to get their SUVs, utilities, food, medical care, and cell phones subsidized by taxpayers.
It’s not the business of business to police immigration law especially when government agencies whose business it is to do that sort of thing pointedly refuse to do so.
And I don’t just mean the Attorney General’s office, I mean school districts and state welfare programs.
So, I just can’t find myself getting outraged by some restaurant owner who doesn’t do a deep background check on his dishwasher.
I prefer to save it for the Attorney General and the courts who keep government agencies from doing what government is supposed to do.
Screw that.
Any employer must pay payroll taxes.
Any employer who doesn’t get SS numbers AND confirm them is lying and possibly committing fraud on innocent citizens who pay their taxes or would prefer that their dead relatives not be raped beyond the grave by thugs faking to be them.
Clear enough for you Bill? Ethics much?
How about the idea that if one doesn’t hire illegals one will go out of business?
Its a competitive marketplace. So yes, the government is the only org that can address the issue.
Actually, I must admit that I’d far rather have illegals working than drawing from the welfare rolls. As for breaking the law… well our naturalization process is terrible. We all complain that our grandparents and great-grandparents came in legally, but honestly I’m pretty sure that if most of our ancestors tried to come in today, a lot of them wouldn’t be allowed in.
Personally, I feel we should let in anyone who isn’t a criminal or terrorist threat, give them a blue card that allows them to work but not draw welfare, then in 5 years if they speak the language, have jobs, and can pass a basic citizenship test, swear ‘em in and turn ‘em loose.
I suppose at one time laws were morality based, but that time has long passed. I’m one of those who firmly believe that a man belongs where his heart, his judgment, his skill and his feet will take him. Artificial borders be damned.
Your post’s expressed objection is misguided. It is not the alien who causes the problems, but the welfare state. Had our societal based welfare institutions, families, churches, neighbors, towns and counties, not been subsumed and overwhelmed by impersonal big government, aliens with promise would have been assisted so that our own institutions would have been strengthened by the value of their contributions. Instead, we are now forced to provide sustenance to those who do not contribute as well as those that do.
Off the topic of the value of a liberal arts education and what it may, or should, consist of, but in identifying the Spanish language (a musical and rugged one at that with its sonorous Latin base and Arabic roughness) in your commentary, I have wondered for years if any other country has so easily and gradually given away its source language as the USA appears to have done in return for a foreign one (Spanish), a language which appears to have become legally equal to English. My perspective is that America (the USA) has lost wholesale respect for its founding language and therefore for its founding character.
I shudder to think about what those in the University crowd would do if they learned that the asphalt they drive on is in fact, oil.
LOL!
The housing bubble followed by the education bubble. A trillion dollars in loans to leftist indoctrinated mush minds is not a good financial investment.
Repaying $250,000 while living in your mom’s basement is not going to happen!
A trillion dollars in loans to leftist indoctrinated mush minds is not a good financial investment.
But it was a sound political investment (the only kind of investment Washington makes) in that it funneled money to universities whose employees then funneled campaign donations and support back to the Democrats. Like Dr. Hanson said, the universities are in the business of producing more ill-educated liberals.
If they really cared about young people, they wouldn’t be screwing them over with massive debt, either in the form of education loans or government debt. I call it economic pedophilia. They’re screwing the kids’ futures in order to buy political benefit today. It fits right in with the leftist demigod John Maynard Keynes statement, ““The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
Behold the hand of radical leftism.
Professorial tenure is to “higher” education, what union stewardship is to manufacturing. A thug-based un-meritocracy posing as a reward system, that rewards leftist fealty, not achievement, honor, integrity, or …heaven forbid…a free will.
University “education” is now a vocational school experience…if one considers radical leftist bootlicking to be a vocation.
True vocational schools like DeVry actually provide a sound and beneficial service to their students and the country at large. Teaching hands on electronics or computer skills that enhance productivity and the chances for making a contribution are to be highly praised and valued.
The University experience is the radical leftist’s wet dream. It teaches lies, slanders, half-truths, hoaxes, cons, and all manner of indoctrination tricks to the easily led in a cultish devotion to protest of all things “Amerika”.
It not only has ceased to think students how to think, it slavishly attempts to “un-think” the process. It peer pressures devotees into refusing to think, repelling deductive reasoning, violently putting down any free will that dares to question the dogma fog blurring all rational thought in a landscape of treason and traitorism.
Academia is aided and abetted by Hollywood and other cultural thought tundras. The reason nothing but crap is being produced in entertainment is because it’s all state propaganda now that the state has been seized.
The protest culture has to figure out how not to protest itself as its last trick.
This, of course…can only go where EVERY radical leftist overthrow takes it.
Into the iron-fisted hands of tyranny.
This path has taken four short decades. First, we had to destroy the ability to think for ourselves and to question those who mean to rule us from the far left.
Then, we had to indoctrinate a knee jerk revulsion of those who do think for themselves.
Finally, we had to convince the new “non-thinker” that he/she was “elite” for their acceptance of “brilliance” into their lives…and to vote in “like minds”.
Ergo…Obama, Pelosi, and your new Party leaders. And, confiscatory taking of accumulated savings, gutting the military, shredding the Constitution, surrendering the borders, running guns to drug cartels, forced purchase of goods and services, favoritism for Party (union) thugs, selective prosecution of civil rights laws, voting fraud, turning self-governance into UN corrupt hands …the full hateful hippie takeover…the Bandana Republic.
Thank Academia. It has done its job well in this four decade act of treason.
sanity. what a relief. thanks bleachers, I was gasping for ration.
Dear cfbleachers and admirers of VDH,
Your points are precise, spot on and so good that the only critique left to a leftist, would be that you speak a different language. Your language: the reason of the West and its dedication to liberty and mutual dedication to self-restraint.
Now, consider this. A political tyranny cannot succeed without a clerical tyranny. All of your points work to describe the Evangelical America seen on broadcast channels, which includes prosperity illogic money absconding (give-to-get)(Here’s the contract: You give preacher $s, he gives you a contract that God will multiply those dollars… quite self-dealing!), rapture fear-mongering (fear the coming beast! So, send us $s!), emergent gobbledygook (the subject for today’s sermon is Twas Brillig Jabberwocky), seeker-friendly brain-dead, mojo-jive emotionalism (Huwh! Huwh! Yawl give me MONEY!), and the newest of insanities: Progtard Brainless Drivel (Watch the pastor on video cannonball into the baptismal tank for money!) (Sparks, Nevada I kid you not.)
Deep thought into this arena is difficult because its leaders turn you into a pariah. (How dare you see our elbows hitting innocent eyes! You’re not of GAWD! Touch NOT GAWD’s anointed!)
But actually what has happened is that five generations of Progressive Public Education of Decline-of-Reason has messed up Evangelical Churchianity big time. To wit: If a sane brain believes a) There is one God above us all and b) There is one universal philosophy of the West, which is liberty, which is (as noted above) mutual dedication to self-restraint…
The idiots in charge of Evangelical Insanity believe c) There is one God above us all and d) There is one universal philosophy which is at enmity to the one of the West.
You see, what happened is that the drones in public education (lower schools & universities) say that e) There is no God above us all and f) There is one universal philosophy, which is enmity to the one of the West. (i.e. It’s always best to be at war with the West!)
So the retarded brains who felt religious, rebelled! They said that there is a God! And then they kept the god of the heathens: They kept the idea of clericalism, which has no restraint and is at war with all Western mores.
Lastly, and forgive me for the long post, we have Extreme Muslims who say g) Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet and h) There is one universal philosophy, which is Shariah Law, now submit or we cut your head off!
The “Christian Right” has been so dumbed down by its idiotic leadership that cannot correct the huge errors it has in its doctrine, because it is dedicated to absolutely no self-correction! And it can’t fight any evil!
Because, as you know, the only system with the highest amount of self-correction is the faith in God and the West.
Sadly, a huge percentage of the Christian Right, the dumbed-down Evangelicals, has no clue it follows the hidden-enslavement philosophy of the Left, because Christians no longer (so many of them, anyway) are dedicated to self-restraint’s correction. They are dedicated, sadly, to jingoism that leads to implosion and decline, as their leaders attest.
I just looked at the CSU Fresno course listing.
An English major who truly wants to study Shakespeare, the other classics, American masterpieces, ancient literature, even the New Testament has available courses that teach those things. She doesn’t have to study “Lesbian Writing” or other such courses.
It’s up to the student. If they’re trying to sail through college to get a B.A. as easily as possible so they can put that on their resume, they can do that. But if they truly want to learn real stuff at CSU Fresno, it’s there for them.
The pressure on both universities and students to get them graduated is enormous. These days, everybody knows that the vast majority of those without college education have done poorly in today’s economy.
Yes, well, it says Shakespeare. You always need to read the fine print. They could very well be doing the Shakesqueer style of syllabus — got to keep those gender theoreticians employed as belts are tightened and the public starts catching on.
As a college student I can actually attest to that. I was taking a course “Nature of Politics”. I was under the impression that I would be learning about the political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, etc. Well I did, but my professor also happened to be a radical feminist and constantly tried to relate all the things we learn to “gender dynamics” and all that crap. Heck, she even made a reference to “dead white males” at least once.
More examples I’ve seen are Women, Weight, and Body Image at Oregon State that costs about $680; Zombies-the Anthropology of the Undead for $1,000 at Ohio State; Politics of Men and Masculinity in U.S. Culture for $1,200; and many more. Pure junk.
I was fortunate in that when I was in college (1970s) I was only required to take one “humanities elective” in my chosen course (criminology). That course turned out to be illuminating.
It was titled “Man and the Environment”. As you might expect from the title, the course material was mainly a series of screeds about the way everything humanity did (other than, say, raising rice in paddies and spreading “night soil” by hand) was despoiling Holy Mother Gaia.
What made it interesting was that the teacher was the head of the English department, a nice lady in her forties. Who took one look at the material, and said, “This is complete b******t”. Her father, BTW, was an engineer who designed bridges, etc., for the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. So you could say she was exposed to the realities of the physical world from an early age.
Instead of simply “absorbing the wisdom of ancient cultures in living gently on the land”, as the course description exhorted us to do, we spent the semester “deconstructing” the arguments in the course material, using the standard tools of scholarship; research, and facts.
After which she presented our findings to the dean. And then the board of governors.
That class wasn’t in the catalog the next year. I doubt there would be a similar outcome today.
We’ve been here before. As James Burke relates in The Day The Universe Changed, by the height of the Renaissance the universities of Europe, which were run by the Catholic church, had become (in his words) “temples of irrelevant logic-chopping” in which theology was the only subject considered worth teaching. The result was the emergence of non-church-run schools that taught subjects like economics, mechanical arts, and etc., that were vitally necessary to the expanding economy. Minus the theological BS.
Today, the technical schools serve much the same purpose. No wonder the clerisies of the universities (i.e., the tenured, politically-radical faculty) hate them as much as they do.
I hate to say this, but it’s not only time for parents to stop sending their 18-year-olds to “name” colleges, they should probably stop sending their 5-year-olds to kindergarten, at least in the public school system. Just as the colleges are now defined as boot camps for progressives to train students to support their pet causes, public schools are little more than boot camps for the colleges. (SAT scores reflect this, no matter how much they try to dumb down the questions to “hide the decline” in actual learning in K-12.)
A typical, public-schooled 12-year-old of today knows that nuclear power is evil, and that Holy Wind and Holy Sun will save us, and that if their parents own guns they should be turned in to the police as criminals right now… but is probably completely incapable of adding 2 plus 2 and consistently getting 4, or even spelling “cat” correctly. And will graduate from high school at age 18 in exactly the same condition, with exactly one useful skill; carrying a placard in a protest rally.
If I were a parent today, I would seriously consider home schooling, probably including a tutor. You can be sure I’d make sure the tutor knew the difference between Passchendaele Ridge and Antietam, or Newton and Aristotle, at the very least before hiring them.
Any reference to the “obvious divinity of Gaia” would be grounds for immediate dismissal. There is no place in the real world for delusion. No matter how determined our “enlightened elite’” are to make us all live their fantasies.
clear ether
eon
As much as I like James Burke – I have both books: The Day the Universe Changed, and Connections. – he is not immune to the all too common Protestant bias against the Catholic Church. It was the Church, after-all, that founded Europe’s great universities. Sure, theology was important, but many scientific advances, like those of Copernicus, came out of Catholic universities. As far as Galileo is concerned, it was not his science that got him into trouble, but his politics.
Clerisies can develop in any closed system, which was Burke’s point, irrespective of his (theorized) opinion of Rome.
Another good example can be found in science fiction; namely, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. In it, Miller describes a post-nuclear war American Southwest, in which once more the Church is the main repository of learning, through monasteries.
The first part, “Fiat Lux”, describes the century “after the Bomb”. It is mainly about internal Church politics, and is not kind to them.
The second part, “Fiat Homo”, describes the roughly early-Renaissance civilization that grows up half-a-millennium after the Fall. It is one that is the sort modern-day progressives dream of (feudalistic and primitive), but Miller enjoys pointing out exactly how cynical and often pig-ignorant the “nobility”, and even the “learned academicians” of that era are. (Their assumptions about “human nature”, written in 1959, seem eerily prescient of modern “progressives”.)
The third part, “Fiat Voluntus Tua”, describes how it all happens over again, because the by-then roughly late-20th Century equivalent civilization is still run by the same sort of “nobility” and politicians who destroyed the last civilization. Ours.
BTW, Miller was a devout Catholic.
Moral; Faults in a system are faults in a system, no matter who calls attention to them. Or why (theoretically at least) they do so.
cheers
eon
I read “A Canticle for Liebowitz” for the first time about about 1980, and it seemed far-off science fiction. Not so much any more.
I could see any number of dumbed down art history majors with a minimum wage job illuminating circuit board design drawings with PhotoShop, adding them to their blogs.
Monkeys with ipads blog Armageddon.
Lovely post, Eon.: “There is no place in the real world for delusion. No matter how determined our “enlightened elite” are to make us all live their fantasies.”
I would only change “fantasies” to “nightmares.”
Or parents should tell their “kids”: I will pay for your BA but I get to pick what classes you will take. If more parents did this, some of the non-class classes might wither on the vine. All our kids (23, 25 and 27) are now proud BA holders. I recommended to each of them that s/he take an introductory economics class and a survey of world history. Not one did. (“Area requirements, yadda yadda…”)
But one interesting factoid. Our youngest started her university career at a mid-West land grant public university with a student population over 30,000. After two years she transfererred to a small, elite, intellectual, politically correct college one the west coast. Today, six months after graduation, ALL of her many friends from the fancy college are still on Daddy’s check or working as baristas or the like. ALL of her friends from the mid-west public school have serious “real” jobs. Not artsy or creative, of course, (sneer), but jobs. My daughter was surprised by this. Hmmm.
