Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Friday, June 23. 2017

Why are American universities such hotbeds of oppression?


That's a paraphrase of a stock Insty comment. 'Meritocracy' is a microaggression, university guidebook claims:



 Under the heading “Myth of Meritocracy,” for instance, the document asserts that saying “Everyone can succeed in this country, if they work hard enough” constitutes a microaggression, advising students and faculty members to respond to such statements by challenging the speaker to provide examples.


They are welcome to use me as an example. Meanwhile, I wonder how all of this nonsense does college kids any good. I had some blue-collar white privilege, but I did learn stats, calc, and physics. It was not easy but I earned my stripes. If you go to college today, you had best take on the hard stuff or nobody cares.
Posted by The News Junkie at 12:36 | Comments (9) | Trackback (1)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

PingBack
Weblog: www.thepiratescove.us
Tracked: Jun 24, 13:00

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Count me in as a microaggressor..............
#1 Ghost Rider on 2017-06-23 13:40 (Reply)
Was it Abbie Hoffman who once quipped the American Universities used to be hotbeds of unrest, had become unmade beds of hot rest?
#2 The Distributist (Link) on 2017-06-23 13:51 (Reply)
Would they prefer that I said not everyone can succeed because some of them don't have enough character/intelligence/determination?

I know the answer, of course. The correct formulation is to attribute success to luck, connections, or privilege. Which are all nice things, of course, and good to have. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient for success.
#3 AssistantVillage Idiot (Link) on 2017-06-23 14:04 (Reply)
Why are y'all basically arguing with the left and its false premises?
#4 Ten on 2017-06-23 14:36 (Reply)
"The correct formulation is to attribute success to luck, connections, or privilege. Which are all nice things, of course, and good to have. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient for success."

With all due respect AVI, when the connections and privilege are good enough (like, say, almost everyone in your family for the last 200 years attended Harvard) it is enough. The same amount of effort and initiative that would get a normal person a job at McDonald's will get the well-connected person a master's degree and job with excellent benefits -- provided they have the right connections.

Source: I am the child of immigrants with an Ivy League PhD. Saw it with my own eyes many times.
#5 JM01 on 2017-06-23 15:09 (Reply)
“Everyone can succeed in this country, if they work hard enough”

Well, that statement does require qualifiers. If your measure of success is a decent living and financial rewards, then working hard at the liberal arts is not going to matter, except for the very few who gain university sinecures.

This does not mean that those having pursued the liberal arts rather than the lucrative fields can't achieve financial success, it's just that after they've had their fun in college, they'll have to double down on the hard work on something economically exchangeable, especially when compared to those icky "vocational" majors like engineering where the student improves their employability and general ability to do something others find useful.

Perhaps the discipline of their intellect, regulation of their heart and establishment of principles will ease the liberal arts major's move toward employability. No, educated in its traditional definition like liberal is a rare adjective applied to the modern liberal arts student.
#6 JK Brown on 2017-06-23 15:56 (Reply)
The fact is, we as alumni have to starve the beast. Stop making or redirect your alumni donations.

For a couple of years I stopped giving entirely to my college. Then I realized I could make a restricted gift to a meritocratic segment of the college and they would still have to credit my gift and couldn't complain about it. So in recent years I have been giving restricted donations to the Crew program. Id you're a rower you can't fake it or whine that it's too tough. I realized rowing was probably the best part of my time in college, and may have taught me the most in college I needed to succeed in life. Such as discipline, giving it your all and never giving up even if you're in major pain and ready to collapse.
#7 Jim on 2017-06-23 16:07 (Reply)
Minor men's sports like wrestling and crew have been devastated by Title IX. They survive on alumni donations.
#7.1 Mike-K (Link) on 2017-06-24 07:48 (Reply)
Current college curiculum for all courses comes down to teaching the adult babies that The Government Will Provide and that anyone who thinks they're responsible for their own success (or even has success in the first place) is a racist, sexist, mysoginist, nazi.

And they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for that indoctrination, which fits in perfectly with the idea that The Government Will Provide because nobody else is going to give them a job.
#8 JTW on 2017-06-24 01:45 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.