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.
Once academia lost the agreed-upon, universally held notion of what classical learning was and why it was important, a steady unraveling process removed not just the mission but the mystery—and indeed, the beauty—from the American university. How ironic that the struggling university, in its efforts to meet changing political, technological, and cultural tastes and fads, willingly forfeited the only commodity that made it irreplaceable and that it alone could do well. And how sad, since once the university broke apart the liberal arts, all the religious schools, self-help courses, and CDs couldn’t quite put them together again.
Outside the venerable halls of Columbia, the University of Chicago, and a couple of others, Hanson's ideal version of higher ed for the free citizen is not so easy to find. In fact, it never was easy to find, but was reserved for the elites or for the self-educated. Self-education is difficult, though. It's always best to have a guide who has the big picture in mind. That's why we all love CDs from The Teaching Company, now Great Courses.
To be human, interacting with other humans, is to enter a world in which as Object being perceived, we emit an infinite series of unconscious cues (how we walk, how we talk, how we look, our tone of voice, our gaze, our height, our weight, what we say, what we do, how we say & do these things, etc.). These cues are then received by the Other who, in turn, as Subject, subconsciously filters & interprets them according to an infinite set of paradigmatic beliefs, stereotypes, experiences, and insights.
They say we form first impressions within approximately seven seconds.
It is filled with excruciating solecisms (“Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves”); garbled regurgitations of High Theory (“The notion of discourse, when it comes to discussions about experiences and identities, deters the ‘Columbusing’ of established realities and truths [coded as ‘intellectual inquiry’] that the institution promotes”); and sheer head-scratchers of incomprehensibility (“To conclude our statement, we invite you to respond to this email by Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 4:07 PM [since we have more energy to expend on the frivolity of this institution and not Black lives].)” (Gnawing question: Why not a 4:08 PM deadline?)
Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas they don’t like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.
It's unclear what in particular they wish to resist about Washington, but it is quite clear that they wish to support gay Palestinians. Pathetic. And to build bridges between gay American blacks and gay Palestinians to change America. Good luck with that. As if there were any gay Palestinians left anyway.
I am afraid that they have no idea what this sort of thing sounds like to ordinary Americans. It sounds psychotic, out of reality, worse than Portlandia.
His op-ed is partly right, partly wrong. His naivety about human nature, especially late-adolescent/young adult nature, is where he gets things wrong. Opinion writers tend to be naive about the college youth, and take them far too seriously. Perhaps they identify with them. College administrators are even worse castrati.
For a subgroup of kids that age who are in fancy schools and usually lack jobs, creating mayhem, especially when cloaked in some imitation of higher virtue (but is also fun when it is not cloaked in anything as in mayhem in Fort Lauderdale or Nassau), it's an attempt to unleash their warrior, reckless natures without fear of being shot by an enemy. It is a sort of play warfare, really. Paintball.
In almost all of human history, it would have been real clubs or arrows or spears or bullets at their age. No safe spaces for anybody.
Can I earn distinction among my peers by shutting down Charles Murray? Seems rather pathetic to me but these are bubble-wrapped kids with the Teenage Diseases. Some of their profs, for sure, never recovered from their own by avoiding the Big World Outside the bubble.
In elite schools, this play war is mostly for kids who didn't make the sports teams. In non-elite schools there is little of this foolishness because there is a diploma to be earned and they have side jobs or their parents are stretched to pay for them to have a positive experience to graduate with a supply of useful skills and enough socio-cultural tools to maybe handle a managerial role and a mortgage at some point.
Were I a college president (which I would not mind being), I would have any disruptors expelled and/or arrested (which is just one of many reasons I am not a college president).
Who was it who said recently that what America needs is a Good War? With a co-ed, or, should I say, pangender draft. There must be people worth suppressing more than a refined, gentle, scholarly grandpa like Murray. Where is the heroism in war against Grandpa?
All examinations discriminate among people. That's their purpose. The purpose of bar exams is to discriminate on knowledge and skills. Medical licensure examinations discriminate on knowledge and skills. And let's discuss commercial pilot's licenses.
When you look for something that tests discriminate on, you can find it. IQ, study habits, educational background, character traits, family background, race, age, height, etc. You can find whatever stats you look for, but all the tests are looking for is to see who can do the thing, and who can not do it. That is discrimination of the able from the unable. It's the individual that matters.
For Christ's sake, if you can't understand simple written English, how can you be paid teach it? You might almost imagine that teaching was just a government job.
During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that’s an allusion to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.