Don’t worry good people. Their comeuppance is on the horizon. China, Russia and the Arabs are not up with the humanities’ unprecedented level of progress as yet and have not the desire to partake of such poorly conceived and implemented philosphical trends guiding the current Unsavoury States of America.
You can’t run a country in traitorous reverse of the values which initially constructed the place for very long. China and Russia are quite happy with science and meritocracy and foreign trade. Africa is presently being handed to China; a new China edition paper began in Africa recently where they promote economic progress and positive news, by the lords, What an idea!
Putin is having a ball just being himself. Who is going to stop him? Your President? Imagine those two, say, as cellmates…But that is the President they wanted, the media and the academics, anyone who fancies themselves a modern philosopher.
As has been noted, science is used because it works. Their bulldust just doesn’t function. It will fall apart, just be glad Russia and China are no longer communist but are here to keep you on the straight because when it does fall apart, the West will have a role model there to imitate and challenge.
And as we recede from the world stage, there is some consolation, it will be they dealing with the muslims. Lets watch them all screw each other for a while. None of the three have any gurgling voices calling for gentlemanly conduct, pax and reason.
Well and truly said.
I have met highly educated university graduates who – among other jobs – were either waiting on my table at a restaurant or were wearing a uniform as a security guard at a job site I was investigating.
Engineering graduates, on the other hand, don’t seem to have nearly as difficult a time getting a job – or starting their own business. Not an easy time, mind you, in the current Obama economy, but not as difficult either.
In my opinion, the university system will crash when the general population no longer buys into their game – and the only way not to lose that game (in debt for life while working minimum wage jobs to pay for an education of questionable utility) is quite simply not to play it.
The challenge is how to get ahead in a world transitioning from valuing a traditional university education to one that accepts value in other educational paths.
There is also the challenge of finding work for all the idle hands. History holds examples of the usual solution to the problem, they are sometimes called “trough wars”.
We are today fully stocked with college grads who are useful for nothing. They ae undisciplined, uncouth, lazy louts who really should be digging ditches and clearing tables. Their education was bogus.
The reason we need illegals is that all these dolts have very high opinions of their worthless selves. They are TOO GOOD for menial work, yet they are not. And with Poppa Sam giving them free stuff, there is no need for them to address reality.
I hired two twenty-something guys last week to sweep my shop. In the course of the day, I discovered that they both had Masters in History from a State U. I think I’m fairly up on my history, so, for some reason, I mentioned that I had just read Grant’s Memoirs. No response, just puzzled looks. Ulysses S. Grant. More puzzled looks.
“Wasn’t he a President?”
I had to explain who US Grant was to two Masters of History. Now, even though their degrees were in obscure minutae, of no possible interest to anyone outside of academia (explaining why they were sweeping my floors instead of teaching. FYI, their sweeping was neither very good nor very swift) shouldn’t a Master of History educated at an American University actually know who the hell Grant was?
They were also a bit fuzzy about the dates the Civil War, the Spanish/American War, WWI, WWII began and ended. They had no idea that there ever was a War with Mexico.
But they “knew” that blacks couldn’t vote in the South until 1964 and Johnson saved them all with the civil rights act, and that lynchings were commonplace everyday occurences during the early ’60s.
I told them they should see if they could get their money back, as the product was apparently defective.
I bet you they knew a lot about sports, movies, celebrities, rap/hiphop music, sex, and beer.
But they could probably tell you who was buried in Grant’s Tomb. :)
I hope.
If it makes you feel any better, I was chatting with da wifey as we drove the other day and we were discussing the Bamsters plans to ban guns.
My 14 year old son pipes up from the back seat with – “But they can’t do that!”
He elaborates that it’s in the Constitution. I ask him where…just to see if he knew…and he said the Second Amendment.
When I asked him whether he picked it up from me or from school – he claimed school, though I’m pretty hardcore on that particular subject.
So, there may be hope after all….
Nowadays a BA is simply worthless. Most students -if tested on competence- will deliver astonishing answers they might believe in, but can only be commented with “sorry, you have confused Kartoffelsuppe with the Radetzky March.”
I’ve offered this thought up some years back, tried to present it in such a way for others to understand, yet it still seems a minority view: Strong in body, mind and soul…what happens when the “body” comes to rule? Feelings, emotions reign one’s world. Could this be “feminine” in it’s dynamics?
You’ve heard others say to you (if male) “get in touch with your feminine side” for reasons they believe will make your perspective more valid. Just what does that mean?
What if one were to say “get in touch with your masculine side” to either a male or a female? Want to be a “gender bender” here?
Do our universities rule via a “female” perspective, one driven by “feelings” where mind and soul are merely twisted to support whatever dominate feelings are at play?
“You boys shouldn’t play with guns!” Who is saying this? Diane Feinstein from California intends to line up every gun owner and “create a file” on said person.
Bad Santa…get my drift? Where did the notion of “metrosexual” arise? Who really wants “gay marriage” and for what purposes? Narcissism is at play here, serious and deadly in all it’s forms.
Gird your loins people!
Agreed with you here to some extent but then came to see that the flip side of masculine over-emotionality is there too. That brutish, persecute it, kill it, hit it on the head, has proved just as dangerous and disastrous as is the the current “all must be included” feminine ideal.
But then has the pure feminist ideal truly been embraced. Apart from the beautiful though traumatised by Harold Bloom’s groping of my thigh Naomi Wolfe, the most dominant feminista voices have been men in women’s bodies. Is that the problem, the perversion of well-balanced feminism by women who aren’t actually women, but in fact madmen? Minority issues had to be addressed but look at how it is done now, with a reflexively psychopathic persecution of those who disagree.
End result of a being led by maniacal hypocrits is more of the same, a brutish, combative, ignorant, narrow minded society. Very Melville isn’t it?
“…Apart from the beautiful though traumatised by Harold Bloom’s groping of my thigh Naomi Wolfe…” Ha, ha!
Have you seen? Naomi Wolfe has a new book out, titled “Vagina.” I read a few reviews. One reviewer claims she tries to make her vagina sound like Socrates’ cave, and another relates Wolfe’s excursions to a British yogi who, for a fee, will sit and stare at a woman’s vagina in order to bring her enlightenment. Sounds like his liberal arts degree isn’t paying off either. I kid you not.
When I was a younger, thinner and athletic man, I actually had a male college professor touch my knee and invite me up to see his etchings. I wasn’t traumatized; in fact, it is still one of my favorite stories to tell, not because he was a male, but because he used such a hackneyed come-on. Etchings? In 1983? Life is too amusing to be traumaized by such things.
Money. That’s the main thing, the engine that drives the indoctrination machine while giving Marxists a comfy tenured life they could never enjoy anywhere else, outside of the Democrat Party machine that is. Some places have set a maximum annual percentage increase meant to limit tuition inflation. Any guesses how much tuition rises every year? And why not? Government has their back.
Colleges know that at least half of the students shouldn’t be there, not by the old standards. So they have all those remedial courses and is some additional excuse for the fluff courses. Anyone familiar with “Party Ratings” and “male to female ratios?” Coed dorms, allowed cohabitation, free condoms, wild parties, etc., etc. Bread and circuses to draw in the unfit to collect those student loans.
I first went to college from private school in 1991. I remembered some of my fellow students talking about the above ratings. The serious students weren’t. Long story short, the college experience so disgusted me I left in the third semester. I worked for a number of years and got my own business running. Then I went back to college. By that time there were courses available aimed at working adults. A MUCH more enjoyable situation since everyone there was serious about their studies, except a few but they left pretty quickly. I’ve also done independent and distance learning courses from different colleges, but gave up because many of them had the PC nonsense as regular colleges.
So yes, outside of the hard sciences, and even those are becoming questionable as seen with the global warming issue, most US colleges are jokes. Combined with the sheer number of undergraduates flooding the market, it is small wonder the BA is losing its earning potential.
$1550 for teaching a class in western civ, renamed world cultures (must have the plural, there is always more), taught from a manual (not a book, really: it didn’t have many words, only photographs of ruins and artwork, and images of authors, and strange comments about artistic styles or feminism — did you know Aristotle was a feminist? — and Muslims who conquered Spain were “multicultural” and “tolerant,” direct quotes, not scare quotes). The end product was supposed to be a gluestick project. What I mean by that is the student would purchase a folded piece of cardboard from the bookstore, one that stands on its own, and glues pictures to it.
The weird and historically inaccurate but colorful manual cost nearly more than tuition for the class, which cost virtually nothing to the student but not nothing and cost the taxpayer a great deal, not because of my salary — I would have earned more working at the Walmart down the road, or at the local Head Start nursery. All of this is connected, and haunting. The class cost taxpayers a lot because the small and exceedingly utilitarian campus featured several $100K plus administrators who did literally nothing except pass along baroque directives from higher-up administrators about diversity’s central importance, or ensured the federal funding flowed down to themselves, and then in smaller streams to their students, and a dribble for the part-time instructors. So they could justify the rest of the money, there has to be some instruction, but it was an afterthought.
The one full-timer in my field sat around mounting rap videos on his campus webpage. He invented the gluestick protocol, I believe. He recoiled when I asked about reading assignments. They won’t read, he said. Ditto writing. Yet he thought he was valuing his students by admiring rap music and was suspicious of my questions. He taught from the manual and used multiple choice tests to ensure his students stared at the pictures and learned Aristotle was a feminist. He wanted to teach the other cultures: he liked teaching Asian culture, he said. The Hispanic Culture Center’s full time employee blasted salsa music making it difficult for the 24 adjuncts to hear their students or grade papers in the storage room we shared next to the cultural center. It was an excellent architectural demonstration of priorities. My classes were once also interrupted with an all day drum circle exercise in the middle of the tiny quad that drowned out all learning. It was for the music appreciation class, or maybe one of the many speech classes — there were remedial classes in speech where you talked about the rap stars you admire or about Martin Luther King. There were also remedial reading and math classes. Learning to read in college. Interrupted by a drum circle. It was hard to not burst out laughing. It was a masterwork of irony.
And yet, the people running this Potempkin Village thought that they were providing value by valuing all important things, ie. diversity. And Martin Luther King. And the Muslim invasion of Spain.
This is where it’s all coming from.
I remember getting in a debate with a Leftist in the blogging section on NRO. The topic was gays and reproduction and how “marriage equality” was a fallacy because heterosexual couples will always be able to do something that gay couples can never do and that is produce children. This Leftist was adamant that gays can have children but every time I pointed out that the only way gays can have children was to use the opposite sex as either a surrogate or donor he/she would become more agitated and that I was “lying” that gays cannot have children. Even though I never said that gays cannot have children only that they can’t produce them he would not give up his position and recognize the truth as I laid out before him. He then stated that I because I lacked his critical thinking skillset that any graduate school that accepted me would be “sorry” to have such a poor thinker. I guess he thought he was insulting me; I simply responded back that if his critical thinking skillset is what is needed to get into graduate school then I am glad to be one of the ignorant masses that has forgone getting an advanced college education.
My observation is that the left hates rationality and that once lefties gets some nonsense in their heads, that nonsense becomes a dogma that is tattooed on their brain, forever.
I regularly run into lefties who regurgitate opinions I’ve heard a thousand times, who think they are one of the blessed who understand the secret meaning of things, and troglodites like myself; uncredentialled, who have not participted in the secret rituals of acedemia, could never understand.
heads “i win” tails “you lose” and you’re racist regardless
wonderful racket these turds indulge in isnt it
I fear for transgender poetry cources when the US economy collapses an the gov’t defaults on our debts. The school of hard knocks has a tough curriculum and no grade inflation. Yet I expect there will still be an England and Shakespeare.
In the 1980′s the Kerner Commission presented its findings on then very dismal state of American Education. Its conclusion was that if a foreign power had done to us what we had done to ourselves it would be considered an Act of War. Ladies and Gentlemen, Asia does not engage in such foolishness and – as a result – will own the World in the next 20 years. All this without firing a shot.
Afraid I must agree. How many empires ever think the world will (and it will) ever belong to someone else? When our empire is pared-down like the British Empire, will we end up retreating to the original thirteen colonies? I don’t know what the future holds for us, but a nation with very little manufacturing base, which trusts a foreign nation with a hostile ideology to manufacture the majority of its goods is not long for this world.
Rik, your exchange above reminds me that when the Bolsheviks took control and defeated the “White Russian” armies, many of those people fled eastward. One result of the defeat was that many European women found themselves stranded and bereft of European husbands, without prospects other than to either prostitute themselves or accept marriage (or less formal) proposals from powerful locals.
It’s not too difficult to imagine such a trend in North America, after a few terms of self-mutilating misrule by the {}bamatics. First, collapse and depopulation resulting from all the know-nothings being utterly incapable of growing their own food or discerning the edible mushrooms from the Amanita Muscaria…
Russia and Mainland China will then divvie up the prostrate territories of the former United States, possibly with some skirmishing, but just as likely with just some flinty-eyed negotiations.
The lucky surviving inhabitants may be regarded as valuable survivor-types by some of the newly-installed colonial administrators. Others may view them with deep suspicion, and set about exterminating the potential trouble-makers. In either case, there will be interbreeding between the survivors of the previous culture and many of the conquerors. Thus will be born a new race – the mingling of native indegenes, descendants of the slaves from Africa and the Caribe islanders, Mayans, Mestizos, Chicanos, and the great crowd of European immigrant populations.
Old Europe will become part of the New Worldwide Caliphate, while the sacred sites that spawned Islam will most likely be preserved under green glass.
Do I sound gloomy and distraught? Not at all. Eventually someone is going to write a new covenant among humans, proclaiming government should serve the people, and the whole thing will start all over again.
Praise God!
The Democrats ran the election on promises to kill Ivan’s goat. What happens when all the goats are dead? Permanent revolution requires an ever expanding list of enemies to fuel the fires of nihilism. First they came for Ivan’s goat, and then they came for Ivan. To what end? Pathological personalities don’t care how much wreckage they cause as long as they survive to rule the ruins. And why not saddle the college educated with massive debts and put them to work in menial positions? Rub their nose in it good and hard and they will become a disaffected mob. Flatter them with notions of their own moral superiority and stoke their hatred against success. Class warfare is based on indignation, ordinary emotions like greed and envy. When logic becomes subverted, the passions of the moment run amok. A demagogue can sense it like a shark drawn to blood in the water. We have arrived. Only Nemesis can save us now. But I think she is ready to feed.
While I agree that college courses can be (and often are) simple or plain silly, I do not see how reading Dante is relevant to my life/career. Sure, it may be a good book, may be a classic, but being able to enumerate the 9 levels of Hell just doesn’t make any sense if I want a job.
