5 ms·

Are there actually any numbers for this supposed infantilization? It seems to me that the number of people complaining about unis being not PC enough is relativ

Are there actually any numbers for this supposed infantilization? It seems to me that the number of people complaining about unis being not PC enough is relatively equal to the number of people complaining about the first group. (edit: had a logical mistake here) Sometimes very small, very loud groups can be perceived by outsiders to be more influential than they actually are. There some to be some more mix-ups in this rant: >According to some universities, these counsellors provide “customer support”. This is more an indictment of the sad state of student/university relationship - you pay so much, you're a customer, not a student. >Final exam time at many large universities is when this infantilization really comes out. Students will literally walk around in public wearing their sleeping clothes and sweats. They nap in the library or in the hallway of academic buildings during normal work hours That's not infantilization, that's just laziness and a short way to the dorm. Sleeping in a university during "normal work hours" (gasp!) has been normal for decades. >Education is not trauma Maybe it didn't use to be a trauma - but in the time of more and more focus on grades and GPAs, forced student competition, "career days", CV polishing courses, mandatory unpaid internships, i.e., ageneral shift from the university as a place that creates politically mature citizens to a place that churns out better trained cogs for companies, education may have become trauma.

fredfoobar42 11y ago
>Sleeping in a university during "normal work hours" (gasp!) has been normal for decades. Seriously. There's a reason campuses have lounges and quiet areas, and it's not just so you can sit and do homework during your downtime.
mcphage 11y ago
> Are there actually any numbers for this supposed infantilization? It seems to me that the number of people complaining about unis being not PC enough is relatively equal to the number of people complaining about the first group. Isn't this the same response we hear every time someone else speaks out about this? "This is just the work of a few bad eggs. If this was a widespread problem, why aren't we hearing about more of it?" Which, yeah, the first few times people have made this complaint, I agreed with. But it has started to ring hollow. > Sometimes very small, very loud groups can be perceived by outsiders I don't think the author here is an outsider—they're a professor at a university where this is happening.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  There is a pair of selfish memes here. "PC" is a meme and so is the attack on PC. For a bunch of reasons it is not feasible for people to talk about or expect any actions about the real problems they face (for instance, the cost of college, all of the ways the 'meritocracy' falls short that aren't connected with race and gender). (Oddly, for all the talk about race-class-gender, you never hear about class because a lot of history got forgotten in the 1960s. For instance, you hear about anti-semitism, but you don't hear that the Klu Klux Klan was an equal opportunity hate group at the peak of it's influence which hated irish people and italians, as well as blacks and jewish people.)
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    Certainly in my AP US History class (ca. 2003), we had the joys of reading primary source literature from the era in question (twenties) with such slogans as "Kick the Koons, Kikes, and Katholics", so no I wouldn't say it was forgotten
- a_bonobo 11y ago
  I can see your first point, but I still have to see yet any quantification (a shift in questionnaire answers towards more "PC" over the decades, for example), until then I remain unconvinced. Most cases in the author's article have to do with other universities - about the author's university, he complains about "counselors" (again, I think that's a financial incentive for the university - "customer support", happy customers study longer therefore pay more, special customers for groups who normally don't study -> more students from that group -> more money), and people in pajamas, which isn't really a problem that I can understand. Now that I've re-read it, it's a bit weird that a psychologist writes a sentence like this: > It seems that Harvard students, for whom the average grade is A- need more help. If you're expected to have an average of A- by your peers, teachers and professors of other universities then I'd expect the pressure to be enormous, of course you'll see more problems with mental health! >I must ensure that every every disability is accommodated. The poor man!
  - matt-attack 11y ago
powertower 11y ago
You might find these amusing - http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/26/prof-corrects-minority-students-capitalization-is-accused-of-racism/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/26/prof-corrects-minority-stu... http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/17/stevenson-college-apologizes-for-serving-mexican-f/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/17/stevenson-co...
Balgair 11y ago
"Most disabilities that I am asked to accommodate seem to be unspecified and are remedied by providing the students with a separate, quiet location and an extra 30 minutes to take an exam." This is where the prof can actually start to pull some numbers out to back up his observations. Measuring the number of disabilities that are assuaged by having an unfair advantage over the class curve and comparing that to GPA may actually change things. Until then, expect the prof to continue to bitch.
