Posted on 04/17/2022 1:32:44 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds?
In one way, this interest makes sense. An enormous amount of high-profile media coverage has been dedicated to what is said, or not said, on certain campuses: students upset by Antigone at Oberlin (a subject that garnered a 5,000-word feature in the New Yorker); a lecturer getting fired at Yale over the wording of an email about Halloween costumes (a New York Times feature, and many more); the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s, signed by professors at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Northwestern (among others). The latest entry in the genre is a March piece in the New York Times by a senior at the University of Virginia, who reported that student dogma made her self-censor. Like so many of its ilk, the piece spawned outrage in her defense from some and scorn from others—another chance to relitigate what is accepted as the issue in higher education in America.
Each time this happens, I wait for someone to ask me about it. And I always tell my interlocutors the same thing: I don’t recognize my school at all in the conversations about what conversation is apparently like at universities in America. I never have.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Our kids are being brainwashed in colleges to believe conservatism is hatred. This woman on this website is attacked regularly for speaking out.
The author excludes another group taking part in censoring centrist and conservative voices on campus by focusing entirely on students, and that’s staff.
Professors have been known to shout down their students, and administrators are the ones who make all of the rules on campus. Students who wind up in front of deans who are also part of the DIE board get screwed if they say something considered disagreeable.
It’s not just students. It’s professors, administrators, and guest speakers.
This is how the unions pushed communism in the U.S. The NEA and the Dept of Ed indoctrinated the children and the children grew up and became adult commies.
Those who became professors taught what they were indoctrinated to believe.
Those who entered careers where merit was the key to success came to understand viscerally if not consciously that only merit matters and equality is a losing ideology (i.e., they were de-programmed).
I actually think its probably true that outside of the elite universities.....filled mostly with kids of upper middle class or even wealthier parents....you probably don’t see many cases in which hard left students stifle all discussion/debate.
The prof here talks about how the faculty is not diverse because they’re overwhelmingly White. I would suggest, that is not the real lack of diversity however. College professors are overwhelmingly Leftist. Their political contributions are over 90% to Democrats. The case is much the same with campus administrators - of whom there are ever more. The biggest and most important lack of diversity is lack of diversity of thought.
These Leftist professors skew the conversations and the lessons in a Leftist direction because, of course they do. How could they not? I’m sure some of it is not even conscious. They simply cannot conceive of a different worldview. As Bill Buckley once said “Liberals always say they are open to different views, and are then shocked and offended to learn that there are different views.....”
Oberlin College lost the appeal.
Opinion: Colleges should pay heed to Oberlin College's costly libel case
The woman is the great Kaitlin Bennett. She is the original "Kent State Gun Girl." I have been following her for several years, but have seen no new posts or videos for about 6 months. I hope she is OK. I know she is/was pregnant, so maybe she is taking some time off to care for new baby.
Do they teach the fact that your tax dollars go to the Public Employee Unions to be laundered back to the Demoncrats and the Demoncrat Party? If not, they are being disingenuous…
They should it’s true
Wow, a lot of words and a meandering prose to make a relatively simple point. But the fact is that campus woke nonsense isn’t relegated to elite schools. There was a well-publicized tranny temper tantrum at University of North Texas, a school that would never be considered elite, economically or academically.
An answer to the professor writing here -
The school he teaches at, and most of those 5000 others he mentions, dont matter. A troubling idea, but its the truth.
Its those elite institutions with those “wildly ambitious” students that produce the modern American elite. It used to be that this elite used to come from much broader origins, all those self-made men that rose through the ranks, those regional businesses, the press, that generally didnt go to college at all, that haberdasher from Kansas City.
These days their modern equivalents HAVE to go through the bottleneck of a very few elite institutions. No-one from UMass Dartmouth need apply, nor anyone from Chico State. It doesnt matter very much at all whether anyone goes through UMass or Chico State (other than for a few career-related training programs). He also should lose that argument with his students, incidentally.
Thats why arguments over free speech matter, and matter the most at the very too. It determines the culture and ethics of your true leadership class.
What's that you say? The communists are disingenuous?
Wherever would you get such an idea?
No, Lucas, being white is not a threat.
That kind of talk is in itself racist.
You had no choice over the matter. No one does. You were born that way. Our skin color is simply a mark of our own human genetics.
The sooner we ALL come ot understand this the better.
It don't matter if you're black or white.
--Michael Jackson
1) It's sort of a commuter school. Students are more interested in getting jobs after college than in making trouble.
2) If you are on the faculty there, you have probably gone through a long process of political correctifying that means that you aren't likely to say things that will get you into trouble now. You have probably had many administrators and seminars and guidelines now and in the past to keep you in line. If you've already been conditioned to say things like this -- "Throw on top of that the overwhelming whiteness of my department faculty, myself included—that is a threat to open, rigorous academic discourse" -- you are less likely to get in trouble than people who haven't been indoctrinated in your rituals.
3) UMD did have that student who wanted to blow people up and the students who tried to hide him rather than stop him, so maybe things aren't as they seem there.
4) I will give the guy credit for seeing that political correctness isn't the only and may not be the biggest problem in colleges, but the crisis of just what college means and is for and should be is bigger and deeper than he lets on. It's not going to be resolved by paying teachers more or giving more of the tenure or hiring non-White teachers. I don't think the writer gives a satisfactory answer to his student's question of just what college is for and why it is necessary. Wrestling with those questions would mean being more introspective and self-critical than the writer might like to be.
I tried to discern Mann’s point. Maybe he was whistling Dixie?
It starts with these, and trickles down to the students. Then, a sufficient number of these students never really leave academia. Instead of having to pound out a living in the real world, they become lifetime college students with the goal of becoming a member of the "anointed ones" listed above. They continue the legacy of brainwashing students, and the cycle doesn't stop until the college goes out into the real world and starts recruiting real working people in a given field of endeavor to become instructors.
This is how I spent eight years as a college instructor. I never had any thought of teaching until a local community college recruited me off of the job in the computer/IT industry. After just two years, I rose to the title of "teacher of the year" for three years running. On some occasions, I never used the current textbook, and told the students we wouldn't because it was outdated and didn't reflect current practices. I spent a great deal of time overhauling textbook requirements and curriculum. I always had full classes, even though I failed students left and right for under-performing. When questioned about this by the deans, my favorite line was: "Today - right now - I work in this industry. If this person brought me work like this, I would fire them on the spot." I knew I was doing it right when former students would seek me out and update me on their advancing career paths.
After eight years, I latched on to an industry contract that would not allow me the time to teach, so I stopped. But, the entire time I spent teaching, I would not allow liberal drivel anywhere in my presence, and rebutted it every chance I got.
Yeah, and don't forget mostly female.
In business schools, particularly the area of finance, the newer faculty tend to be heavily Chinese.
STFU!!! D^ckhead!!!
I had trouble finding the point also. He teaches creative writing. Figures.
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