It’s a matter of shared culture, if everyone in the company has read Dante (or whatever) then you have established that you have some basis for communications, be it effective agreement or disagreement, and your head is neither empty of anything at all, nor is it filled with something that might be hard to mesh with the existing consensus. 80% or 90% of hiring an employee tends to run along those lines, only after there is some shared basis does one want to look for diversity of the remainder. So even if all you ever wanted to do in life is make widgets, it may be that reading Dante (etc) is not a total waste of time.
Though I have not read the entire thing myself, nor would an entire course on it seem attractive to me.
Ragnar:
If not Dante, then Moby Dick (Melville), or portions of Paradise Lost by Milton. The whole idea of well-done humanities offerings is to cultivate an appreciation of the highest levels attained by one’s culture. A sampling that is read in depth and well understood by the diligent student is all that is practical for someone who is not going to be an academic. Knowing about Ahab and the Great White whale is not going to sabotage your job search.
Also, having a decent grounding in history, especially American (and NOT ever written by Howard Zinn), will make you less of a sucker in the voting booth.
“but being able to enumerate the 9 levels of Hell just doesn’t make any sense if I want a job.
It does if you want a job in this administration.
oops. sorry. Forgot to sign in for my comment above
Brilliant! I wish I had posted that.
Knowing what evil is, is very relevant to life and to work. It helps to recognize that your boss or co-worker fits into a certain circle of Hell aand why. It helps you to know how to deal with them. Identifying a problem is half the solution. Very often, the person IS the problem.
Re:
” …..to enumerate the 9 levels of Hell just doesn’t make any sense if I want a job.”
Objection!
Your materialism is almost soviet. You’re not supposed to be able to list all nine of them via some thumb-keyed gadget, you’re supposed to wonder, ponder, think, just why those people are way down there in those descending and graduated (no punning intended) severity circles of Hell.
Why are the punishments different? What have those poor effing idiots actually done to be assigned their particular Circle?
I know it may sound quaint, but what about some Quality in our lives while striving to support ourselves?
Victor: ” “We came of age at a time of white male privilege; therefore, we now resign our positions after reaping unfair advantage to ensure a level playing field for all who follow”?”
I used to marvel at the blatant hypocrisy of the Big Three Network propagandists, Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings (who spoke his native language, Canadian, much better than the other two spoke theirs, mostly because they had severe pronunciation issues). They simply got busy selling affirmative action, i.e., unconstitutional sex and race preferences, with no shame whatever that their message to others would imply early retirement for themselves, if they had any sense of decency at all.
Add to that listing one Warren Buffett, who takes to the airwaves at any possible invitation to promote the leftist cause. He made his, now he wants to use government to prevent other entrepreneurs from ever being able to make theirs
He is universally hailed n the Bloomberg Business Network as the best businessman ever…although I can’t really understand how business and finance reporters could be leftists, but they are. They fawn over Buffett. I kid you not, they have played, repeatedly, a clip of Buffett playing his ukulele and singing, “I’ve been working on the Railroad.”
Monday’s stock market watch will be no less brutal than Sunday’s football game between the Patriots and the Dolphins.
Although the invention of tenure policies was meant to protect faculty, tenure has now become a firing device. Several of my friends were denied tenure so that the university could hire others cheaper (and fire them after six years). The janitors and secretaries at my university have a nine-month probation period, after which they can only be fired for cause. They do not have to prove that there are no better janitors and secretaries available to keep their jobs.
“They do not have to prove that there are no better janitors and secretaries available to keep their jobs.”
This is only true if they are a member of a protected class. Labor law allows members of protected class to sue and win if they can show that they were fired as a result of being part of the protected class, or if the company has not hired a proportionate number of the protected class employees based on the local demographics. It is the second possibility that really causes difficulty, as it does not matter if the company has purposefully underemployed certain demographic populations. Unintentional non-compliance still results in legal liability. The consequence of that law is that unless the employer can show the employee has not or is not meeting one or more specifically listed job requirements, they risk a lawsuit if they fire or let-go a protected class employee. That is why job listings look like legal documents, because every job listing is a potential exhibit in a courtroom.
The only people who are not members of a protected class are white males under the age of 40. All persons 40 or older are protected under age discrimination statutes. I cannot prove it, but it is my belief that age discrimination laws are less powerful/enforceable than the other protected class designations.
Both you and Fortibus85 misunderstand both probationary periods and discrimination laws. Essentially, a college professor has a longer probationary period than a clerk or janitor. Either a professor, a janitor, or a clerk can be fired for any reason, no reason, but not an illegal reason during the probationary period. It is considered a non-retention rather than a dismissal for cause during the probationary period. If you state a cause, you must be able to prove it if the non-retained employee contests it. Union contracts and public employer merit system rules rarely allow a probationary employee to contest non-retention to a third party. Lawsuits are rarely successful unless the contesting employee can state a cause of action based on the employee’s membership in a statutorily protected class or, in the public sector, political affiliation for merit system jobs.
The courts have in recent years significantly clamped down on underutilization and disparate impact discrimination suits by requiring that the complainants demonstrate actual discrimination, not just a statistical underemployment of members of a protected class. Thus, if an employer demonstrates that it does not discriminate in recruitment, selection, retention, or promotion based on membership in protected classes, it can defend itself against discrimination claims.
From an employer’s perspective, the real issue with discrimination complaints is not the power of the laws involved but the power of the politics involved. Especially with a Republican government or an evil corporation, a discrimination suit will be the lead story and on the front page above the fold. All the complainant’s allegations will be repeated loudly and frequently and portrayed as gospel truth and everyone is made to know that you are an evil racist, sexist, or whateverist employer. When the suit gets dismissed and you get attorney fees from the complainant a few years later, it doesn’t even make page 86. Not that there are many papers with 86 pages anymore.
Democrat administrations will do just about anything to avoid a discrimination suit but they really do it as a matter of constituent service. They have little to fear from the media; the complaining employee is just slimed as a disgruntled former employee and the rumor mill spins out allegations of poor performance or corruption and it all goes away. It rarely gets that far because a Democrat administration will rarely discipline or fail to promote a minority employee and if they do, a call from the union, the Black preacher, or the local NOW chairperson will set things right That’s the primary reason Democrat controlled governments are such models of efficiency.
Republican governments just get trashed on the merest hint of discrimination, founded or not. Elected and appointed officials as well as the legal and HR people are VERY gunshy. I’ll admit that my first question when a supervisor queried me about a discipline or dismissal issue was whether or not the employee was a member of a protected class. I’ll also admit that most of the discipline or dismissal cases I lost at arbitration were from being unable to rebut a presumption of discrimination. That is also the case where the issue wasn’t membership in a protected class but rather just disparate treatment; some guy gets fired for doing stuff that other people merely got a slap on the wrist for and you’re not winning that case and money will change hands.
In my experience in education everything is about “fitting in.” A teacher’s certificate proves the employee fits in in the Ed School. Then the aspiring teacher goes through a long interview process as a teacher’s aide and if s/he fits in, s/he gets offered a teaching slot. After another long interview process to determine if s/he fits in, s/he is either non-retained or offered tenure. Contrary to myth, you can fire a tenured teacher for cause and I have a few times, but it really has to be something that brings the teacher to attention outside the educational system. The educational system usually has to react to law enforcement or a public complaint but without one or ther other a tenured teacher really isn’t supervised or meaningfully evaluated and can do no wrong because s/he has already demonstrated that s/he fits in.
As to the allegation that college administrators are non-retaining non-tenured professors to save money, I have trouble believing that. I’ve never seen an administrator in education that had even the slightest notion of what things cost or that they were pissing away other people’s money. My money would be on somehow the new hire wasn’t adequately demonstrating fealty to the herd and they were looking for someone who was a better fit.
Any ‘university level’ course conjured up from the depths of the precious progressive mind represents a jobs program for the same—any progressive is a truly terrible resource to waste after all.
All this proves that when politicians make mistakes—Johnson with Viet Nam and Bush ’43 with Iraq—the Left soon comes out of the woodwork to fix the world. But too often their remedies are intended to assuage their anger over the fact that the rest of us are not UN loving progressives.
Decades of hardline liberal BS has brought us to the pinnacle of leftist therapy with Barack Obama. But for every progressive distortion the correction, which inevitably comes, is at least proportionate to the damage done. Any progressive that believes an election featuring massive voter fraud, the dirtiest campaign in history, a beat the bushes get-them-to-the-polls voter drive like none other, and many millions in illegal foreign contributions represents a new progressive era should plan to take a trip to a very isolated part of the world right before the next Midterms.
A final thought: Perhaps the campus foolishness will be swept away at the same time as Obama’s blizzard of progressive regulation. What a stroke of timing that would be.
I read an article in the NYTs today in which they were knocking young adults in the Northwestern oil boom states for taking a $50,000 per year job instead of going to college. I hope these kids do not listen to the beltway dummies. A college degree is not for everyone. Real experience and a decent wage is an American dream come true. Many people with college degrees do not even have such earning potential or marketable skills. Keep the real job, screw college unless you have a very specific career goal that requires a specific degree.
$200K of debt to buy your way through a guild in which you are not even guaranteed a career at the other end (or underemployed as a waiter or bartender) or a $50K per year job in which you learn valuable skills? If one of my children were at this stage of life, I would be directing them down path number two.
And now those “oil-boomers” can expand their horizons by taking their newly-developed skills to Western Canada and make even better money. I find it the height of irony that Canada, our “social democracy” neighbor with a national health care system and “human rights councils” is a better economic bet — right dowen to the sounder banking practices — than our own country. They even do federalism better than we do!
Except an American citizen will play Hell trying to get a job in Canada, especially an oilfield job. That was one of the big points of opposition to Palin’s TransCanada gas pipeline scheme; it was Alaska gas but only the first few hundred miles were in Alaska and the jobs for Alaska labor would end at the border and the Canadians would take over for over a thousand more miles of line. Anyway, TransCanada still has a half-billion of Alaska’s money, there isn’t any sign of a gas line, and there ain’t likely to be at even several multiples of today’s gas prices.
Damn straight…
Some exposure to a real-world industry will help you decide on OTHER related career / educational steps WHILE you are earning a decent living….
How does an 18 year old really KNOW if what they want to be is a Geologist, Engineer, surveyor, heavy equipment mechanic, statistician ,or logistics expert?
After spending a few summers FRACKING, that’s how.
Exposure to the workplace provides invaluable perspective and guidance (not to mention, CASH)
Get out in the workplace. See. Do. Then decide where to take it next.
It used to be a guy who liked cars/motorcycles could get a job in “industry” and “career” his way over time into Chemistry, Engineering, R&D as his interests and aptitudes developed through his working life.
Making a lifetime financial commitment to pursue a specific “career choice” formed in the vacuum of a (leftist) classroom, is a fools game very few 17-18 year olds are likely to “win” without some real-world experience to flesh out their decision making.
You have a point. Only after a few years of Infantry did I decide that I wanted an engineering job, and after only 2 years to get a BSME I started at the ground floor with missiles. 30 years later, I have really enjoyed my career.
As soon as I got a high draft number I ditched college to go to Atlanta and work. As soon as I could see what was happening with it, I ditched Atlanta and went to Pipeline Boom Alaska in ’74 where I’ve remained since. I worked blue collar jobs, mostly union, and both made a lot of money and learned a lot about unions. Armed with the courage of my connections, I went into private business for awhile but bailed with the oil price crash and went to work for State government in ’87 where I remained until I retired in ’06. I’ve had a lot of classes and courses and training in all sorts of stuff but I still don’t have a degree and I still haven’t read all of Dante. While I can speak, read, and write decent English and go toe to toe with a lawyer from any school on labor relations policy and labor law, I’m still a blue collar worker and Southern redneck at heart – and I like it that way.
I see most of my old HS class at class reunions and some of them in my rare visits to see relatives. They did that tracking stuff back then, it’s discriminatory now, so most of my College Preparatory peers did what we were being prepared for and went to college. Those with family money to the University of Georgia’s main campus at Athens or if they were smart enough, and a couple were, they went to Georgia Tech. The rest of us went to various satellite campi of the University System or one of the private or religious colleges. Most finished, a few flunked out, you could still do that, and a few like me dropped out. A couple of them have done very well financially just off natural talent and luck but they’re the exeptions. Leaving out the two that I can think of that really made it big, unless I have some old classmates who are really good at disguising how they live, I’m certain that the only members of my class who’ve lived better than I have are those who started out with serious family money, none of them have ever made anything like the kind of money I made working on The Pipeline, and I know none of them have ever even been near the kinds of power I’ve had, though a few have held low-level elected offices, e.g., city council, county commission.
That said, a real difference today is that kid coming out of high school, dropping out of college, or who just graduated from college with some general degree and who can’t find a decent job or even any job can’t do anything that doesn’t involve a video screen and a keyboard or key pad. Few of them have any idea of workplace decorum. Few can accept any supervision or correction. Even if you try to teach them some work habits and accountability at home, the school and the popular culture denigrates both the parents and the culture of accountability. If you have modern kids, you’ll hear “It’s not fair” a bazillion times a week. If you work in a labor relations office, you’ll hear, “It’s not fair” a bazillion times a day. I used to have a sign over my desk that said “F*ck Fair,” but the new Democrat administration that came in in the mid-’90s made me take it down. I think that explains a lot.
When you correct them, or tell them to put their stupid phones away, they ARGUE with you!
The last one who had the temerity to explain that he needed his phone because “he needed to keep in touch”, received an explanation:
“I’ve been doing this since I was 9 years old. I have done every job, performed every task that can be done in this business many, many times. My entire life, I have sold the jobs, designed the jobs, purchased the materials for the jobs, acquired and set up the machinery to do the jobs, completed the jobs, painted the jobs, delivered the jobs, and received payment for the jobs.
“In all that time, I have never “needed” a phone continually at my ear. What in the world makes you think I should even take the time to listen to a boy who has so far worked three hours, mostly standing around and playing with his phone, producing not even enough to pay himself?
“Now, shut up, put down your phone, and get to work.”
My stepson, his friend, told me later that noone had ever spoken to him like that, before.
I told him that was the problem.
“But (whatever you just asked me to do) is not fun (fulfilling, intellectually interesting, whatever.)”
“Yes. That is why it’s called “WORK”.
Four years at a UC campus (midpoint between Cal State and Stanford) approaching $200k, is a lot of scratch, easily 3x the starting salary an average bachelor’s graduate is likely to make the first year – if they’re lucky enough to get a real job at all, I’m not even going to try to discount for the many who do not. The point being that when I graduated umpty years ago, my first-year salary was roughly equal to the total of my college cost. So the cost/benefit of a degree has apparently fallen by two-thirds over those years. That’s a lot.
But is it the school, or the society, or the market for graduates that is at fault? These ratios apply pretty much to STEM graduates as well as arts degrees.