mbrutsch 11y ago
>Sometimes very small, very loud groups can be perceived by outsiders to be more influential than they actually are. In my very personal experience, their volume gives them enough influence to cause trouble, regardless of their size. "Reactionary politics" are a way of life now, thanks to instant global communication.
Coding_Cat 11y ago
>They nap in the library or in the hallway of academic buildings during normal work hours As a student: "They (working people) nap in their beds or on the couch during crunch-time and study-hours!" And while I don't do it myself ot that degree, I also wouldn't call lax-personal care during finals laziness. It's just a different social convention which doesn't hurt anyone.
jleyank 11y ago
a_bonobo wrote "Maybe it didn't use to be a trauma - but in the time of more and more focus on grades and GPAs, forced student competition, "career days", CV polishing courses, mandatory unpaid internships, i.e., ageneral shift from the university as a place that creates politically mature citizens to a place that churns out better trained cogs for companies, education may have become trauma." While mandatory unpaid internships seems to be a new development, pretty much everything else existed in the 70's and 80's when I did my 8-year gig. All of the Pre-XXX students were totally grade oriented, with some engaging in lab sabotage to drag down the competition. Parents during HS recruiting were told the majors with the highest GPA for the Pre-Laws. The only advantage of all those bloody Pre-XXX students were that the courses not on their tracks were quite small and TA'ing paid the bills for grad school. Boomer parents are (properly?) criticized for cocooning their kids. Maybe this makes them less able to handle the "toss into the deep end" that college can represent. I figured it out, with the more-senior undergrads being fonts of wisdom (in non-major classes, dorm RA's and just those on the halls). I wasn't that amazing or rare. I did well in some courses, got slaughtered in others. Science majors were <3.0 departmental averages so my 2.87 didn't look so bad, what with all those advanced/small courses. I also learned by my 4th year that if I studied Su-Th I could goof off F-Sa with a clear conscience. And man, was I pissed at the non-science folks who had half the hours/week in classes...
- dcole2929 11y ago
  It's not the same at all. This stuff has always been around but the difference is it used to only apply to a small subset. If you want to go pre law or med yeah get ready for hell. If you want to work at a newspaper or in marketing it was a much easier time. Nowadays unless you're in tech good luck finding a job remotely related to your major if you don't have a resume packed full of extracurriculars and experience. There is also way more competition. The college population is triple the size it was in the 80's. Meanwhile the job market continues to shrink in many ways. Maybe kids should be getting different degrees but at 17 it's not surprising they don't know journalism isn't a great degree to have.
  - vtlynch 11y ago
icegreentea 11y ago
The prof might be groping around a real core issue, but he really picked some unfortunately example. I'm just going to pile on his exam time example really hard. Ok, you tell a bunch of young adults that what they do over the next 2-4 weeks is super important. They will put effort into something, and the end result is a number, and the higher the number, the better chances they have at getting what they want in life (later). And no one will ever give a shit about what happens over those next few weeks except the number. Well, then you'd actually be a total dummy not to ruthlessly optimize for that number. Dress like shit? Why not. Take adderall? Why not. Sleep whenever you get a chance? Why not. Maybe university students are a bit too sensitive about things (I actually agree with that statement). But many (most?) university courses are designed such that a student can typically get what they need (a big number at the end of it) by applying the bare minimal amount of effort outside of certain crunch times, and then dropping all other aspects of life during crunch times. If I can get good marks by sacrificing ~4 weeks of my life (and frankly looking like complete shit) per term, while letting me still go out and hang out and have fun and get drunk and laid and high for the rest of the term - hell, why not. It's not like your missing out - everyone else makes the same calculations. You're not going to be able to hang out with your friends during exams anyways.
maxxxxx 11y ago
> Maybe it didn't use to be a trauma - but in the time of more and more focus on grades and GPAs, forced student competition, "career days", CV polishing courses, mandatory unpaid internships, i.e., ageneral shift from the university as a place that creates politically mature citizens to a place that churns out better trained cogs for companies, education may have become trauma. This together with high tuition fees makes school a high pressure place. When I went to school in the 80s there wasn't this constant pressure students have now.
shenanigoat 11y ago
Perhaps your definition of trauma is vastly different than the more commonly accepted definition. IMO, the points you made illustrate that modern education is challenging, definitely not trauma.
mc32 11y ago
Talk to kids in China, India, Japan, Korea, etc. about focus on grades and the tremendous pressure of getting into prestigious schools. They have pressure. Students in North America have it easy compared to them. Are students in East and south Asia just harder than their north American counterparts?