An ex- Middlebury prof wrote last week about the stunning lack of intellectual curiosity among the pampered and privileged Middlebury students. That might very well be nothing new, and we all know that all education, in the end, is self-education.
On a related topic, Prof. Deneen is struck by the lack of knowledge about the fundamentals of history and culture among his students at elite institutions, HOW A GENERATION LOST ITS COMMON CULTURE. I suspect he is talking about the common elite culture, because I don't think the average guy or gal on the street in 1950 could tell you much about Magna Carta, Saul of Tarsus, or John Milton. I might be wrong about that.
In any event, the democratization of culture and of higher ed has resulted in the loss of basic cultural knowledge among the educated such that the numbers of those able to transfer the knowledge, as citizens and parents, shrinks. Or does it? Maybe it was always like that. I remember being confused once in high school social studies when the teacher joked that nobody cared about Plato's Republic and nobody read it. Confused because my Dad often referred to it. A quote from Deneen:
It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.
But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
I had the advantage of attending a college where the cultural foundations were required, and came first. The result was that every grad knew the Inferno - and the Bible too. There are a lot of basics that the highly-educated youth that I interview know nothing about.
Your current group of students have dishonored your elite, bucolic school. If police are not called in, and kids are not expelled, the school's reputation and image will suffer for years no matter how excellent the faculty. Forget the college rules of conduct because many laws were broken.
If this is a typical administration, nothing will happen unless the Board and the alums put pressure on a seemingly spineless, castrated administration. Typical administrators.
It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do. Like everything else in America, no doubt much has changed at the now-trendy college, nestled in Vermont’s maple-clad mountains, in four decades. Back in the 1970s, the Arab-launched oil crisis forced school officials to choose between shutting off the electricity to the library or to the school’s private ski lift. After a student referendum, the library went dark.
... I remember two salient traits of the majority of students in those days. One was their extraordinary intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity, especially infuriating because so many were such intelligent kids. The other was their immense privilege. Shiny new BMWs filled the student parking lot, each fitted with racks holding the most technologically advanced skis for whizzing down the slopes. There were battered Volvos, too. They belonged to us teachers.
Part 1 by Dr. Norman Doidge is thorough and smart but a bit dull. His error, I think, is in missing a crucial component of the Speech and Thought Police which is their destructive rage and desire for control. In a sense, he gives them too much credit for genuineness. Believe me, they are not hurt when they claim victimhood. They are victimizing.
If you only have a little time, skip Doidge. Prof. Peterson is a fascinating speaker and is able to identify human evil. He has been victimized and he is pissed and passionate. This is dynamite and I urge all of our readers to listen:
1. The U.S. leads the world in health care spending per person, but not in health care outcomes. Many people look at that and say that health care costs too much in the U.S., and we should be able to get the same or better outcomes by spending less. Maybe that is correct, maybe not. That is not the point here. But–
2. the U.S. leads the world in K-12 education spending per student, but not in student outcomes. Yet nobody says that education costs too much and that we should spend less. Except –
3. me. I believe that we spend way too much on K-12 education...
Often one needs or desires knowledge and skills which do not lead to a degree but which extend your abilities and skills and, thus, your value and employability. The best source I am aware of is the NYU School of Professional Studies.Many of their courses are online.
It's practical education. I am all for it. Many things can be learned on the job, but it never hurts to know the stuff in advance and, after all, you have to be able to say something worthwhile in a job interview. Many or most of their courses are available online and are not expensive.
Signaling, for better or worse, is an important part of what humans do in societies. Signaling can convey what one wants to be, or what one is. Educational signaling is an interesting case.
I have always said that, as a rule of thumb, your education can get you your first job, but that, after that, you are mostly standing on that first job.
Adjunct faculty are the serfs of the higher ed industry. Generally speaking, and excluding the "studies" hires, these are very bright people who have either lacked the genius, or the political savvy, to achieve the cushy life of academic tenure. They also tend to be people for whom, ironically, life outside the non-profit bubble seems frighteningly competitive with frighteningly-measurable results.
I once imagined the idea of an academic life, but quickly learned that I was not a genius even though I have some flair for teaching and perhaps a bit of a calling for it. I might have been a beloved and valued private secondary school teacher, but that turned out not to be my fated path. It could be a good retirement path for me, however. I could teach Civics, history, Art History, Law, Latin, and Government, and I can coach Baseball and Soccer. That won't happen, though, because life is too short for everything and retirement from my post is not on my agenda. I like being the boss of me and I do not like answering to anybody.
There is a lot of college marketing going on. At some point, colleges realized that they were an industry with a large social and entertainment component.
