Posted on 11/17/2015 5:26:08 AM PST by Kaslin
Riots in black neighborhoods. Rebellions on campus. The news these past few months and particularly in the past week has been full of stories that remind us, as William Faulkner wrote a little more than half a century after the Civil War, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." We're seeing something that looks eerily like the recurrence of events that led, half a century ago, to the destruction of much of our cities and much of our campuses.
Half a century before the recent uproar at Yale and the University of Missouri, America saw protracted rioting at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the fall of 1964. Half a century before the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, America saw in Los Angeles' Watts the first of the 1960s horrifying urban riots.
The Berkeley students' cause was "free speech," protesting the ban on tables in campus with electioneering material for candidates such as Lyndon Johnson. Students held up signs proclaiming "Do not fold, bend, mutilate, or spindle" -- a disclaimer on the IBM punch cards then used to input data onto huge multi-frame computers. In retrospect, this was a sign of the baby-boom generation's rejection of the cultural uniformity of the post-World War II years.
But the rebellions that followed on multiple campuses for many years were transmogrified into many other things -- banning military presence on campus, authorizing separate black organizations, firing administrators and establishing racial quotas and preferences in admissions.
In the process campuses were transformed into leftist enclaves in the larger society, with "tenured radicals" reshaping faculty in their own image, black and Hispanic groups self-isolating into mono-racial cliques and speech codes enacted to punish anyone who dissented from campus orthodoxy. Scholarship in many areas has been profoundly weakened and trivialized -- a huge loss to society.
That's the atmosphere highlighted in the violent and frenzied protests lately at the University of Missouri, Yale and Claremont McKenna College. Protesters are demanding high-visibility denunciations of real or imagined racial slights and the creation of "safe spaces" for students desperate not to hear opinions other than their own. If this is as representative of generational attitudes as the baby boomers' punch-card signs, we're in for an even more polarized, less tolerant and seriously infantilized future.
Eleven months after the first Berkeley protests, a riot broke out in Watts, a black neighborhood in Los Angeles, after an argument following the arrest of a black motorist who had been drinking and driving. It lasted for six days and was followed by dozens more over the next three years, with especially high death tolls in Newark, Detroit and Washington.
After 1968, riots ceased but violent crime exploded in black communities, destroying what had been stable neighborhoods, retail areas and factories. Crime was vastly reduced in the 1990s, but you can still see the damage in such places as Detroit and Newark today.
Elite de-legitimatization of law enforcement followed the 1960s riots and something similar may be happening again. After the August 2014 shooting of a violent suspect in Ferguson, Missouri, protests and violence erupted across the nation, and police in many cities ceased proactive patrolling -- and murder rates exploded in Baltimore, St. Louis, Milwaukee and many other cities.
The Berkeley protests came just after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and on the brink of passage of Johnson's Great Society legislation. The Watts riot came just after passage of the hugely effective Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today's campus and city rioting comes just as the most liberal administration since has at least partially succeeded in "the fundamental transformation" of the nation. Liberal government seems not to squelch protest but to embolden it.
One is reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that the French Revolution arose not out of desperation but at a time of rising expectations. The defenestration of liberal university administrators is reminiscent of the Jacobins guillotining the Girondists and then being guillotined themselves. The revolution eats its own -- and destroys its own redoubts.
Berkeley and Watts were followed in California by the election of Gov. Ronald Reagan, riding a wave of support from a GI generation that financed its great universities and supported civil rights legislation. Nationally, Republican presidents won five of the next six elections. Will today's sequels produce a similar response?
I’m waiting for the Great Uniter to actually do something.
Maybe this will accelerate the transition of collegate academic instruction to be way more economically efficient web delivery.
Western Governors University uses competencies rather than seat time as the measure of its outcomes.
Read more: http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/WGU_story#ixzz3rkweTxk5
Excellent point. It all depends on the quality of courses available and the motivation of students to learn. I have taught online for years and would say I have about a 40% fail/drop rate because students expect online courses to be easier. Some courses should never be taught online, but other subjects are almost made for online delivery. And online courses would offer the prospect for defusing the collective nonsense that has become a hallmark of today’s higher education.
In a generation, colleges and universities will no longer be brick and mortar, live away from home institutions.
Local commuter colleges and tech schools may still exist, but the ivy covered halls of present day academia will be scaled down immensely if not phased out altogether.
