Posted on 07/24/2022 4:25:08 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Academia in this country has entered a dark age, neglecting ts true function: A place for the sifting and winnowing of ideas.
If you have been paying any attention at all to academia in this country, you know it has entered a dark age, neglecting what my alma mater once described as its function: A place for the sifting and winnowing of ideas. Today’s academic “marketplace” increasingly sells only one product, drives others from the agora with a variety of bullying actions, and threatens both the sellers and purchasers into silence about alternate products.
Here’s an eye-opener to illustrate the extent of the assault on free speech and free thought.
We are entering a future where blacklisting, censorship, and the abuse of power will become the norm, because apparently the new generation thinks such things are always justified, if they have been offended in any way. From a recent poll of 2,000 students at 130 colleges: In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says “something that students find offensive” should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers’ mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority, 56 percent, are of the same mindset.
The consequences of this are far reaching. After detailing a number of outrageous campus actions, Heather Mac Donald contends the deleterious effect on society.
Every year, thousands of college students graduate and carry into society the same megalomaniacal confidence in their own righteousness that has turned campuses into zones of conformity.
How have universities become so blind to their own leftist totalitarianism?
Clarice ping
THey worship diversity but despise diversity of opinion.
Academic exists today to indoctrinate. Much like the communist reeducation camps.
They claim they’re there for the students success yet their actions prove otherwise while they sit in their ivory towers drawing six figure salaries and dictating policy that’s doomed to fail.
They have forgotten the face of the Father.
They seem to think that, if they can claim to be offended, then it is an “instant win”. If they can call you a racist, then you just lost. It’s simple.
From my perspective, I can play that game, and I can say that the statement “Black Lives Matter” is inherently racist and that the statement “All Lives Matter” is far superior. I am offended by BLM.
But, somehow, I don’t instantly win under these circumstances. It hardly seems fair.
What a racket. Government loan sharks force students to take money at low interest rates to be indoctrinated into leftist programs and then they must pay for half their lives while learning nothing useful.
My son as a future attorney chose to work for the state for 10 years so they pay off his student loans. My daughter paid for her own degree in cash and my company paid for my degrees.
I
Turns out none of them had to rely on indoctrination policies to get by.
“How have universities become so blind to their own leftist totalitarianism?”
That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.
History always repeats itself......
This is a long video, but very thorough & compelling in its explanation. He mostly pins the blame on Education colleges and the Administrators they churn out. Not sure I entirely agree (as I had always blamed the faculty), but it was a viewpoint I had not considered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hybqg81n-M
It’s not academia anymore it’s the god-less communist party
Excellent link - I’ve not watched all of it yet but certainly plan to finish it. I like that the speaker clearly owns his leftist bias yet can give such a critical analysis of how woke thinking has skewed the university experience away from the idea exchange basics.
Yeah, I don’t often agree with American Thinker, but on this one, they’re not far off the mark. The problem I see isn’t the absence of a free market of ideas - that was always a starry-eyed fantasy - but the penetration of “woke” into serious, government- and corporate-funded research. If you go to Google Scholar and search Articles (it’s one of the selection buttons, down below the search input screen) and search race racism you will come up with a seemingly endless list of articles.
These articles are all or mostly produced by university professors, and nearly half of these professors (well, more than any other specialty) are in medical schools. Smaller numbers are in Sociology, Psychology and Education departments, and there are a LOT from other departments as well.
I think if you examine the abstracts of these articles you will find that common sense is not a salient feature. And that’s just wrong. Common sense should be the PRIMARY feature of university research. We shouldn’t be spending money on things we already know aren’t going to help. But we are. A lot of money. Discovering correlations between so called racist ideas and unevenly distributed medical outcomes. Doing meta-analyses of vast quantities of data, looking for needles in haystacks (and always, oddly, finding them).
I know Biden’s administration took a lot of heat for their so called Ministry of Truth. But epistemology is a serious issue. It ain’t for kids. And the epistemology of research design has swallowed woke hook line and sinker, and is causing our government and our corporations to waste tons of money on research that cannot help anyone.
All right, done ranting... sorry...
Yep. To them "diversity" means different skin colors, not differing opinions.
In the 50s academia in western nations still believed that their role was to permit a free market place of ideas.
Using that idea that decided that the Marxists and what they said and believed (and later what they did as “protestors”) should not be kept out of academia.
In time the Marxists gain control in academia in the westen world and as that control became secure then they started ending the idea of academia as a free marketplace of ideas.
The Marxists methods were standard Marx. Use western institutions, ideas and methods only for the purpose of gaining control of western institutions and once some level of control is reached, abandon western shiboleths about the purpose of their institutions and subvert/convert them to instruments of furthering Leftist agendas.
Depends, apparently, on what it means to “function.”
Academia has succumbed to the Decadence of Western Civilization.
The evil most fundamental to the Decadence is contempt for truth--truth for its own sake. Rejection of the free marketplace of ideas is part of the contempt for truth.
See: Herbert Marcuse and “repressive tolerance”.
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