Back in my school days there was still a healthy blue-collar job market in the US, today not so much. So all those would-be factory workers are going to school and many or most major in, what? Just perhaps they need some softer subjects, if they are to be awarded their (expensive) certificates. And we can add on top of that the degenerative effects of affirmative action – once you must accept less-skilled minority workers, the entire job structure tends to be simplified and now there is no need (or use) for more highly qualified workers anywhere, so the pay falls (as it has) and the universities turn out more of what fits the market.
So, much of what VDH says may well be the case, but what is cause and what is effect of these changes to the university, may both be largely exogenous to the university.
I think the universities drove the train off the tracks following the Gramsci model. The “elite” universities were firmly to the Left by the turn of the 19th – 20th Centuries with a combination of home-grown statist progressivism and emerging socialist/communist thought. By the nineteen twenties the socialist-communist left had a firm grip on elite and academic opinion. By the nineteen thirties and especially after FDR’s recognition of the USSR, some significant portion of the academy was taking direction from the Comintern and beginning to help the Soviets spy and agitate. By WWII Berkeley was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco and the locus of Soviet aerospace and atomic spying. WWII allowed the NKVD/GRU to massively recruit and infiltrate in US media and academia. There was a bit of a setback for them in the Red Scare days of the Fifties but they returned at full cry with the Civil Rights Movement and the Antiwar Movement.
With the success of the Civil Rights Movement in the ’60s an ugly and damaging symbiosis began to take form. On the one hand the Gramscian communist assault on all Western institutions and beliefs and on the other the attempts to “integrate” Blacks in the wake of the Civil Rights Bill and its progeny. The whole premise of Integration was that white racism had systematically deprived blacks of education and opportunity and all that needed to be done was to give them access to the same education and opportunities that whites had and we go boldly forward together. By the mid-seventies it became painfully obvious that just putting blacks in the same classrooms and giving them the same jobs that whites had had wasn’t having the intended results. Many black students weren’t just grade levels behind they were generations behind and while outreach and affirmative action could put blacks in jobs that were formerly almost exclusively white, it couldn’t make them able to do those jobs. Enter now the plaintiffs’ attorney, the Civil Rights Division of the USDOJ, the OEEO, and the poverty pimps and very quickly one was unable to say that the black students couldn’t do the work at anything like age/grade level or that affirmative action hires could not perform the job. Didn’t take too many high-profile, high-dollar lawsuits and grading and behavior standards began to plummet and minimum qualifications and performance standards for jobs dropped to “can fog a mirror.”
This of course suited the left because it furthered the attack on Western/American institutions and productive capacity. The universities were more than happy to accomodate students whose only skill was fogging a mirror and offered lots of classes for them that just happened to have a very leftist slant. Throw the feminist movement and the environmental movements in there to further attack Western institutions and productive capacity and by the ’80s grading was pretty much optional and a diploma was a certificate of attendance. The race hustlers attacks on hiring and promotion policies was met by over-credentialling jobs. Since you couldn’t test, you put up a degree for the MQ so you knew that at least you were hiring somebody who could stay in a seat for four or five years. If they were a minority, you were afraid to fire them for failing to perform so you just hire somebody to actually do the job for them so now the minority has a position and some white kid has a job, usually for a lot less pay but s/he can’t sue, though eventually SHE can so now she can have a position while some white guy has a job, and he can’t sue until he gets old anyway.
So, now this has all come to fruition with a communist affirmative action hire President that nobody can criticize because of his race. Since he only has a position, all sorts of people have been hired to do his job for him and we only know who some of them are but we can be pretty sure that most of them are academics with a decidedly leftist if not outright communist ideology. There see how easy it was to conquer the most powerful nation the World has ever known in less than a century.
Actually the downfall started when John Dewey’s mentors were forced to leave Germany by Bismark.
Excellent analysis of the effects of the Gramscian praxis, Art. On its own, it’s been devastating. Most people have no idea just who Antonio Gramsci was and why his ideas were transformed into one of the most destructive memes of modernity. For the sake of those who may not have twigged on to his background and his influence, here’s a bit of that history.
In 1919 an Italian Communist named Antonio Gramsci published a newspaper in Milan called, L’Ordine Nuovo, or “The New Order”. Gramsci concluded that the average person would never voluntarily reject the faith and culture of the West. He thought that the best way to implement a collectivist government was to use an intellectual elite to destroy traditional values by attacking fundamental Judeo-Christian beliefs. To achieve this end, Gramsci envisioned a three-phased assault.
First, he calculated that these elites must maneuver to achieve a “cultural hegemony” over the West. And following Gramsci with precision, his entourage did exactly that. Practitioners of the Gramscian meme used culture itself as a vehicle to destroy Western ideals. It presented the young not with heroic, Apollonian or Athenian examples, but glorified degenerate anti-heroes — ‘losers,’ not to put too fine a point on it. Marriage and family were continuously attacked, demonized and subverted. People were demoralized by the replacement and subornation of age-old doctrines and moral teachings with ‘modernized’ or diminished cultural ideas. Traditional standards of ethics and conduct were reduced to irrelevancy where they were not scorned and jeered. It replaced genuine education with radical permissiveness, with gutted curricula and radically lowered academic standards. It preached and promoted collectivism in the institutions of higher education. It gained de-facto control of the mass media. Not by Stalinist censorship, but by subtly promoting placement of like minded thinkers in media positions in order to transform it from a news reporting mechanism to a propaganda organ. The media then manipulated, harassed, and discredited traditional ideals and institutions that clung to the notion of self-control and self-determination, and promoted those seeking authoritarian control and state supremacy.
Morality, decency, and traditional virtues became the subject of ridicule and derision. Marriage was portrayed as a plot by males to perpetuate a system of domination over women and children. Radical feminism worked to psychologically, morally and finally – chemically neuter males. Any larger anthropological logic in the religious canons was abandoned as irrelevant and childish nonsense. By emphasizing the improbabilities and inconsistencies of the traditions, by blurring the historic facts with the legends, attention to their higher symbolic meaning was successfully diverted. Should anyone doubt this, all one has to do is to take look around and verify that this is exactly what has happened. Gramsci characterized this first stage as demoralization, a term that can be taken in both of its senses.
Gramsci originally envisioned that twenty or thirty years of this cultural manipulation would lead to the second phase: destabilization. This takes on the form of a power struggle emerging between the so-called ‘progressive’ collectivist forces, and those trying to uphold the traditions of Western culture. And along with the coarsening and cheapening of culture, political issues devolve into chaos. Crime explodes, disorder becomes pervasive, and financial markets grow rife with corruption ans instability. Politicians flaunt their own corruption. All the while, the public loses faith in what was once a constitutional republic. Liberal demagogues declare war on all opposition. No quarter is without subversives and agents of the ruling elite.
Destabilization finally brings a form of anarchy and internal terrorism. Markets may collapse. Cities are overrun with drug addiction and criminal gangs. Disgruntled individuals, largely unaware of the source of the problem, commit senseless, undirected violent acts against their own government. The organs manipulated by the cultural elite defame all efforts toward traditional common sense, reason, compassion and dignity, and promote salvation by federal collectivism. Citizens finally cry out for order and stability. Finally, totalitarian collectivism is orchestrated in order to solve our problems. It seizes power and sets into place a repressive system Gramsci called normalization. People actually clamor for ‘the man on the white horse,’ but in this case, what they actually get is strict centralized government intervention. For this, many willingly sacrifice their liberty in order to end the social and political chaos. Gramsci’s destructive meme has been taken up, modified and amplified even further in recent times by such as Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven duo. And all with great success.
The trouble – the real trouble is, the destructive Gramscian meme is not the only one running out there. It is aided, abetted and hideously amplified by the convergence of two other streams of thought and outlook that have come to the fore in modernity. One of these is the prevailing and now persistent notion that human beings are nothing more than things, animals or machines. This is can be characterized as the dehumanization of humanity. The This meme has been advanced in one form or another by a stunning array of 19th and 20th century thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, B. F. Skinner and Dr. Peter Singer to name just a few.
What makes all of this, as bad as it is for Western civilization, far, far worse is the convergence with those destructive currents of the rise of the will to power as the animating force of politics in modern times. Nietzsche, writing in 1886 said, “The greatest event in recent times – that ‘God is Dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable – is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe”. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who Nietzsche said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche understood that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum. Who or what would fill that vacuum?
Nietzsche thought that the most likely candidate would be what he called the ‘Will to Power,’ which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds.
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. Look around you now: that’s what you see.
I strongly believe that the destructive Gramscian meme and the dehumanization of humanity have with almost perfect precision played into the the hands of those driven by the modern incarnation of the will to power. We are talking about nothing less than those would happily rule from atop a pile of smoldering ruins ans stinking corpses as long as they were the ones doing so. This is the madness that haunts our modern world. The death of millions is not too much for these monsters to consider. Many of the so-called ‘czars’ of this regime have said as much in their own words. All of them are killers without conscience.
For the life of me, I cannot even begin to fathom how our now-crippled representative republic can possibly recover from its current state. How does one heal a culture, a civilization? Perhaps one doesn’t.
So here’s your picture: Open warfare in this country is inevitable because there is no reconciliation possible with those who claim that your life simply does not belong to you. You cannot make peace with those who demand not only your economic submission, but your intellectual and spiritual surrender as well. The price of surrender has been and always will be more than anyone of reason and good will can ever care to pay.
There will be no turning back once this starts, and the cost in lives and property will be truly staggering. Nor is there any guarantee that we will ever be able to recover from such a scenario. But then, and only then can we successfully engage in our own ‘long march’ back towards a society where human dignity and freedom aren’t mere bagatelles to bartered away for a mess of liberal socialist pottage, but are fundamental values worth living, striving, fighting – and dying for.
There are many of us, myself among them, who constitute an entirely different class of humanity than these killers without conscience and their enablers. We are neither interested in power nor its abuse. We are satisfied to live our lives in peace with ourselves and with others, and we derive great satisfaction in seeing others enjoy life as we do. We believe that our lives and our minds are sovereign, and that the fruits of our labors are not forfeit to the first thug who demands them at the point of a gun. We are never the initiators of violence. We judge others solely by their competence and by their character. We hold dear the defining values of our Western Christian culture as they were described so eloquently by historian Carroll Quigley:
These basic aspects of Christ’s teachings are for all intents and purposes totally lacking throughout the hearts, minds and outlook of the killers without conscience, their agents and their followers who seek to lay waste to our world.
The final first-principles question is this: To whom does the world belong? Does it belong to those of us who wish to live free of coercion or to the killers without conscience? Does it belong to those who uphold the core outlook of Western Christianity as the standard of their values, or to those who uphold the standard of death?
Can those of us who are passionately committed to the ideals of life, liberty, and the sovereign dignity of the individual hope to persist in the face of such an inevitable tragedy? Even if we prevail, we will not have seen the end of these monsters, these killers without conscience. The desire to control others and to harm others without consequence appears to be ‘black code’ that’s written into our all-too-human DNA. Modern ideology – that is, all of the modern totalitarian ‘isms’ – communism, socialism, and so on – provide the perfect environment for that ‘black code’ of the will to power to prosper and flourish. This is one of our great human failings, an aspect of our tragic nature that must always be recognized, resisted, fought and destroyed, even if only for a little while. But for that, we’d be out among the stars by now.
Elegantly stated!
Nietzsche did not declare that G-d was dead; rather he asked of his peers what they were going to do now that they had killed their G-d. The book, Will to Power, was not published by Nietzsche but by his sister, Elizabeth, and her husband from uncompleted and unstructured notes written by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s thoughts on Will to Power will never be known as his insanity precluded the completion of his work. Nevertheless, the indications are that Will to Power was an attempt to understand mankind’s indomitable search for self-improvement and growth.
Thank you for this excellent commentary. I was familiar with the names but unfamiliar with how their respective writings impacted on western civilization.
Incidentally, being that you are, as you stated, “neither interested in power nor its abuse”, I would ask whether you, yourself, might be somewhat responsible for the power vacuum which the godless have subsequently breached? Someone must take up power, after all. Why couldn’t it have been you or others with your general outlook? Could that be a character defect? All thought and no action? I am sincerely wondering where you may be coming from on this matter. Nothing meanspirited intended.
Robert – thanks for the well-considered reply. You’ve touched upon a couple of things that I’d like to expand upon. First of all, the ‘power vacuum’ of which you’ve spoken wasn’t so much a matter of one system of power replacing another as it was the decline of religious sanctions and cultural currents. Before Gramsci, the assault on the ‘hegemony of values’ that comprised the culture of the West had proceeded apace. Consider the pedigree of the ideas that fueled the French Revolution – Rousseau, DeSade, Condorcet and many others had a lot to say about the malleability of the human soul even as they denied its existence. What we’re really talking about here is what took the place of the cultural and societal constraints that governed the affairs of men; however imperfect, these traditions, constraints AND the notion of human transcendence were infinitely preferable to the ‘transvaluation of all values’ envisioned by Nietzsche and others.
Secondly: we all exercise power. The power to create, to make decisions, to live our lives as we see fit; decent human beings do this in modernity within the dwindling frameworks of cultural, religious and moral constraints that prevent us from committing acts of savagery and atrocity on our fellow men. Power is and can be good; combined with the hubris of the power-driven, the lust for destruction and the regard for humans as chattel, it becomes the tool of the worst mass-murderers of modern times.
That’s the power of which I speak. This is the power that animates the monsters that haunt our modern world. Let no one be mistaken – those who delight in slaughter and atrocity almost exclusively inhabit the precincts of the Left. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, writing of the influence of the Left on American foreign policy, referred to the influx of 1914 -1918 émigrés whose ranks were swollen during World War II –
Another one of the 20th century’s great writers understood the nature of that adulterine power and its ultimate aims all too well:
That’s the triumph of the Will to Power in all of its malignant narcissistic glory, as Eric Blairs, writing under the pseudonym of George Orwell, described with merciless clarity in 1984.
Yes. Beware the man on the white horse offering an easy path out of chaos. This excellent review is very relevant to the main discussion on education. True liberal arts education teaches students to ask meaningful questions, to probe and most of all, to think for themselves. A population unused to thinking for itself (or worse, programmed to accept “political correct” dogma ) is easily led. Once they figure out how they have been fooled, it is too late to go back. I do worry for our expensively educated, credulous children.
I once worked with a petroleum engineer who attended the University of Texas. One day he casually mentioned something about how evil the U.S. was by forcing Native Americans to remain on their reservations. I was stunned by his ignorance.