No one can afford it anymore and with today’s technology, the present day paradigm is obsolete.
Richard Feynman still serves up the “old” Physics quite well.
Both the ‘60’s Days of Rage and the current crop of Angry Students have been nurtured by Democrat Presidents (Johnson & Obama) and Administrations promising (and delivering) lots of freebies, no individual responsibility or accountability and the assurances that their Benign, Benevolent Almighty Washington will provide all that they desire.
College administrations abandoned their responsibility to act “in loco parentis” and instead sought to be liked and to demonstrate that they, too, were young, hip and “concerned”. With that they also ceased to deliver the educations necessary to bring children to adulthood, let alone sustain a country guided by the People. These angry, uneducated college children are actually allowed to VOTE!
Which is a shame. A big part of college education is moving out of your parents’ house and living on your own, living by your own budget, scheduling your own time, etc.
My decades-long insistence that “college” courses should be freely available over the web is proving itself to be the best preferable option as time goes by.
Put the courses online for people to take at their own times and at their own rates. Then perhaps arrange for a local testing centre to administer the tests for the course(s) -if necessary- and most of the liberal pap these red-socialist commie-loving pinko ‘professors’ are “teaching” will be a thing of the past and they will be out of a job. Finally.
Of course, much of this is already done on Youtube for various things such as home repair, gardening, and automotive work, so I see no reason why so many of the truly necessary courses are not already offered online.
Not uneducated... MALEDUCATED.
And hopefully primary and secondary schools will be that model too
I looked at the infrastructure of a local university, as part of its master planning effort. They brought in a nationally known firm that seemed to know their stuff, and liked to dig deep into numbers and stats.
Their assessment - online classes has a ceiling. Most professors of course like the classroom..but that could change over time. But it turns out that most students prefer the classroom too. The bulk of students taking online classes are non-traditional and have busy schedules with full time jobs and kids...but most traditional students prefer the classroom.
An important element of this (that is somewhat disturbing to me) is the collaborative way kids are being taught. If you’ve walked into an elementary school classroom in the last 20 years, you may have noticed that the desks are pushed together into pods of 4. This is common...and kids are encouraged to work on problems and come up with answers as a group. Well, these kids are in college now, and they still gravitate towards this way of learning. So the idea of sitting at home alone and learning by themselves is very foreign to them. A ‘brick and mortar’ example of this has to do with lecture halls. Teachers and students do not like them, and they are under-utilized. So, most new classrooms have flat floors, and desks/tables on wheels, so they can be pushed together into pods...just like they did in first grade. Even the notion of sitting alone in a lecture hall desk is too nerve racking.
So, I think the universities will be around for a while (they aren’t stupid, and realize this attitude keeps kids on campus - so they encourage group learning).
Read more: http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/WGU_story#ixzz3rkweTxk5
I'd hire WGU graduates ahead of any brick & mortar university, including Ivy League, private, and flagship state universities. They have the best model for education for now and into the future, IMNSHO.
I’m considering the affordability factor, mainly. Without significant financial assistance, the cost of a four year degree is well beyond what a middle class (even upper middle class) family can afford without loans. Multiply that by two or three children.
If the students are saddled with the loans, they graduate facing 10’s, even 100’s of thousands in loans plus accruing interest. Many will default. Many will pay interest but never principal and take the tax hit in 20 years.
Optimum learning environment aside, that’s not a sustainable financial model.
First of all, I do not agree with the realities I am about to list, but here they are:
- Barry has already set a time cap (I think 20 years) and percent of income cap on student loan repayment for students entering college today. The taxpayers get stuck with the rest.
- Hillary and other democrats have been pushing the idea of free college for a while. It will eventually happen in some fashion...again the taxpayers get stuck with the bill.
One of the central tenets of Marxism is to mold young people’s skulls full of mush (TM Rush). The left will not let that go easily. Universities also offer a place for the Melissa Click’s of the world to exist. And they offer a money laundering opportunity for the Rat party.
Even though most of these universities have endowments, and receive taxpayer money annually, what are the stories you see in the paper? Around twice a year we get the story about how their infrastructure is crumbling, and we have to pay for it. Same for the ‘tuition is going up, lets raise taxes to stop it’ story. I’d say that preservation of the university system is second only to abortion on the rat priority list.
Sure are. And they cancel out YOUR vote!
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