Hi Mom, I'm home from Amherst! Can you do some laundry for me?
Posted on 02/06/2007 7:52:15 AM PST by Aquinasfan
Student Life 101
Being a student today is about much more than academics
Leslie Wolfe ’80G
...IN THE NOT-TOO-DISTANT PAST, when a college education was a rarity, student life was nearly monastic. The mostly male student body adhered to a daily routine of chapel, classes, and perhaps military training. Meals were perfunctory, required exercise took place on the sole campus playing field or the single stuffy gymnasium, and then it was off to sleep in a Spartan dormitory room. Colleges operated in loco parentis; expectations for conduct were high, regulations were strict, and discipline was firm.
Those quaint times are far removed from today’s reality...
To help meet these expectations, offices of student affairs or student life now occupy spaces in administration buildings that are as extensive—and important—as those of academic affairs. Student affairs executives routinely preside over hundreds of staff members and budgets of tens of millions of dollars.
A Culture of Choice
On its surface, student life is about all the extracurricular things... On a deeper level, it is about choice—about the many opportunities and options laid out before students, and the choices they make...
...Beyond that, though, are more recent challenges—counseling on how to bond and have fun without running the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, for example [or spending eternity in hell, for example. Fornication is "having fun" in UMassWorld]...
"We've seen the increasing involvement of parents in the lives of college students. We have to help them strike a healthy balance and make sure that they are not too intrusive."The Parent Trap— Michael Jackson ’76G Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment Services University of Southern California, Los Angeles
For all student-life officials, dealing with parents is a top priority. “We’ve seen the increasing involvement of parents in the lives of college students,” says Jackson. “We have to help them strike a healthy balance and make sure that they are not too intrusive, so that the students can develop and mature and take responsibility for their own affairs.”...
UMass Amherst sends e-mails an average of four to five times a month, not only to keep parents informed of campus events but also to offer helpful advice. For instance, they help prepare parents for students’ return home on breaks when they may show up on the doorstep transformed—with new opinions on politics or religion or new forms of self-expression, such as a tattoo or a piercing. Students have gotten used to not having a curfew, so what should parents say when they go out at midnight?
...Of course, Jablonski and her colleagues also meet students in trouble, those who are facing the discipline system for academic or social problems. “Some students have a higher level of need,” she says. “You set expectations, give guidance, have them make choices and try things and sometimes fail, and then help them put it together again and go on to the next thing.” [So the school is still acting in loco parentis, just not with quaint, old-fashioned discipline, when "expectations for conduct were high, regulations were strict, and discipline was firm...].
"We view parents as partners in their sons' and daughters' education." —Michael Gargano, Vice chancellor of Student Affairs and Campus Life, UMass Amherst
[We'll help the kids make important life decisions. Parental "partners" can pay the bill]
“We are not working with a clean slate,” Moneta says. “Half our job is deconstructing certain attitudes.” He has observed a greater degree of moral relativism among incoming students. “This is a generation for whom 55 miles an hour means 65 miles an hour. Rules are starting points for negotiations. I don’t think we have any illusions that overnight we will transform our students into dramatically different folks, but we try to have them reflect on the decisions they make, good and bad, and learn from them. Then the next opportunity they have to make a decision, make a responsible one.” [What is "good" and "bad" in UMass world? Is pre-marital sex good or bad, or simply a decision to try out and learn from?]...
All the student affairs alumni agree that a university’s discipline system should be designed to aid in students’ moral and character development. Benedict says,
“The judicial process should help a student understand what went wrong so that it doesn’t happen again. If it’s designed simply to punish, with no time for a student to reflect on what went wrong and learn, then that system is not very useful.”...
While enjoying autonomy as a student, he also experienced some turbulent times as an administrator in the 1970s, when, among other events, students occupied the career center in protest over on-campus military recruiting. “I realized that there had to be some balance between laissez-faire and strict administrative guidance,” says Benedict. “Trying to find that balance has always been the challenge in my career. All of us in this profession feel the tension between empowering the students and providing sufficient guidance and advice so that you don’t end up with chaos.”