In Canada, even Native people who served alongside their White brethern were required to remain on reservations unless they received special permission to leave (temporarily). Eventually, of course, this policy was abrogated but you can imagine what an insult and humiliation this rule caused our WWII veterans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzC1Dgh17A
Ray sums it up, money and facilities with no expectations of results
..and that was a commentary from the 80s
Having two kids in California public universities, I can attest to the fact that even in the science classes where everything should be straight forward facts and procedures, they (the professors) find every opportunity to jam down the students throat their liberal agenda. Also, volunteering at some outside organization (free labor) is mandatory, and the acceptable organizations are all liberal social/environmental groups (church based groups don’t count).
This is what the California Constitution says about the University of California’s governing body, the Board of Regents: “the university shall be entirely independent of all political and sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its Regents and in the administration of its affairs.”
Eighteen of the 26 are direct gubernatorial appointees serving a twelve year term, presumably staggered, seven are elected or appointed state officials, and one is a student who serves a one year term. Other states have similar structures and a similar charge. Some require confirmation of appointees by the state legislature, and there may even be some elected boards; I’m too lazy to do the research.
The people of CA elect the governor they want and he appoints the people he wants to the Board of Regents. Now, since CA is the kind of state that would elect Governor Moonbeam, there really isn’t much hope for rational people being appointed to the Board so until there is a different res publica in CA, the California schools are going to be leftist cesspools.
But, we on the Republican/conservative side of the ditch have at least nominal control of 30 of the 50 states and thus at least some control over the governing bodies of those states’ universities. If our governors would actually pay attention to who they’re appointing, our universities wouldn’t be leftist cesspools producing illiterate “Studies” majors. If we paid as much attention to who gets elected to school boards, state boards of education, and where elected, boards of regents, as we do to the dog catcher race the left might not be able to use the education systems in our states as indoctrination.
To my disgust, my state has had a Republican Legislature for thirty years and a Republican Governor for the last ten years and 14 out of the last 22 years yet our university system produces illiterates and provides sinecures for Democrat politicians and operatives. The former head of the Democrat Party is the cancellor of one campus, a former Democrat Lt. Gov and Gov candidate was the head of another. The Fairbanks campus has a pretty good mining, engineering, and other hard sciences and math programs – but you have to live in Fairbanks, not exactly everyone’s favorite winter spot, but the Anchorage, Juneau, and rural campi are lefty cesspools that exist primarily to “educate” kids that shouldn’t go to college in the first place and to give teachers their continuing education classes so they can get paid more. My experience with Republicans is they call around to see who might be interested in serving on the Board of Regents and wind up with either a friend’s wife who used to be a teacher or some old rich guy who wants being a University regent to be a part of his legacy. Whichever they choose, that person is just going to get rolled by the university bureaucracy.
Even in states where there isn’t legislative confirmation, university systems can’t tax and appropriate so they’re subservient to the Legislature financially. My experience with bureaucrats is that if you have them by the budget, their hearts and minds follow. So what if partisanship or ideological litmus tests are unconstitutional or illegal. Hell, adultery is still illegal in lots of places; must be why nobody does it.
Reading this I am glad to be at my institution, which enforces core requirements and where no student can graduate without reading Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Arendt, and a few other luminaries. That said, the battle to maintain a curriculum is eternal. Part of it is the resistance of individuals in “professional” fields, who seem to encourage students to believe that there is nothing to be gained in thinking or being widely read. No surprisingly, business students are the ones most likely to cheat on exams and papers. The other problem, as several have pointed out, is the lack of preparation in high schools. From what I’ve seen, what American education does is teach people how to color in little dots on scantron sheets. Beyond that, they learn little.
My general suspicion is that the situation is far worse at large institutions than smaller ones. At a small liberal arts college faculty simply do not have the luxury of focusing on their discipline defined most narrowly. Especially at institutions with extensive core requirements, faculty have to engage a wider range of perspectives AND STUDENTS. To my mind, the latter is key. It’s only thing to explain ideas to students in one’s own chosen field; it is another thing entirely to have to engage students from a wide range of fields in meaningful discussion of topics that go beyond their comfort zone.
As far as tenure is concerned, the problem there is not just faculty senates, but also the utter spinelessness of administrators. In the end, faculty are answerable to a higher authority, but by and large administrators are too busy honing their CVs looking for the next job to enforce existing rules. And it’s not just the high profile controversies — it’s at the matter of enforcing contracts on a day to day basis. I’ve seen many faculty over the years simply fail to do what they were hired to and never even get a word of warning from a dean or provost.
Final note on the issue of adjuncts. We are in an adjunct-rich environment, in that there is no shortage of recent PhDs or advanced graduate students to recruit for courses. And faculty have complained about that for years. Our current provost figured out that we were not really making any money by having so many hours taught by part time faculty. Thus budget lines previous reserved for adjunct pay have been converted into full-time positions, some tenure track, some limited term post-docs, some non-tenure track lectureships. Oh the wails from the faculty!! Of course these full appointments only go to some departments (those with needs who are able to make a convincing case) and come with strings attached (general-education teaching responsibilities). It was easier, of course, to hire lots of adjuncts and not be answerable for their teaching competency or ability to serve broader curricular needs.
I was a humanities major–creative writing and English, actually, with a minor in philosophy. I chose to pursue writing because I’m frankly terrible at math, and mediocre in most sciences. It seemed best to focus on what I had a natural aptitude for, rather than something I hated and had extreme difficulty with.
My college was good, but I did see some of what Mr. Hanson mentions, especially in the English courses. I tried to line up my courses according to the skills I would need to cultivate: grammar, critical thinking, logic, the process of writing a novel, etcetera. It wasn’t a popular approach. I remember getting into an argument in a creative writing workshop; another student’s story made no sense at all, and I cited “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” in my criticism. The response: “What does Mark Twain know about writing?”
I shake my head in wonder at what you had to put up with. :-)
An aside, but didn’t Cornel West do some quite solid scholarship at one point, before becoming a celebrity?
No.
He’s always been an unreadable wackjob, who, if he were not the campus embodiment of the Wild Man of Borneo, and thus a valuable icon of diversity conformity, would never have graduated kindergarten, because he is a rude, stupid jerk.
Go ahead. Try to read anything he’s ever written. He makes up words and beats around so many bushes, always failing to even be comprehensible, that I’m not even sure we can refer to it as writing, just gibberish.
That’s why noone ever argues with him, because he never makes any arguments.
Oh! Except: YT BAD!!!!
Only with more words.
Three observations:
1. There are lots of extremely conservative profs, especially in state colleges and other second-level institutions whose faculties are full of disappointed men. Simple arithmetic guarantees that most profs will end up a less prestigious school than the place from which they got their degrees. Political radicalism is a way of compensating for career disappointment. Of course this mechanism might explain leftist as well as rightist radicalism; but in my experience, the commoner outcome is the permanently irritated reactionary curmudgeon, e.g., Victor Davis Hanson.
2. The largest single major in American colleges and universities is business, and overall the vocationally-oriented majors have steadily grown at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. If comparative literature departments are a terrifying menace, they are, statistically speaking, a rather small menace.
3. Even in the hardest of the hard sciences, political liberalism correlates with status and accomplishment. As you can see if you consult the appendix to Charles Murray’s Bell Curve, PhD physicists, biologists, economists, and mathematicians tend to be to the left of people with lower levels of education. Conservatives are aware of this general phenomena, of course; and tend to explain it as a consequence of brain washing by evil college professors. There’s at least one alternate explanation, however.
Jim:
Nice try with hinting that “intelligence” equates to “liberal” views. As this ex-liberal can attest, that is not the case by a very long shot. First off, today’s “liberalism” isn’t. For that matter, equating what are now considered “conservative ” views with being “reactionary” is utterly false and dishonest. For my part, I can best describe myself as a “classic liberal,” which in today’s post-modern world can be defined as a grownup version of libertarianism. That means I am an actual liberal in the truest sense, as opposed to the “progressives” who wear the “liberal” label falsely.
As to the preponderance of high-achieving “liberal” academics in the non-humanities, I have some astounding news for you: they are every bit as likely to follow the crowd they are immersed in on ideological issies as us “mere mortals.” There is nothing to commend academics as far as their ideological leanings go. The same brilliant academics who unlock the misteries of the subatomic world are often raving jackasses on political and social issues. I have observed this phenomenon first hand time and time again.
Happy New Year my friend.
It’s not that liberal people are more likely to be intelligent, but that intelligent people are more likely to be liberal. The same logic occurs in J.S. Mill’s observation that not all Conservatives are stupid, but nearly all stupid people are Conservatives.
If you don’t mind the advice, I wouldn’t put too much weight on your assertion that brilliant scientists are fools about politics. It sounds a little self-serving to assert that being a raving jackass = disagrees with Bozo the Clone. Perhaps you should follow the line of Charles Murray on this issue. People remember the Bell Curve as an argument in favor of the crucial importance of intelligence, and that is indeed one premise of Murray’s racism. But Murray is as emphatic in denouncing people with too much intelligence as those with too little. His position on intelligence reflects the fact, obvious from election results, that support for Republicans tends to come from people of middling educational attainment while Democratic voters have a bimodal distribution. Conservatives have a long history of distrust of intellect—William Buckley used to be quite upfront on this point, as I recall. Why not insist that people be just smart enough to run a pizza franchise? A sort of Goldilocks approach.
Of course, if you aren’t a conservative, you may have a slightly different take on all this. At least among a great many of the various kinds of hard right folks I encounter here, the dominate attitude towards science and learning could be summarized as reactionary modernism in the sense of Jeffery Herf. You perceive that education and science are absolute preconditions for economic performance and, crucially, effective military technology; but you distrust the sciences because they are bound up with values you dislike. Scientists are dubious about religion and patriotism. They are cosmopolitan in outlook. And it isn’t that they brainwash children that bothers you, it’s that they don’t; at least they don’t brainwash ‘em in the ways you approve. Worst of all, they tend to be liberals! There’s no real solution to your quandary: you love the bombs so much and yet you hate the boffins.
You’re just the full meal deal; a premium spread if ignorance, stereotyping, and illogic. First, there is little correlation between intelligence and credenialling and hasn’t been in thirty or more years outside the hard sciences. A diploma outside the hard sciences certifies that somebody was willing to pay for you to stay off the job market for four or five years and you were willing to show up ocassionally. Paying and showing up ocassionally gets one a C, doing something, anything gets you a B, and doing something resembling what’s on the syllabus gets you an A. Being able to spell syllabus without SpellCheck gets you on the dean’s list.
Credentialled people outside the hard sciences tend to be liberal because they are indoctrinated by liberals in their time of sitting in the chairs at the university. If they go out and get a job that requires their credential and are surrounded by other people similarly credentialled, they will stay liberal because they will all listen to NPR, watch PBS, and the MSM, go to the same liberal plays and movies, go to bars and restaurants approved by liberals and where there will be other liberals. If they find themselves in the presence of someone who isn’t a liberal, first they’ve been taught that s/he is ignorant, dangerous, racist, and violent, and, second, they don’t understand a thing s/he is talking about because they only understand liberal crap. If they work for government or in entities funded by government, they can remain mindnumbed lefties for life or at least until the retirement plan goes bankrupt. If they have to go out into the real world, they either fail miserably and become one of the bitter failure lefties or they become the dread, evil, apostate reformed lefty so they can survive.
Did you ever consider that the same people who find it financially oppressive to pay $200K for a college degree are the same people struggling to put food on their table and gas in their minivan. It may not be that they don’t “believe” in “science” like “global warming”, it’s that they care more about their children than the God damned polar bears. Or they understand that the overbearing regulation of the EPA may cause farms to go under, leading to a lower supply and higher costs of food, or the unintentional consequences of mandating increased fuel efficiency may lead to the extinction of family sized vehicles. Oh right, it jus us dumz halfbred hiks wez juz so dumz we not nose anythings. All you smarty oikophobe college professors live close enough to bike to work, so why give a damn about anyone else, right?
“G damned polar bears”? I once visited a zoo in Calgary, Alberta, with one polar bear walking to and fro in a kind of frenzy, nothing to do, all cement and metal gates. I think the polar bear was going stir crazy. Since then, I have never visited a zoo again. I gasped at the cruelty of human beings who, for no other reason than curiosity and business, had to do this to a creature over whom we (human beings) had stewardship. The Plains Indians, who frequented the areas now known as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, had a much more developed perspective on our relationship with other creatures in the animal kingdom. Their wisdom on these matters still remains in spite of the incursion of European society and powerfully debased material values.
Sorry, forgot to append my nomenclature to the above comment.
Outside of your preponderance of snark and insults, what yard stick are you measuring all that “intelligence” Jimbo?
Jim Harrison, you actually held my interest, but then you went and did it: “…that is indeed one premise of Murray’s racism.” For years, I used to keep a stack of pre-printed cards in my pocket that stated, “Congratulations! It only took you ___ minutes to mention ‘racism’.” I live in the SF Bay Area, and would fill in the blank and hand out the cards at parties and during departmental discussions. Needless to say, thanks to printing costs and geography, I quickly went broke.
And so, Congratulations, it only took you 118 words until you mentioned ‘racism’ in a 357-word post. I am shocked, shocked, that you held off for so long. Clearly, not only do “Democratic voters have a bimodal distribution,” they also suffer from monomania.
And as for J.S. Mill’s observation that nearly all stupid people were conservatives, I seem to recall a J.S. Mill essay in which he did a good deal of intellectual hand-wringing as he fretted that every possible combination of music notes, at his moment in time, had already been combined and thus the end of music was fast approaching.
He was a “raving jackass” in the truest sense of the term. If that makes me an anti-intellectual intellectual, so be it.
Then again, how sad that Mr. Mill could not be alive today to enjoy a typical college classroom lecture that analyzes the joys of Gangsta’ Rap. He really would have something about which to wring his hands, and considering that most supporters of rap are liberals, Mill might have changed his opinions.
Please Note: it only took me 233 words, almost to the very end of my post, to offer you something to confirm your subconscious belief that everybody here is a racist.
John Stuart Mill… Charles Murray… William Buckley… Bozo… Goldilocks… Liberals drop names as if they were handing down family silver. And who the hell is Jeffrey Herf anyway? As if I care. As if I care…
You guys are so funny. Of course Charles Murray is a racist. Haven’t you read his book? I guess your thought is: racism is a bad thing, ergo I and people I support can’t be racists even if we assert a biological difference in intellectual capacity between the races. Wouldn’t the more logical thing to say be that Charles Murray is indeed a racist but that’s OK because he showed that racism is scientifically correct?
For the record, I mentioned the historian Jeffrey Herf, not by way of name dropping, but because I had used his trademark notion of reactionary modernism and I didn’t want to act like I dreamed it up myself. I like to avoid plagiarism.
