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Back in the day (I'm talking way back) college was all about exploring the scientific method, history, literature, and economics. Today these kids aren't doing
by dev1n 10y ago
Back in the day (I'm talking way back) college was all about exploring the scientific method, history, literature, and economics. Today these kids aren't doing any of that and, thus, have too much free time on their hands. So they go out and protest about the fact that their school’s Afrikan Heritage House lacked truly authentic food.
- geogra4 10y agoDepends on whose history, literature and economics you're studying....
- Aqueous 10y agoBut it also doesn't. And a lot of this culture on campus is about replacing objective facts and knowledge with highly individual, subjective facts and knowledge, privileging "my truth" above all else. In this mindset, there's no 'objective truth' at all because all objectivity is tainted by power dynamics. The problem is, just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean they're not true.
- locopati 10y agoWhen it comes to history and literature and other non-science fields, are there actually meaningfully objective facts and knowledge? Even a 'fact' like X event happened on Y date involves a lot of subjective perspectives on how X came to pass and even more subjective perspectives on why and even more on what the ramifications were.
- nicoburns 10y agoI think the purpose of a lot of these movements is to point out the natural counterpoint to this: Just because the facts were placed in our textbook by some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar doesn't mean that they are true. Academia has a history of claiming things as objectively true, and then changing it's mind. It's healthy to question these things from the beginning. If you're doing secondary research then you ought to be asking who wrote what you are reading, what was their outlook on life, and why did they choose to write what they wrote. If you are doing primary research then you ought to be asking the same thing about your methodology. There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings.
- morgante 10y ago> There surely is such thing as 'objective truth', but it isn't to be found in textbooks written by human beings. Really? The fact that a textbook was written by a human does not mean it cannot contain facts. No amount of politics will change the fact that the Normandy landings occurred on June 6, 1944.
- mikerichards 10y agoby some culturally privileged Caucasian scholar there ya go...just what the article is talking about. Sorry to have to clue you in, but nobody buys that weird leftist newspeak.
- jmorphy88 10y agoBingo. Progressive leftist ideology, in its essence, is anti-white racism. All of its purported ideals are really about stripping whites of any power or identity and giving it to others.
- morgante 10y agoThat goes entirely too far. There is certainly a subset of "leftist" thought which is about searching for offense, but you shouldn't paint the whole progressive left with that stroke. Plenty of progressive movements (including the original Progressive Era) did not make racial causes central or important.
- jmorphy88 10y agoIn regards to historical progressivist movements, I agree with you. I was referring only to the current progressive dispensation. Perhaps I'm not using the correct term for it... whatever you want to call the dominant American university ideology of today. I do think it's appropriate to think of this ideology primarily in racial terms. Virtually any issue supported by the left today is, in its essence, about stripping white people of power, identity, and autonomy, and giving that power to other groups. Diversity, equality, multiculturalism, globalism, "one-world"-ism, pro-mass-immigration, all of these terms mean "not white". It's perfectly easy to see that, because all "white" cultures are treated differently in this paradigm, as "oppressor", "colonialist" nations/peoples, "majority/minority", "privileged", etc. These terms don't apply to other groups. The amorphousness and formlessness of this ideology and its lack of coherent theoretical basis (as opposed to something more rigidly principled like Marxism, libertarianism, etc) is what provides cover for its true aim, which is political power for its adherents.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoWhen I was 15, and struggling to accept the limits of what I was learning in high school, a teacher explained it to me very well. "You're here to learn how to learn, as much as to learn anything in particular. You're hear to learn how to think critically about the world around you, how to formulate a question based on observation, and then go into the world and find the answers."
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- dev1n 10y agoAgreed but the point of the article is that these students are rebelling against literally any form of challenge to their own ideals. They actually don't identify with any ideals; they make up their own! On no factual basis. The article even says so. The fact is that these students are rebelling against the education they are paying for in order to gain more visibility for non-issues. Some of these issues are actually fairly fascist. They asked for a piece of artwork to be taken down because it insulted them. If we extend that argument, no art would be allowed, ever! Coddled is the word that comes to my mind.
