Posted on 03/27/2020 7:22:59 AM PDT by karpov
Professor John Ellis has served on college faculties since 1963 and is now an emeritus professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He has witnessed enormous changes in higher education over his years and he finds those changes to be deplorable.
In his new book The Breakdown of Higher Education, Ellis explains how our system was subverted, why it matters, and what it will take to put it back on the proper track.
Americans, Ellis observes, used to have almost unlimited confidence in our colleges and universities. They were expected to provide advanced learning for serious students and a forum for the discussion of important national issues, which they did. Higher education simply wasn’t controversial; few books were written about it and hardly anyone offered harsh criticism.
Today, however, many people are deeply distressed at the state of higher education, mainly because it has become terribly politicized. Ellis writes that “advocacy has now replaced analysis as the central concern of the campuses” and says that “this rot has been growing for decades and appears to have reached a point of no repair.” He provides plenty of evidence to back up his charge that radical politics has become the dominant force at many schools.
One case Ellis highlights is that of Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State. Gilley, a political scientist, wrote an article that was published in an academic journal, in which he argued that colonialism had some beneficial consequences for native peoples. That is certainly a debatable proposition and any scholar who read his paper would have been perfectly free to respond with counter-arguments. In an earlier day, that is all that would have happened.
But rather than arguing against Gilley, an outraged academic mob immediately demanded that his paper be suppressed.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Hopefully everyone forced on line for college will continue into the future and these scams run by the liberals will tank
Universities were respected when they only taught serious subjects. Then the Grievance Studies courses began and that was the end of that.
This guy gets it.
The whole higher education system has been hijacked by the communist liberals. The days of the word “Professor” meaning something good, purposeful and talented have long since passed. Yet, millions of Americans spend hard-earned money to send their little snowflakes to these rabid monsters only to be “educated” into SJWs...LOL
Trade school is the answer IF a young person wants to actually make a decent living doing something beneficial to society.
He should have Betsy DeVos job!
I think we’ve had enough scholar’s laments for now.
Universities are nothing more than Marxist indoctrination centers now.
By shutting them down and forcing students to seek out alternative educational opportunities online, and, hopefully, opening their minds, the Wuhan flu may result in something beneficial.
Administrators want to keep enrollment numbers up. Adjuncts and tenure-track (untenured) faculty are especially vulnerable if they get low scores on student evaluations, so it is risky to be a demanding grader. There are pressures not to flunk too many students, so standards have to be lowered to accommodate students who don't think they need to study. A student can still get a good education if he or she wants one, but I think it is easier to get by with passing grades than it used to be.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.