Jim, to paraphrase your words, you guys are so funny too. You avoided my point. I didn’t bring up racism, you did. For what, ultimately, does a post like yours that does nothing but compare ideological pee-pees to begin with, and then brings up Charles Murray and his supposed racism to make that juvenile point, and which is followed up by yet another post that employs a mini-discourse on Murray and whole-cloth assumptions about my views on the differences between races as well as my thinking processes in regard to Murray, race, and the assumptions you make about me and the other posters regarding race – have to do with a typical VDH column about rot in academia? And if Murray is a racist, why use him in any manner in which to back up your argument, as you did in initial post 34? I woudn’t have, but you did.
Again, in case you missed my point: “You guys” are obsessed with race and racism, like an accountant searching for a lost penny. You see it everywhere, and if you can’t find it, you find a conversation (or mouth) into which you can insert the topic in order to ultimately accuse others of being racist. That is the monomania I alluded to. I don’t know if “you guys” do this to irritate or if it is done in sincerity, but no matter, it is also called obsession. In the end, it makes you a colossal bore and reinforces the stereotype of the single-minded race-conscious liberal.
Moreover, if unlike liberals, conservatives have “middling educational attainment,” then at least run-of-the-mill conservatives have an excuse for their ignorance. How can we explain away what educated liberals have done with the public education system or with our system of higher education, which again was the point of the VDH essay anyway. And how can we explain away your thinking process which always drifts back to the same subject?
My response above should have been from Michael G. and not Anonymous. I apologize for any confusion.
Our first ignorant, brainwashed lefty of the day has arrived. A new column from Dr. Hanson attracts them like flies to flypaper.
jh @ 34: 1. There are lots of extremely conservative profs, especially in state colleges and other second-level institutions whose faculties are full of disappointed men. Simple arithmetic guarantees that most profs will end up a less prestigious school than the place from which they got their degrees.
Please show your work, I do not believe that follows nor is true, not that there are “lots” of “extremely” conservative profs, nor that they are much more common outside of elite universities, nor that the generation and consumption of professors numerically follows what you described.
2. The largest single major in American colleges and universities is business, and overall the vocationally-oriented majors have steadily grown at the expense of the humanities and social sciences. If comparative literature departments are a terrifying menace, they are, statistically speaking, a rather small menace.
Shrinking does not equal small, I hope you balance your checkbook with more mathematical insight than shown here.
3. Even in the hardest of the hard sciences, political liberalism correlates with status and accomplishment. As you can see if you consult the appendix to Charles Murray’s Bell Curve, PhD physicists, biologists, economists, and mathematicians tend to be to the left of people with lower levels of education.
Again your innumeracy shows, try Googling, “correlation is not causation”. Also I suspect an unfamiliarity with both PhDs and academia. Sturgeon’s Law applies, and 80% of PhDs are really just political hacks, cranking the system, so it’s not surprising if they get sucked up into the political currents. More than that, typical liberal analysis of the electorate is to spit down on the less educated and consider them more conservative by the very nature of their lesser formal education. My point being it probably isn’t even true. Certainly Obama was largely reelected by the “low information voters” who, at least, are not much less likely to occur among high school dropouts than they are in the departmental governing committees.
Three observations on three cavils:
1. The Yales and Harvards put out far more PhDs than they hire. If they don’t drop out of the education business, the new grads simply must wind up at lower-level universities. People with degrees from less prestigious places, wind up even further down the prestige ladder. This observation is not primarily a political one. I’ve heard it cited many times as an explanation for some of the gloom characteristic of academia.
2. It’s a standard operating procedure on the right to make a scarecrow out of some marginal figure on the left as if they were tremendously influential or characteristic. That’s how Saul Alinsky suddenly became a central figure in American political life. Saul who? I did know who Alinsky was before you turned him into Fu Manchu, but I haven’t given him a thought in 20 years and I actually do read leftist writings. Now it seems to me that you’re attempting to pull off the same trick by treating small academic departments as if they had great political significance.
3. God keep you safe from knowing as many academics as I do. In my professional life, I’ve met and done business with thousands of PhDs and visited something like 150 colleges and universities.
About looking down on people: it’s an equal opportunity vice. Well educated liberals do look down on right wingers, but then right wingers look down on the mass of people they despise. We all should watch it.
1. “The Yales and Harvards put out far more PhDs than they hire.”
This is true about any college that produces PhDs. Something about the laws of supply and demand.
2.”It’s a standard operating procedure on the right to make a scarecrow out of some marginal figure on the left as if they were tremendously influential or characteristic.”
This is the pot calling the kettle black. I can say that because I’m black. To prove my point the entirety of the Left has attacked the NRA for a crime that the NRA has not even committed.
3. “Well educated liberals do look down on right wingers, but then right wingers look down on the mass of people they despise.”
Says the person who just flouted to all the Neanderthal righties the numerous PhDs he has worked with in many different countries.
As for looking down on “the mass of people they despise” I only look down on overeducated Leftists. Last I checked that doesn’t exactly add up to a mass.
The above is mine. I just keep forgetting to put my name. Must be the ten thumbs I have.
I wasn’t bragging about knowing thousands of PhDs. I was simply responding to the suggestion that I had no knowledge of academia.
For the record, I don’t think you guys are stupid. I think you’re nuts.
Well, it at least appears you don’t know how to read. I said “numerous PhDs” not “thousands of PhDs”.
As for whether there is any difference between nuts and stupid I guess that can be a semantic argument though I won’t make it here. Though what I will say is that the only person who is looking stupid right about now is the person who thinks that conservatives are nuts.
“I think you’re nuts.”
And yet you keep coming back to pimp your blog. Try harder Jimbo. It will take effort and honesty though.
Normal, sane people that have jobs outside of government or government funding haven’t the slightest reason to have read or even heard of an old Trotskyite like Alinsky, at least not until the Clintons came on the scene. Since HRC wrote her thesis about Alinsky, one might take that as a reason to peer into just who we were electing. I read it when it came out because I was only beginning my recovery from going to college so I still would read leftist drivel sometimes. Never gave it another thought until I began having to deal with AFSCME. If you ever wonder what happened to all those SDSers of the ’60s and early ’70s, look no further than the offices of your nearest public employee union, especially the big wall to walls. Alinsky is their bible and even the AFL-CIO’s Meany School teaches Alinsky without calling it that. When I became the supervisor for my state’s labor relations function in ’99, among the first things I did was buy a copy of “Rules” for each member of my staff.
You can’t use Alinsky if your constituency is composed of sane adults, so nobody on the right has any use for it. However, if you’re an adult manager in a government not run by Democrats or in a business that has attracted the attention of pestilences like community organizers, Presidents that once were community organizers, unions, greenies, OWSers, and such you have to know their playbook so you can call the right defense.
Your #2 is a total nonsequitur.
Your #3 also misses the point: Well educated liberals do look down on right wingers The point being that in your story they look down and ASSUME that the lower classes are right-wing if they in any way cling to their guns and religion – yet no such class-based explanation seems accurate on our most recent election. The world is far more complicated than the modern left wing treats it, they have only dogma and fantasy and are proud of it.
Even on #1 you don’t really answer my quibble, most elite universities hire the vast majority of those they do hire from other elite universities, and many who cannot find a job at that level do simply (!) leave the field. Other levels also have this stratification. So it is not just *simple* math in any case, even if it eventually does show some downward flow, nor does that establish political leanings nor the causes thereof.
Here is another theory. A majority if people who can afford the economic sacrifice of 8 years of college to earn a PhD to become a college professor come from a financially comfortable background. Those who come from such a comfortable background have a strong sense of privilege guilt (white guilt), that tends to manifest as oikophobia and leftist beliefs. The rare cases of poor kids who make it without the help from their parents just don’t buy the bullshit about white privilege and the oppression of the patriarchy and capitalism. They don’t feel guilty for their accomplishments, they are proud of them.
*of
about poor kids who work their way through
How about an even simpler theory? Follow the money. Tuition, research grants, plum apointments, etc… rely heavily on government money and influence. Liberal means big government. Academia also means big government. Even a village-idjit Conservative like me can figure out that.
the commoner outcome
…Conservatives are aware of this general phenomena…
the dominate attitude towards science
Crappy grammar alert.
At least among a great many of the various kinds of hard right folks I encounter here, the dominate attitude …You perceive that education and science are absolute preconditions for economic performance and, crucially, effective military technology; but you distrust the sciences because they are bound up with values you dislike…there’s no real solution to your quandary: you love the bombs so much and yet you hate the boffins.
Crappy point alert. (not to mention totally wrong)
Did they teach you that in college about how those on “the right” think about science? And boffins ?
You have imbibed the KoolAid of your liberal conditioning. Your assumptions about people you call “conservatives” are enormously wrong, albeit highly predictable and smug.
You guys are so funny
Finally got down to the real point.
Jim Harrison, throw off those weights that hold your mind in bondage to that set of erroneous assumptions you call “knowledge”.
Luckily, common sense is common. It is not the product of a rarified education.
We have a severe problem in our society, but it is not limited to liberal academia. Our basic problem is integrity. When a college graduate can not read a first grade book, or write his name, the problem is not teaching skills, or IQ, or course prospectus. The problem is that his university is led by liars and thieves. They made millions from his athletic skills in football, but cheated him in the deal.
The reason for Fast & Furious, the Benghazi pre election lies about the attack, the EPA “science” on pollution abatement, the green global warming debacle, the nuclear power “Safety” issues, the New Orleans safe levees, the flooded New York subway systems due to Sandy, the grand theft in our underwater housing market, the Fukushima emergency electric systems which were placed, cheaply, in a floodable basement, the Gitmo prison closure lies, the press coverage of left or right issues, is a basic lack of integrity. After forty years in engineering, I do not agree that the problem is only in the liberal arts fields. CEOs lie, priests lie, scientists lie, bankers lie, and lawyers lie. It is pandemic in our society.
If we do not stop, the United States of America will go out of business, go over a cliff.
AMEN!
Well, 40 years of being instantly proven right or wrong will do that to you. That’s why engineers are the best.
You can’t bullshit that bridge that just fell down back into place.
Even Obama can’t. No matter what he thinks.
“After forty years in engineering, I do not agree that the problem is only in the liberal arts fields. CEOs lie, priests lie, scientists lie, bankers lie, and lawyers lie. It is pandemic in our society.”
Indeed. When you vest moral authority to the Government you shouldn’t be surprised when society follows suit.
The above quote is mine.
Right you are about integrity. And I also agree that the problem is not limited to educational institutions or Hollywood.
But what happened in so short a time of a few decades? To be sure there have always been shirkers, but why have we reached a tipping point with regards to simple integrity?
My opinion is that it is due to an unparalleled period (post WWII) of prosperity that has slowly but surely eroded our morals. Wealth, particularly unearned or wealth that came too easily, has a way of making one do away with the old restrictions, which is mostly what morals are. And what fool would hold on to morals and traditions if there are no real consequences to doing what feels good?
Very slowly this lack of consequences has weakened us. More and more people in all walks of life have moved those adjustable lines in the sand. I agree that the most vile are in Hollowood and education, but we the people – taken in the aggregate – are culpable, IMO.
The bill is coming due, as it always has and always will. I think we’ve tipped the scale to the point that a ‘correction’ will take more than an adjustment of policy, sadly.
I always hope I’m wrong.
Bravo Mr. Hanson for a terrific article! I too spent too much time at the university, though I did drop out with a PhD and turn down the postdoc and the adjoint faculty position. It was clear to me that today it’s hardly moral to be a professor, especially at one of the more prestigeous universities. The graduate students and non-tenured faculty are mercilessly exploited, and just as you say there is too often an obvious waning of whatever the tenured guy had that got him tenure as the years go by.
My thinking has been not only along lines of your testing idea— I’m talking about getting a degree just through tests, without attendance— but along lines of dropping the idea of a degree altogether. With today’s massive database management solutions, why not just provide testing for individual classes, whether or not class attendance or taking an online course is involved. Instead of a degree you could present a transcript of studies mastered to date. Young people could take courses of interest to them and to their employers, and pay as they go. Who says that their idea about what to study should be suspect? We allow them to select majors. Why not allow them to select every course?
And everyone should do the following math with me: thirty students per class, taking three classes at a time, $5,000 per year per student for it all. That’s my rough profile of a unit of college finance. Each thirty students would pay a total of $150,000 per year, for classes taught by three professors, and so for each professor the school would get $50,000 for every class taught— and each class typically meets three times per week and only 9 months of the year. How is it possible for a college education to cost more that that? If a professor only taught two classes the sum available per professor would be $100,000 for nine months. With such sums available a bunch of professors could all buy/rent houses in the same neighborhood and hold classes in them (and the space would be tax deductible), so that no… I have not neglected overhead or administrative costs. There really is no need for any such thing.
Why not have a national BA test that is privately-organized and administered? Why should the government be involved at all?
The real driver of change is going to be employer preferences. When employers start demanding objective verification of the applicants’ educations, places like Kahn Academy will be able to answer (because your deskwork performed in learning the Kahn curriculum is itself online, and available to employers).
Provide the same thing in the humanities, and graduates who really learned will sit for the tests and have the objective proof of their knowledge certified.
What are we waiting for? It’s just a test, let’s make it.
I don’t know. I sometimes think employers will do this without some external motivation, or it will be kind of too late. The hi-tech world can simply hire foreign workers, which is what I see now in my industry. The story is that employers cannot find the exact skill-sets they need from the US labor pool. I think that is lame, and frequently an excuse to hire foreign workers instead of companies building their own, no doubt at some cost. We’re still stuck with the problem of an unsustainable educational system does not produce what is supposedly needed, while the credentialed and employed don’t know our history or think critically outside their areas of expertise.
Give the kid a blue book and a pencil. Tell them: “Make up a question I should ask you about your fitness for this job. Answer it. You have one hour.” That is all it would take. BTW, the question the kid choses to answer will be at least as revealing as the answer, his/her writing style, logic, spelling, etc. Although those would also matter. Easy.
…because it would immediately be blasted as racist by the same lying bastards that made it a crime to give a poor grade for inferior work, plagiarism, or assaulting a teacher in the classroom.
With a BA in Classics, a gold medal in Latin, and an award in moral philosophy, I spent four years in the US Army, learned Chinese at the Army Language School, served in Korea, and after my discharge in 1961 did graduate work with a National Defense Education Act Foreign Language Fellowship, won both Fulbright and Ford Foundation Fellowships to study and do research in Japan, eventually got a doctorate in Chinese and Japanese, won an appointment to teach at a “prestigious” Ivy-league college, founded its Department of Asian Languages, fought for budgets sufficient to obtain brilliant Chinese and Japanese language teachers, designed highly successful programs in both languages and literatures, wrote and published several outstanding works in Asian drama and poetry, won teaching reports from my students described by reviewers as the best they’d ever seen, so much so that I was suspected of “hypnotizing” my students, believe it or not!
Denied tenure after eight years, I was pissed off, natcherly, but it was all for the best, and I’m glad as hell now.