- kingkawn 10y agoThat rebellion against anything but your own ideals is how any given canon came to be in the first place.
- cLeEOGPw 10y agoAnd this is exact polar opposite of science. Science is all about challenging not only other, but your own ideas and rejecting those that don't hold on to the tests thrown at it. The rebellion at the campus today is a rebellion against science, against very idea that facts are universal. I sometimes wonder if rebellion like this can cause another dark age someday if it gains enough support from young people. Or maybe a beginning of "Idiocracy" type dystopia.
- pigpaws 10y agoconsidering 'new-earthers' and 'flat-earthers' are making a comeback, along with religious extremism taking over (in terms of laws vs traditions) I'd say the next dark-ages are right around the corner...
- rhapsodic 10y agoYou know this how?
- DanBC 10y ago> Back in the day (I'm talking way back) When? How far back are we going?
- dev1n 10y agoTo the 1940's, the last decade IMO when the only people who went to college went because they wanted to learn about meaningful questions on those subjects. Many students go to college now, but very few go on to actually study the foundational subjects that these universities were built upon.
- dragonwriter 10y agoYou're off by several centuries if that was ever true. College had been an important element of social status signaling for much longer than since the 1940s, though the particular status level that college in general or particular institutions are associated with had sorry drifted over time. If there was ever a time that people went to college exclusively it off a pure desire to "learn about meaningful questions" on any day of subjects, it was in the very distant past. But there probably never was such a time at all.
- TorKlingberg 10y agoI assume you also object to the 60's civil rights movement in universities in the same way then?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoAre you saying that students today are involved in a similarly important, organized, and effective movement as the 60's civil right's movement?
- sotojuan 10y agoWhether that's true or not, part of the reason why things seem bad now is because society tells high schoolers that if they don't go to college (for any reason and almost any major) they're failures.
- mrdrozdov 10y agoMaybe they've learned enough about science, history, literature, and the modern world to the point that they realize they can make a difference. I'm not sure how you measure impact, but it feels like they're succeeding.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoMaybe, but they're succeeding at the wrong things. The difference that they're making is "learning how to make everyone else shut up", which is not a life skill that contributes to the progress of civilization.
- mrdrozdov 10y agoThat's an ironic turn of events.
- ams6110 10y agoIt's all summed up nicely as "first world problems." I emphasized to my son when he entered college to always remember why he was there, and my expectations as the one paying for it. He's mostly lived up to that.
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- justaman 10y agoPeople would choose college based on professors instead of footballs teams as well.
- tosseraccount 10y agoYale won 27 collegiate football championships. Princeton won 28 . Harvard won 12 . Standford won 2 .
- ryandrake 10y agoI was thinking something similar. WTF are these protestors majoring in? When I was in undergrad, I was taking 18+ credits per semester, and my ass was in the lab 50% of the time. And when it wasn't, it was in the library or cramming for the next exam, or doing the piles of homework that you were never able to finish (by design, so you learned to prioritize). Then in Junior and Senior years it was labs, career fairs, mock interviews, internships, more labs, resume writing, homework, more labs... Who the hell has time to go out there protesting every little thing that bothers them? Don't they have classwork to do?
- moron4hire 10y agoThe article goes into that. Their academic standing is slipping. They've even protested to have academic standards loosened so they can continue protesting.
- caseysoftware 10y agoIn some cases - like Mattress Girl - these are class projects so they may get credit for going out and protesting, writing letters, etc.
- dragonwriter 10y agoMore likely, this ideal is something that lots of people believe is a universal thing rather than an ideal of what college should be about, and when they learn in the real world that its not what lots of people approach college as, they construct a fantasy that there was a time in the past when the ideal they've internalized was true, and the present just represents a fall from that ideal. Similar cultural complaints and conflicts between academic and non-academic communities go back to the establishment of the first universities. (And the idea that "Today these kids...have too much free time on their hands" and that this is the source of all kinds of problems goes back into antiquity, and probably is documented nearly as far back as we have records at all.)