fredfoobar42 11y ago

>Sleeping in a university during "normal work hours" (gasp!) has been normal for decades. Seriously. There's a reason campuses have lounges and quiet areas, and it's not just so you can sit and do homework during your downtime.

mcphage 11y ago

> Are there actually any numbers for this supposed infantilization? It seems to me that the number of people complaining about unis being not PC enough is relatively equal to the number of people complaining about the first group. Isn't this the same response we hear every time someone else speaks out about this? "This is just the work of a few bad eggs. If this was a widespread problem, why aren't we hearing about more of it?" Which, yeah, the first few times people have made this complaint, I agreed with. But it has started to ring hollow. > Sometimes very small, very loud groups can be perceived by outsiders I don't think the author here is an outsider—they're a professor at a university where this is happening.

PaulHoule 11y ago
There is a pair of selfish memes here. "PC" is a meme and so is the attack on PC. For a bunch of reasons it is not feasible for people to talk about or expect any actions about the real problems they face (for instance, the cost of college, all of the ways the 'meritocracy' falls short that aren't connected with race and gender). (Oddly, for all the talk about race-class-gender, you never hear about class because a lot of history got forgotten in the 1960s. For instance, you hear about anti-semitism, but you don't hear that the Klu Klux Klan was an equal opportunity hate group at the peak of it's influence which hated irish people and italians, as well as blacks and jewish people.)
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  Certainly in my AP US History class (ca. 2003), we had the joys of reading primary source literature from the era in question (twenties) with such slogans as "Kick the Koons, Kikes, and Katholics", so no I wouldn't say it was forgotten
a_bonobo 11y ago
I can see your first point, but I still have to see yet any quantification (a shift in questionnaire answers towards more "PC" over the decades, for example), until then I remain unconvinced. Most cases in the author's article have to do with other universities - about the author's university, he complains about "counselors" (again, I think that's a financial incentive for the university - "customer support", happy customers study longer therefore pay more, special customers for groups who normally don't study -> more students from that group -> more money), and people in pajamas, which isn't really a problem that I can understand. Now that I've re-read it, it's a bit weird that a psychologist writes a sentence like this: > It seems that Harvard students, for whom the average grade is A- need more help. If you're expected to have an average of A- by your peers, teachers and professors of other universities then I'd expect the pressure to be enormous, of course you'll see more problems with mental health! >I must ensure that every every disability is accommodated. The poor man!
- matt-attack 11y ago

powertower 11y ago

You might find these amusing - http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/26/prof-corrects-minority-students-capitalization-is-accused-of-racism/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/26/prof-corrects-minority-stu... http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/17/stevenson-college-apologizes-for-serving-mexican-f/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/17/stevenson-co...

Balgair 11y ago

"Most disabilities that I am asked to accommodate seem to be unspecified and are remedied by providing the students with a separate, quiet location and an extra 30 minutes to take an exam." This is where the prof can actually start to pull some numbers out to back up his observations. Measuring the number of disabilities that are assuaged by having an unfair advantage over the class curve and comparing that to GPA may actually change things. Until then, expect the prof to continue to bitch.

mbrutsch 11y ago

>Sometimes very small, very loud groups can be perceived by outsiders to be more influential than they actually are. In my very personal experience, their volume gives them enough influence to cause trouble, regardless of their size. "Reactionary politics" are a way of life now, thanks to instant global communication.