So I guess that refers to the kids coming home as conservative Christians.
Hey parents, the joke's on you.
Brainwashing. Antonio Gramsci and John Dewey style.
Bedlam, or Stalinism? Benedict's a genius in realizing that there might be alternatives.
Why no one's thought of it before is simply amazing.
Hi Mom, I'm home from Amherst! Can you do some laundry for me?
Amherst aka Cambridge with trees.
Meet the liberated college woman. You may pity her.
"Unprotected" is a hard slap at the sexual free-for-all that prevails on American campuses and throughout American life. The author, revealed since publication as Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at the student health service at UCLA, was hesitant to put her name on this book. The orthodoxy within the academic world is a strict one, and those who transgress often pay with their jobs. Let's hope for her sake, but particularly for her patients' well being, that she is not punished for her heterodox views.
When they move too far to the left, you cut their college fund and make them get their own jobs. If they want to play, make them pay for school themselves. Why waste the money?
Never reward an undesirable behavior.
If they behave themselves and remember what you taught them, by all means be supportive.
Yes, they warned us about this when my daughter was preparing to go to college 4 years ago. Fortunately, she's a commuter. Just had breakfast with my husband who is a college professor. He told me that the new required freshman course about getting adjusted and critical thinking (can't remember the name of it) has been changed. Now, to even be allowed to teach it, professors have to take a test of some sort to see if they have the "right attitude" to teach it. This is mandated, apparently, by the textbook company which also provides the test. I met the teacher who taught this course several years ago. As a parent, if I had met him and realized he was going to teach my child such a course, I would reconsider the decision to go there. And this is normally an excellent school. Somehow, I doubt that if conservatives took this attitude test that they would be teaching this course. The battles parents have been having with secondary education has moved to colleges where children are of age and no longer, for the most part, live at home. Beware.
i.e., moral relativism. True "critical thinking," or logic, as it's been known since Aristotle's day, went out the window in the early '60s.
Perhaps I'm being overly paranoid, but two ideas just clicked together for me:
1) I've seen a lot of articles about "helicopter parents" who hover over their children -- even going on job interviews with them! I have found this sad. Parents do their children no favors when they are so "involved".
2) This article, to some extent, says that colleges expect to brainwash children, and urges parents to back off and let the Socialism Machine shape their young minds without interference.
I think I see an effort to separate children from parents. To help the kids be independent? Or to make them part of the machine?
I missed that one. The poor shlub writing the article doesn't know the job that's been done to her head.
Actually, that happens with surprising frequency - though this probably isn't what UMass had in mind.
I see these as two separate phenomena. At least part of the reason for the first is that parents have only one or two children and lots of time and disposable income.
2) This article, to some extent, says that colleges expect to brainwash children, and urges parents to back off and let the Socialism Machine shape their young minds without interference.
It's been this way from the beginning.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deedThen later, the Marxists sought to breakdown the current social order by destroying public morals. A population enslaved to vice is easy to conquer and govern.
Fortunately, she's planning to live at home and commute to Valpo.
And if anyone's going to do any "deconstructing" with regards to my daughter and her welfare, it'll be me.
LESLIE WOLF
CUBETTE REPORTER FOR COLLEGE RAG
Here's another one...yet another reason to bypass colleges.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1777966/posts
These girls are the "empowered" generation. They should stay home and learn some real skills, IMHO.
The thinking is that is that logic or rationality is an aftermath of the Enlightenment or modernism. Oh the horrors! And since there is no such thing as truth, you have to forget facts and concentrate on process and where you as the student fit into it. I was really upset while talking to my husband. He said he's glad it will soon be time to retire. Also, the Middle States certification institution is making them hire a person whose sole responsibility is assessment--making certain that teachers are "assessing" students in such a way that comparisons can be made to all other college students. In a word, standardized tests.
Which is it?
To be stupid is human. To be really stupid requires college.
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