Let me guess. Your competence intimidated someone senior in the department. OR, your published book did not toe the scholastic party line of someone powerful. OR, could it be, you are white and male?
The place was rotten to the core, that’s all.
I graduated from a Cal State University in 1984. Full political indoctrination had not taken place yet as there were still some “old school” professors who kept their personal political opinions to themselves. However, even in those days I felt like the university curriculum was a waste of time. The amount of money we had to spend on stupid “required” courses really pissed me off. I would have loved to take more challenging courses, but that “Women in Literature” course was required so I had to waste my time on it. I actually had one course called “Practical Reasoning” that was so lame I only attended for exams and got an “A.” I would have gotten the same grade if I’d taken the same course in the 6th grade. What a joke!
I grew up in the Central Valley around people who worked hard for a living. My father ran a successful trucking business and we grew up with a very firm grasp on reality. I found the college experience enlightening in that I realized that the academics people looked up to were mostly educated morons. The scary part is that they weren’t that well educated. I can’t tell you how many times I had to prove that the facts they disputed in my term papers where true. Frankly, the only reason I came out of college knowing more than when I went in is that I always scheduled a couple of hours a day that I could spend in the library. I read constantly and randomly, pulling books off the shelves I thought might be interesting and then going off on my own tangents of study.
I have always felt that if I could have taken an exam my first year of college I could have passed and gone on with my life. I would love to see some kind of system where a degree could be granted on the basis of passing an exam or even a series of exams. This would be wonderful for the many people who can’t afford to go to college and who want to improve their job prospects and career ambitions. There are many brilliant people out there, many of them well self educated, who can’t deal with the boredom of a traditional college education.
Gillyo, you wrote, “I have always felt that if I could have taken an exam my first year of college I could have passed and gone on with my life. I would love to see some kind of system where a degree could be granted on the basis of passing an exam or even a series of exams.”
I agree. I graduated from high school in 1980, kicked around and saved my money for three years, and only then entered college because the fields that interested me required a bachelors degree — in anything. I graduated from a Cal State University in 1988. I could have been out of there in a year’s time had it not been for the useless classes required of me.
Cal State taught me nothing. It was an extension of high school. I was already far better read than most of the students and not a few of the professors.
For twenty years, I worked concurrently in both the newspaper business and the for-profit trade schools VDH described. If I knew then what I know now, I would have skipped CSU in 1983 and attended a for-profit trade school; it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.
By the way, the newspaper business is full of ignorant graduates of fine universities. A former co-worker, a UC Berkeley grad who spoke five languages no less, turned to me while editing a crime report about rape and asked, “What does ‘sodomy’ mean?” I told her they do it on the quad in Berkeley and that she could get extension credit for it. True story. I have several dozen more like it.
I am just a bit insulted. I came through vocational training, IBEW; NJATC, to become a journeyman electrician, working on my masters. You know, nuts and bolts and all. But, I have read Dante, I have read Machiavelli and Tocqueville. I keep a copy of “The Prince” and “Democracy in America” on my phone with me at all times. In the same way I kept a copy of “The Republic” and “Nineteen Eighty Four” with me when I was in school. It is not that the working man is not educated, it is the lot of a man who questions to be relegated to the working class for not conforming to the liberal doctrine. This sword of indoctrination cuts both ways.
Please do not be insulted but view yourself as a futurist because your path will be the future one, ie, vocational training, for the middle class kids whose parents can not afford to send them to a 4 yr college. Hopefully they will have enough sense to read the classics as you did.
Some of the best read people I’ve ever known were construction workers working camps on The Pipeline or at remote sites in Alaska; you name it, somebody, maybe several somebodies, had read it. Many had encyclopedic knowledge of history, politics, or current events. It was often an unstructured and unchallenged knowledge however and that is the liability of the lone autodidact.
These are not poor people; a skilled tradesman can make $100K or more a year, even non-union. They think like poor people though; the more moderate have a wide populist streak and the rest range from no-tax, legal pot libertarians to out-right communists. You can get some damned interesting conversations in an ATCO bunkhouse during a long minus 40 night with a group of guys who’ve been far from home and “civilization” for weeks or months.
As I understand the idea behind TENURE, it was created back in the Dark Days of higher ed when there were more openings than there were qualified proffesors to fill them. More than guaranteeing the Prof freedom of ideas, it guaranteed the Institution a saleable commodity in the class room. In other words Princeton could be pretty sure Harvard wasn’t going to poach their Einstein. Now the institutions are functioning more as a Proffesorate Protection League. Or a Lifetime employment agency for Professional Students. There doesn’t need to be a “NEED” in any department for another ‘Tenured Prof’. As much as there are well thought of, ‘RIGHT THINKING’ ‘Progressive PHD’s’ out there who need protecting. And just what do you mean ‘STUDENTS’? Education is about Educators. Not Students.
I can add to my prior comments the “majors” that should be utterly eliminated (in no particular order): “communications”, political science, education, municipal planning, sociology, and of course ethnic/feminist studies.
They are all utterly bogus degrees. How is it that neither, say, Einstein nor any other Nobel laureate, or Harvard professor in any hard science field for that matter, ever sat one hour in a course on how to teach or be an “educator”? So why then are school districts allowed to hire math teachers who couldn’t manage to major in math? Who needs four years of instruction in how to write a news story? Why not basic English and some other language perhaps? Indeed, why does either a “journalist” or one of those clerks behind the counter at the planning office (a municipal planner) need anything more than a high-school eduction?
To me, the main purpose of school is to teach the student how to think. What is not on the test is just as important as what is on it. I’m sure we all know someone that is really great at taking tests. They may not know much of anything but the sure can ace a test! Without hands on experience as to how to find the right answer instead of just looking it up, memorizing it long enough to ace the test then going on to the next test subject without knowing how to find the right answer without having to look it up each time you need it.
Too many of today’s teachers don’t want to teach. They just want to sit back, point out what is going to be on the test, let the student learn just enough to get out of the class and make room for the next bunch. Why make them think? It just creates more problems for the teacher. They might even be expected to understand what it is they are supposed to be teaching. It’s a lot easier to just pound enough into the little numbskulls to get them to go away. Why should the teacher care how they do in the real world? It’s no skin off the teachers nose if they can’t earn a living. Just sit down, shut up and do as the teacher says. Don’t ask questions it just makes it harder on the teacher. Don’t even think about questioning what’s in the book or what the teacher tells you. Do that and it just makes the teacher mark you down as a trouble maker.
See how easy it is to get a “good” education? Who cares if you can’t read or write or add or subtract? You were a “good” student. You didn’t give the teacher any problems and you answered all the questions on the tests. You feel good about yourself. Why can’t that mean old boss see how great you are? Why does he expect you to work so hard? Doesn’t he know that makes you feel bad?
I feel that I was lucky to go to university when I was, in the late 1970s, before the factors so lucidly outlined by Professor Hanson came into play. I did Classics, was taught by scholars, not intellectuals (a brand of university creature I have come to loathe), and I had to work hard to get an A. The one part of Professor Hanson’s article that resonated with me was the riff on preferential hiring. As a lowly lecturer, I was told by my department head that there was no point in me applying for a coming position since it was slated for a woman. He said this with great satisfaction, as though to show how progressive he was, but I could not help thinking that these hypocrites were happy to revel in their virtue while passing the real sacrifice on to the generation behind them. My suggestion that he and some of his colleagues step down and use their salaries to finance two positions, one for the designated minority, the other for the most qualified candidate, elicited an annoyed response. On another front, it’s troubling to see how students coming out of high schools today seem to know very little despite impressive paper credentials and abounding self-confidence. To cite one instance, one young doctoral candidate wanted to do something on myth and memory from the First World War, but in discussing the topic with her it become clear that she had no idea who Rudyard Kipling was (or any of his contemporaries, for that matter)– and it didn’t seem to bother her at all. There is a kind of invincible ignorance among teachers and students now that bothers me — not just the not knowing, but the lack of curiosity and the unwillingness to change one’s mind or outlook. They all think what everybody else thinks and resent other points of view. Culturally, politically, socially we are paying the price for the strange turn universities (and education in general) took thirty to forty years ago; and it will be a long, hard task to undo the damage.
I also count myself lucky that I acquired my own college education at a slightly earlier date – early 1970s, and that the professors who taught me were (with one or two exceptions) intellectuals and teachers, afire with the enthusiasm to pass on knowlege. I was a major in English – which these days seems to be nearly as useless as a degree in philosophy – and yet, I was inspired and encouraged by them to go down many odd avenues in the stacks of the university library, seeking knowlege for its own sake.
I suppose that one indication of the terrible uselessness and blindess in the current academy – is that I have never felt myself at an intellectual disadvantage in any assembly since then. And I write historical fiction, and have held my own in discussions with many experts, despite being without a PhD – or as I term it, “Relatively Phidless.”
Judging from the comments I’ve read so far, it appears that Ph.D. is an abbreviation for “Piled High and Deep”.
Yes, good point about the lack of curiousity. Seeing how conservatives are so willing to listen and learn. I know it’s just coincidence that it’s so frequent that conservatives immediately pronounce any thought in conflict with their own as “stupid” – often before hearing it!
The comment I made had nothing to do with the political stance of students or teachers. That’s up to them. What I am concerned about instead is the unfairness of preferential hiring or quotas in universities; and the dilution of education at the high school and university level. Students are free to choose whatever poltical views they wish, but how many can defend them clearly and rationally, with due recognition accorded to another point of view. Very, very few, in my experience, and they take their cue from teachers and textbooks which for the most part point in one direction only. You need only pick up some standard textbooks to see this.
If you substitute ‘progressive’ for conservative, you’d be correct. Troll.
Judging from the lack of historical perspective of most of the posters on this blog site, and based on the fact that the subject matter of this blog site is decidedly the domain of liberal arts majors, I would say that very few people are getting an education of any kind any more. Dr Hanson focuses on his liberal arts degrees because, as a historian, he is familiar with that region of his campus. But I would venture that if he were as familiar with any of the other disciplines he would find himself to be just as appalled. So called “higher education” is the next economic bubble that will burst in this increasingly woebegone country. Economic solution for the USA: Find more people who want to work for a living.
Yes. This change may be coming soon. About a month or so I read a very interesting article (wish I had the reference, sorry) about online education. More and more colleges will begin using online education for basic courses. Some of this is interactive (the students post comments on the readings and on each others’ comments) and some of it is videos of lectures, plus variations. Some will have “section” discussion groups in real time, some will not. But the demand for professors will decline. Furthermore, in many versions, the professor can be anywhere and teach the class: Augusta, ME, Honolulu, HI, Beijing… Students would not have to “do college” in dedicated 4 year blocks. They could get a job and study at night.
Free online courses including lectures from acclaimed professors at universities such as MIT and Stanford are already available, and could be used as part of the course or as enrichment. Mastery of a subject matter would be recognized by passing a standard exam. And so forth. I predict that “higher” education will look very different in ten years.
Yep, I’m one of the really old folks here. 70 years old.
And, I’m afraid I’m with a lot of folks lamenting the good ‘ol days.
My first education was working summers on a real cattle ranch, from my
seventh grade until my third year in college. That was a REAL education
on how the real world worked. Please the foreman. Please the owner.
And my depression raised Dad allowed my Mom to buy me five shirts, two
pairs of Levi’s, and a pair of shoes each fall. I had to budget my summer
earnings to last until the next summer’s first paycheck for everything else.
No allowance for me. Dad was a stern taskmaster. It helped me a lot later on.
That experience sent me to college to be a mechanical engineer. When
my Dad said in my senior high school year, two weeks before graduation, “Where
are you going when school’s out?” I said I’m going to be an engineer and
work for a car company. He said, “That’s stupid, you aren’t even good at
math”. It took me six years to pay my way. But, I did it. And, I retired
from the “old” General Motors at age 54 with 31 years of service. And had
a hell of a good time in different forms of “Passenger Car Safety” stuff.
OK, enough patting myself on my back. What did I learn ?
1. The engineering education was TOUGH. But, really, all it did was drill
into my head how to use the scientific method to solve problems. And I was
able to pay my own way the whole time with jobs that used my “skills” as I
aquired them.
God, how I wish politicians could just “do the scientific method”. OK, “they”
can’t do it. But, they should demand folks on their staffs do it. It will never
happen. The “annointed ones” and their staffs are too tied up in getting re-elected.
2. All problems can be solved if you can accept “the perfect is the enemy of the possible”.
3. One of my “fun projects” was learning how to do computer programing “way back when”.
Because, in 1972 our “computer experts” were all tied up in just running the budget/payroll
stuff on IBM mainframes.
4. It is amazing what you can do if you devote eight hour days/five day weeks to
a single-minded goal. OK, it took me two years. Some of you may understand “this”:
If X Then Y, Else Z.
My results were in a twenty page SAE Paper. The code was 550 pages with 66 lines each.
HELLO: you had better have a “flow chart” giving you a road map on
“what in the world am I trying to do?”. {:^)
Twenty years after airbags were mandated in passenger cars, my controversial
results were validated.
Now, that wasn’t the high point of my career, but it sure was sweet.
Again, all this back patting is to say, Engineering or the other hard sciences
can have real paybacks. But, they NEVER come easy.
And, it is ALWAYS good to have a “flow chart” outlining stuff. Like your life.
Finally, I’ve had 15 years of retirement. I can see mountains to the north of me.
I can see mountains to the south of me. I’m single, and my Lab mix and my Aussie love me.
Can’t never ever do better than that ! {:^)
My double major in mathematics and computer science was in the College of Liberal Arts. I got a BA instead of a BS. I also spent time in nearly every college in the university, studying history, culture, religion as well as anthropology, etymology and abbynormal psychology. My physics teacher was not good at teaching triple integration (field on a wire, right hand rule), but my meteorology professor was named Jimmy Carter…
Liberal Arts is/are what you make of it…
Spot on, Dr. Hanson. Ironically the idea of “tenure” has led the way *away* from academic freedom rather than towards it. Professorial tenure (i.e., big pay & overweening prestige, for life, regardless of performance) has proved to be every bit the poison to good education that public-employee unions have proved to be to good governance. Tenure in the Academy is every bit as detrimental to higher learning as “seniority” (per se) is to the workplace. In short, tenure and seniority are two artificially imposed barriers to freedom that need to be done away with.
AS Lazarus Long (Robert Heinlein) noted “———–. It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than than of plumbers, much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.”
“every graduating college senior would take a basic 4-hour exam in math, verbal skills, and simple facts ”
No universe exists in which this is remotely possible. The same professors who lecture on “Queering the Dutch Resistance: Gays and the Opposition to Republican/Nazi Power” will write the national exam.
And why offer a high school-level exam to college grads?