Coding_Cat 11y ago

>They nap in the library or in the hallway of academic buildings during normal work hours As a student: "They (working people) nap in their beds or on the couch during crunch-time and study-hours!" And while I don't do it myself ot that degree, I also wouldn't call lax-personal care during finals laziness. It's just a different social convention which doesn't hurt anyone.

jleyank 11y ago

a_bonobo wrote "Maybe it didn't use to be a trauma - but in the time of more and more focus on grades and GPAs, forced student competition, "career days", CV polishing courses, mandatory unpaid internships, i.e., ageneral shift from the university as a place that creates politically mature citizens to a place that churns out better trained cogs for companies, education may have become trauma." While mandatory unpaid internships seems to be a new development, pretty much everything else existed in the 70's and 80's when I did my 8-year gig. All of the Pre-XXX students were totally grade oriented, with some engaging in lab sabotage to drag down the competition. Parents during HS recruiting were told the majors with the highest GPA for the Pre-Laws. The only advantage of all those bloody Pre-XXX students were that the courses not on their tracks were quite small and TA'ing paid the bills for grad school. Boomer parents are (properly?) criticized for cocooning their kids. Maybe this makes them less able to handle the "toss into the deep end" that college can represent. I figured it out, with the more-senior undergrads being fonts of wisdom (in non-major classes, dorm RA's and just those on the halls). I wasn't that amazing or rare. I did well in some courses, got slaughtered in others. Science majors were <3.0 departmental averages so my 2.87 didn't look so bad, what with all those advanced/small courses. I also learned by my 4th year that if I studied Su-Th I could goof off F-Sa with a clear conscience. And man, was I pissed at the non-science folks who had half the hours/week in classes...

dcole2929 11y ago
It's not the same at all. This stuff has always been around but the difference is it used to only apply to a small subset. If you want to go pre law or med yeah get ready for hell. If you want to work at a newspaper or in marketing it was a much easier time. Nowadays unless you're in tech good luck finding a job remotely related to your major if you don't have a resume packed full of extracurriculars and experience. There is also way more competition. The college population is triple the size it was in the 80's. Meanwhile the job market continues to shrink in many ways. Maybe kids should be getting different degrees but at 17 it's not surprising they don't know journalism isn't a great degree to have.
- vtlynch 11y ago

icegreentea 11y ago

The prof might be groping around a real core issue, but he really picked some unfortunately example. I'm just going to pile on his exam time example really hard. Ok, you tell a bunch of young adults that what they do over the next 2-4 weeks is super important. They will put effort into something, and the end result is a number, and the higher the number, the better chances they have at getting what they want in life (later). And no one will ever give a shit about what happens over those next few weeks except the number. Well, then you'd actually be a total dummy not to ruthlessly optimize for that number. Dress like shit? Why not. Take adderall? Why not. Sleep whenever you get a chance? Why not. Maybe university students are a bit too sensitive about things (I actually agree with that statement). But many (most?) university courses are designed such that a student can typically get what they need (a big number at the end of it) by applying the bare minimal amount of effort outside of certain crunch times, and then dropping all other aspects of life during crunch times. If I can get good marks by sacrificing ~4 weeks of my life (and frankly looking like complete shit) per term, while letting me still go out and hang out and have fun and get drunk and laid and high for the rest of the term - hell, why not. It's not like your missing out - everyone else makes the same calculations. You're not going to be able to hang out with your friends during exams anyways.

maxxxxx 11y ago

> Maybe it didn't use to be a trauma - but in the time of more and more focus on grades and GPAs, forced student competition, "career days", CV polishing courses, mandatory unpaid internships, i.e., ageneral shift from the university as a place that creates politically mature citizens to a place that churns out better trained cogs for companies, education may have become trauma. This together with high tuition fees makes school a high pressure place. When I went to school in the 80s there wasn't this constant pressure students have now.

shenanigoat 11y ago

Perhaps your definition of trauma is vastly different than the more commonly accepted definition. IMO, the points you made illustrate that modern education is challenging, definitely not trauma.

mc32 11y ago

Talk to kids in China, India, Japan, Korea, etc. about focus on grades and the tremendous pressure of getting into prestigious schools. They have pressure. Students in North America have it easy compared to them. Are students in East and south Asia just harder than their north American counterparts?