Posted on 05/26/2016 9:19:38 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
'I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!'
Oberlin College's activist community is ready to call it quits. Progressive students are dropping out of college, citing academic and emotional difficulties stemming from their mental health problems and overall disgust with the toxic culture on campus.
That's according to a fascinating piece for The New Yorker by Nathan Heller, who interviewed a number of exhausted activists at Oberlin. They perceive that other students, faculty members, and the administration are completely against them, and have made it impossible for them to live on campus. Some are dropping out.
Of course, some of these students probably feel unsupported because their impractical demands were not realized. Two examples: activist students not only wanted to abolish all grades below a 'C,' they also thought faculty members should proactively offer them alternatives to taking a written, in-class midterm exam. Here is the testimony of Megan Bautista, who identifies as an Afro-Latinx student:
Protest surged again in the fall of 2014, after the killing of Tamir Rice. “A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting. But we needed to organize on campus as well—it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically.” In 1970, Oberlin had modified its grading standards to accommodate activism around the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings, and Bautista had hoped for something similar. More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail. “Students felt really unsupported in their endeavors to engage with the world outside Oberlin,” she told me.
If students take their activism more seriously than their classes, that's their choice. And certainly much good can come from an organized, aware, activist community on a college campus. But in some sense, doesn't school have to be about, well, learning? And measuring whether students are in fact learning?
And then there's this, from student Zakiya Acey:
“Because I’m dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems—having to deal with all of that, I can’t produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways. There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come in to my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized. I have to find that professor.”
Again, it's great that some professors are willing to make that accommodation, but should it be an institutionalized policy? Should we handicap professors' abilities to grade their students because some of those students think organizing and protesting is more important than class?
The students Heller interviewed seem to think they're not at college to be educated: they are at college to educate everyone else. As Jasmine Adams, a member of the black student union, put it:
“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”
While I share Adam's view that Marx is over-taught in college, I question her desire to leave college as a completely unchanged human being. You should change who you are, and what you think, in college. It's a transformative experience. That's the entire point. It's what you're paying for.
I say eliminate college. Everybody is equal.
Speechless.
Insanity
Why not just hand over your student loan checks and the university hands over your diploma?
That’s pretty much what they’re doing anyway.
The important thing is that the universities get to harvest all the student loan money they can before they bury themselves in debt elsewhere.
well Oberlin was the first college to accept female students so they want to remain THE progressive institution...
and basket weaving should have a pass fail grade..
and A for showing up etc
and A+ for writing a name any name on a test paper...
In a perfect world, they would receive a loud ‘no’ and then get a good slap and a push out the door.
“...“A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting. But we needed to organize on campus as well—it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving forty minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically...”
Are you sure this wasn’t the script from a Saturday Night Live skit?
To be fair grades above average should be eliminated too. Try getting into a good grad school with a 2.0.
” I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.” “
Except for that pesky $50,000 college loan balance.
Karl Marx isn't LEFT enough for them!
“and A+ for writing a name any name on a test paper:’’-—
Not in cursive,though. I’m sure that would be considered discriminatory.
.
“...a number of exhausted activists at Oberlin. They perceive that other students, faculty members, and the administration are completely against them, and have made it impossible for them to live on campus. Some are dropping out.”
Good! At least the system is working somewhere.
Sounds to me the next crop of welfare recipients will be college educated.
A resume with an Oberlin degree is automatically round-filed.
If you abolish below average grades, don’t you by definition also abolish above average grades?
Naw, she’s not white so she got a grant instead of a loan. Nothing to pay back, thanks to you and me and our tax dollars. Those tax dollars went down the drain and she’s going back to some Chicago ghetto exactly the same as she left. Just like Obama, she didn’t learn anything in school or through her activism.
I predict that resumes from Oberlin grads will start going straight to the round file.
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