Yet another brilliant and devastating analysis from VDH whose insights are just as frighteningly relevant here in the U.K. as in the U.S. One of the intriguing things for me is the thoughtful excellence of the reader commentaries after each VDH article — this being outstandingly exemplified by Ward Dorritty’s overview of the vastly insidious impact of Gramsci.
Plato’s Laws? Who ever read that? Not many. I took bunches of classes in Greek philosophy back in the 1970s, and I can’t remember any of my professors even mentioning it, much less requiring us to read it. Aristotle’s Poetics, yes. Plato’s Republic, yes. But Plato’s Laws? No way.
Karl Popper read everything we have that Plato ever wrote. His opinion is that Plato was the father of what he calls the Historicist philosophical school(collectivism for people who don’t care about the nuanced differences). Two of its well known members include Hegel and Marx. I was certainly not exposed to this aspect of Plato back in my college days. Popper is one of my favorite authors. Plato never was. I thought Plato was an elitist who would have never gone for the political solution put forth by our founders. But I never read Plato’s “Laws”, either. My curiosity piqued, I will find and read it. Hanson is a good teacher as well as a good op ed writer. He should start his own College of Liberal Arts and accept only serious students. No affirmative action, diversity, and hyphenated tribal stuff in his school. He would have more students than he could handle within a couple of years, says I. It can be done. There are enough people who are fed up with the whole education system who would love such an alternative for their kids. Just my opinion though.
I know the author of this piece is of course in some sense right, yet I can’t help thinking that too much of his article is sour grapes, and that he misreads the symbiotic relationship between the professors and students. If he indulged more in some justified anti-intellectualism, he would see it more clearly.
Re “2) the quality of today’s students is so questionable that the social sciences have stepped up to service the under-qualified, in the sense of providing courses, grades, and graduation possibilities”
Poor professors! Students aren’t good enough. Well, yes, they aren’t. But neither are the professors. And of the two, the students really are the better.
What we are witnessing at colleges is the playing out of the Liberal Ascendancy and the launchings of its bogus social sciences – sociology, psychology, economics, statistics, liberal medicine, liberal history, liberal science.
This is the real history of our campuses. The campus is Vanity Fair – not a moral place but a busy one. And yes, the people, again, aren’t good enough.
OK, there are some real dangers here – the infusion of the doctrinal Left into positions of influence. But this trend has been with us for some time. The departments and disciplines at a university mirror is name and substance the legislation of the Federal Government.
This one made me laugh out loud. WTF is “liberal science?” Would that be a field where the actual real-time observations of animal homosexual behavior is discussed like it really happened?
Liberal Science is the science of observing scattered instances of homosexuality in extremely stressed animal populations and pretending that these populations are not deeply stressed at all. Don’t troll on this site, son; you’ll get frustrated every time.
” The beginning of wisdom is fear of G-d …”
It is impossible to create a wise generation when they have not been taught to fear G-d.
I agree I trying to teach my students “how to think” not “what to think.” Also many of the problems are not with the traditional liberal art the subjects – English, History, Sociology, and Political Science – but agendas of their particular Professors and the manner in which they are taught.
I heard David Horowitz say in one of his talks that the Modern Language Association is now a 40,000 member association of Socialists; one of the most influential Marxist-propaganda organizations on the planet. Dr. Hanson’s unsparing appraisal here has convinced me that what David Horowitz says about the M.L.A. is a fact. Perhaps rectification of the mind-rape committed by these tenured rapists can be most efficiently accomplished by following the A.D. 1209 edict of Innocent III in his decision to crush the Albigensian Rebellion.
I know it’s “formulae” Charlie, but standard usage now permits cactuses, campuses, etc., rather than cacti etc. It causes many to cringe, so someone either gets offended or confused. Your description of an all-male Victorian-flavored college classroom of yore makes me happy; wish I could have attended.
Also, I wasn’t disagreeing with Stallion; I actually agree with him entirely. Good writing, after all, is the result of experience rather than a degree. Frankly, a weekend seminar focused on grammar and editing held at a local hotel conference center would probably accomplish far more than a degree program in writing, and it would cost a lot less.
Michael G,
Yours here is #57.
Thanks for the clarification.
I’ve read them all, eyes wider, and brow more furrowed at each new comment…I cannot relate to any of this….any of it at all. Simply have not had these same sad experiences. They’re so frustrating. And, illustrative of the very sad state we’ve reached with this chameleon Obama. No other word for him….chameleon.
Have decided now that I was then at that very time inside a C.P. Snow bubble…..read his “The Masters” if you’ve the time, I could actually see them huddle over their tea cups….muttering anxiously about that Election.
Forgot to mention that we wore jackets and ties [that's actual, knotted neckties] everywhere, except when actually participating in sports.
All gone with the wind.
Cf: “The Masters”, excellent C.P.Snow Novel…..very definitely ON topic here.
Pasted…from Google,
At a glance:
First Published: 1951
Type of Work: Novel
Type of Plot: Psychological realism
Setting: Cambridge, England
Characters: Eliot, Brown, Calvert, Gay, Nightingale, Winslow, Jago, Chrystal, Alice Jago
Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Social realism, Political fiction, Novel
Subjects: Teaching or teachers, Power, personal or social, Politics, Twentieth century, College life, England or English people, Death or dying, Elections, 1930′s”
This further paste should pique some interest here:
“C. P. Snow began his academic career not as a novelist but as a scientist. Unable to gain financial assistance for a university education other than on a scientific scholarship, he earned a doctorate in physics. Initially, he worked as a researcher, then as a government official overseeing the hiring of scientists for the British government.”
Read it, folks, there will be no quiz.
Charlie, I was essentially raised by my grandparents. They were born in 1894 and 1899 respectively and both died a year apart in 1989 and ’90. I was born in 1962. Imagine how I view the world!
I expected college to be what you described; what I encountered instead was high school with better cars and fewer pimples. And yet I didn’t know any better or have the money, had I known, to go to one of those small colleges that you see in movies about the 1920s. Despite all of that, my family hobby of reading put me ahead of the pack in most classrooms.
Like Stallion says above, and I agree, my BA was useless in the scheme of things, but as I also posted somewhere above, I had no choice. Every job demanded a bachelors in something-anything and I’m still not the start-your-own-business sort.
There is not space enough here to recount the stupidities, inanities, insults and foolishness I encountered in 1980s college classrooms (I know it’s worse now; cheating with cellphones etc., is rampant). Nor is there space enough to relate the downright rotten and corrupt people that confronted me in Bay Area newspapers during my two decades in that business (see my reply to #39 to get the flavor).
As for our Chameleon in Chief, I knew he was useless on Inauguration Day ’09 when that foolish reverend he approved of gave the speech that included such intellectual stool softeners as, “…When yellow is mellow, and white does right…” etc. I had already heard that stuff in class “discussions” circa 1984.
Wherever this new year takes us, I hope it is a good one for you!
…..Thank you, and you also.
CMG.
“… today’s graduating English major probably cannot name six Shakespearean plays…”
I guarantee that my daughter, who has completed only two semesters as an English major at the University of Delaware, can name more than six Shakespearean plays. However, she is atypical because she searches for the most rigorous courses available. (She needs such rigor because she plans to become a fiction book editor.)
It is possible (with care and effort) to acquire a good humanities education at some universities and colleges, but it is far easier to take the many Mickey Mouse courses and have plenty of time for party and play.
“she plans to become a fiction book editor”
That made me laugh, thanks.
Dr. Hanson, why do comments with two links get deep-sixed?
Interesting essay and even more interesting comments. I’m glad that my college experience which ended in the early 70′s was not like what VDH describes today. But I was in a professional/technical program (not engineering, I’m no good at math).
And, I’m very glad my children went through 4 years at schools that had a solid religious foundation, although it was not overbearing. I cannot remember them citing examples of overt political correctness in the classroom but I’ll have to ask them. I think much of what VDH describes takes place behind the curtain, not visible to the average undergraduate.
The 4 year degree model might have to adapt. States with two state universities might have to consolidate most of the engineering and hard sciences on one campus, and the liberal arts, languages, humanities on another. Where to put the business and marketing majors? It seems like a logical step. But this pre-supposes that 17 and 18 year olds know what they want to study.
The private schools are a little more business-like, at least in their recruiting and admissions. I was reading how they target the top kids on the standardized tests, use direct mail, and one school made hundreds of thousands of contacts, garnering 44,000 applications for 2,800 freshman slots.
Vagina!! Figures doesn’t it. Had’ve been me I’d have called it “Cnut.” But then I am a common and vulgar “MAN” a member of that horrid group of creatures known as “MEN!!!!!!” Socrates Cave huh? Jokes a plenty there waiting to happen. I remember doing a (homo) sexuality in literature course the introduction of which included this “…and in week 14 we will cover (ecstatic and slight gasp of air) penetration.” At one point in a tute he felt the need to come at me from behind and press down sensually on my broad shoulders. Got a distinction in that course. One and only. Great big fag! :)
It all sounds familiar. Colleges are filled with courses about “sexuality,” (Art and Sexuality, Silent Movies and Sexuality, the Sexuality of the Paris Communard”…), as if a breathing human being requires a professor to help him or her locate a sexual reference in anything.
These classes are just excuses to let professors engage in not-so-subtle exhibitionism during lectures, for example, “I once had a friend who…” (then you fill in the verb). It’s as if it is their chance to fix the lost chances for “gittin’ some” that they let slip by in high school and college, as in “if I knew then what I know now.” They don’t grow up.
Or, they abuse their soapbox and just talk about themselves, ie., a mix of their politics and their narcissism, because their position validates it. Speaking of that, I used to keeep a collection of newspaper clippings of things that outraged me, in hopes of using them in essays or fiction, but then I almost ended up going crazy and my filing cabinets were bulging at their riveted seams.
I recall a Bay Area obituary of a young professor who died of AIDS who was lauded for his “groundbreaking studies of transborder sexualities,” among illegal immigrants. In other words, he likely used our taxpayer grant money to pick up young men in Tijuana- and then he wrote about it, and clearly died from it.
Aren’t you glad you’re not in college anymore? Then again, maybe middle age and early reirement is the time to re-enroll in college in order to challenge every professor we encounter. I would care less abou getting a poor grade at this point; it would be swell to just watch those libtard SOB’s suffer under the scrutiny of from-the-gut conseratives. That’s what Pell Grants were really made for.
Jim Harrison @ December 28, 2012 – 11:55 am
It’s not that liberal people are more likely to be intelligent, but that intelligent people are more likely to be liberal. The same logic occurs in J.S. Mill’s observation that not all Conservatives are stupid, but nearly all stupid people are Conservatives.
This “logic” is easily refuted by pointing out that high school dropouts overwhelmingly vote for Obama. I don’t believe you need reams of studies to show that high school dropouts in the US tend to be of lower intelligence than those who complete high school or college. IOW, high school dropouts/stupid people in the US tend to vote for Obama- tend to be liberal. Mill’s logic- which you admit is also your logic- is refuted. Your claim that intelligent people are more likely to be liberal is thus also refuted.
By anecdote, the two brightest persons in my high school class ended up with very different political view. One has spent decades working for the Federal Government, which helps explain why he has never strayed from the liberal belief that more government is better- he never had any life experiences to refute that belief. The other is a libertarian. By contrast, the libertarian has spent his career working in free enterprise jobs, which similarly goes a long way toward explaining why he strayed from the liberal belief that more government is better. My working in free enterprise jobs also goes a long way toward explaining why I left the liberal fold.
The blogger known as Assistant Village Idiot has conjectured that the tendency of people to group into tribes is a more plausible explanation for the liberal/conservative divide. There are many liberals in the Arts & Humanities Tribe. I am in the Science and Technology Tribe.
VDH often mentions Fresno State in his ramblings because he used to teach there so this is from the Political Science Dept. there:
PLSI 110. Seminar in History of Political Thought to Machiavelli (3 units)
Development of political thought from Plato to Machiavelli: law, justice, the state, authority, forms of government, and church-state relations in light of the philosophy of history. FS
PLSI 111. Seminar in History of Political Thought Since Machiavelli (3)
Freedom and individual rights, democracy, majority rule, equality, law and authority, power, constitutionalism, property, social class and structure, and revolution traced through the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Burke, Bentham, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill. S
These are REQUIRED courses for the major and it’s clear that a PoliSci major will have been exposed to Machiavelli and Tocqueville and many other political thinkers.
I am a professor at an expensive liberal arts college who has worked in “higher education” for forty years. The steady decline has been horrific. Whether or not the people I have worked with read Ailinsky or Gramsci, they have certainly exemplified them to a t. My school charges a huge tuition for an “education” that is in many departments explicit and unapologetic hard left indoctrination. The damage done to many of the students is palpable. I believe that rather than soak the students and parents the huge amounts we do, we should pay indemnities to our clientele for the damage we do to them and theirs. The worst offenders are in the “humanities” and the social “sciences,” though there are pockets of honest scholars and teachers in those fields. But they do not dictate the “values” of the institution (yes, we are all expected to have the same ones, and they do not include genuinely critical thinking or mastering bodies of knowledge). I’m about to retire. Gott sei dank.
Why didn’t I say something? I did, at first, but was ignored as an eccentric or shouted down. Unlike Sisyphus, I can leave the damned rock at the bottom of the hill and walk away.
Best,
Richard
(My apologies if this has already be discussed. I don’t have time right now to read through all 200 comments)
“The Value of a BA Degree”
“…why not have a national BA test in the way we have bar exams? Simply put, every graduating college senior would take a basic 4-hour exam in math, verbal skills, and simple facts (e.g., “What is the 1st Amendment? What is a non sequitur? Who was James Madison? What is the Parthenon? etc.).
The Harvard and CSU Stanislaus graduates would alike have to pass the same rigorous test to ensure that American colleges were turning out students with a minimum level of competence — in the manner that the consumer assumes that widely different but UL approved appliances all have the same safe and standard cords and plugs.”
National BA testing is an excellent idea. The private sector UL (Underwriters Laboratories) model is the way to go – better not to to involve the State in this. Get to work, Prof. Hanson. There are millions to be made by providing this service to society.
FWIW, my employer publishes a study of liberal arts core curricula at, well, pretty much every college and university in the United States (we do not include technical schools). We help students and parents find schools that require all students – whether they’re majoring in philosophy or pre-med – to study at least some of the basic liberal arts – literature, U.S. history, mathematics, etc. Those of you who are concerned about the declining quality of liberal-arts education should check it out: http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/
An excellent article, but I am quite perplexed about the ending: “But almost always, on closer examination, this is because of our superior medical schools, business schools, engineering schools, and science and math departments. The liberal arts have piggybacked on the reputation of American professionalism and science”
According to http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011/subject-rankings , the US top universities are the leaders at humanities, even more than in science and technology. After all, they set the tone, and the leftist indoctrination is no longer unique to the American universities.