The Evil Virus Upon Us (Universities)

Washington Times ^ | 10/19/05 | Suzanne Fields

[freespirited]

A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They're required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it's the evil oppression of everybody in American society.

There's an emphasis on multicultural studies and few campuses have escaped the disease, ... students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the "gangsta" rapper ...There's "Queer Lives and Culture," "Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora," and a discussion of the relationship of gender, race and war in Haiti through the lens of "Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism." Smith College, the elite school that once was only for women, and still is, sort of, has a different problem. About two dozen women who arrived as female have become male, more or less... Smith has long been "gay friendly," but now that girls have become "boys" Smithies joke that the school motto is "Queer in a year or your money back." ... Smith is not alone in disfiguring what passes for education. A course at the University of Pennsylvania deconstructs Herman Melville and other dead white males, seeking hidden meanings of homosexuality, pederasty and incest. Majors in the humanities are down, and why not? Vassar College has a "Homo Hop" and the Queer Student Union at Williams College holds a "Queer Bash" with gay pornography, widely attended by straight students. Adrienne Rich, a lesbian poet, encourages young women to experiment with homosexuality and bisexuality. ...

[freespirited]

This stuff will just get worse as long as parents pay for it.

[atomicweeder]

I actually welcome the proliferation of college graduates with nonsense degrees. As I told my two children (both 3.5+ engineering majors and both conservative), the more idiots in the world with non-degrees, or on drugs, or promoted via self-esteem nonsense, the more demand there will be for your hard-earned, rigorous, and valuable skills and knowledge.

[FerdieMurphy]

The last sentence is about as clear an indictment of stupid studies as it can be:

"Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women's Studies, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies," writes Roger Kimball, author of "Tenured Radicals," in New Criterion magazine, "are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances... Parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social and political scruple they have been brought up to believe." These studies inhibit debate, corrupt young minds and infect learning with a virus for which, like bird flu, there is not yet an antidote.

[hsalaw]

"These studies inhibit debate, corrupt young minds and infect learning with a virus for which, like bird flu, there is not yet an antidote."

Actually, there is an antidote: having to work for a living in the real world, in order to buy food, shelter, clothing, etc. But I don't know how many of these students will have to work for a living, as opposed to living off their parents for the next 20-30 years.

[Joe Beerman]

the more demand there will be for your hard-earned, rigorous, and valuable skills and knowledge

I hear what you're saying!
I've been serving beer for over thirty years. I have a large college crowd over the summer. I've noticed that intelligence has gone down as the number of degrees has gone up.
.

[freespirited]

I actually welcome the proliferation of college graduates with nonsense degrees. As I told my two children (both 3.5+ engineering majors and both conservative), the more idiots in the world with non-degrees, or on drugs, or promoted via self-esteem nonsense, the more demand there will be for your hard-earned, rigorous, and valuable skills and knowledge.

I used to think exactly the same thing. What do you with a degree in __ Studies (insert name of sex/ethicity/race grievance department) I would ask?

Then I found out. There are entire industries around these majors created by the government and lefty foundations. It just blows the mind.

But I still agree with you. If I had a child that wanted to major in gibberish studies I would go ballistic.

[El Gato]

the more idiots in the world with non-degrees, or on drugs, or promoted via self-esteem nonsense, the more demand there will be for your hard-earned, rigorous, and valuable skills and knowledge.

And the higher fraction of your hard-earned dollars will be taxed away to support the idiots, along with the worse than idiots folks who didn't even graduate from high school, and who live out their lives on welfare of one sort or another. Plus many of those college grad idiots will be employed by government, making your life and your job that much harder.

[Borges]

A course at the University of Pennsylvania deconstructs Herman Melville and other dead white males, seeking hidden meanings of homosexuality, pederasty and incest.

A bit misleading. All literary study is some form of deconstruction.

[M203M4]

Yes, academia is defined by the wacko studies departments...sure. They are the outliers - most faculty and students from other departments recognize their "degrees" as being worthless, the entire existence of their disciplines being acts of feel-good PC-ism.

When I was a (fairly left-wing) student, my friends (also fairly left-wing) used to, while choosing courses for the next year, flip to the women's studies and media studies and such course sections and laugh our arses off at the course descriptions - to think that someone would urinate away 4 years (or usually 6+ years in the case of the slackers who enroll in these programs) on that bs.

There were courses, with no tests, exams, or essays, where students got credit for watching movies (like modern Hollywood stuff). Or, 'The role of post-feminism in gay, lesbian, transsexual, and bisexual gender role stereotypes'. At my alma mater, there is now a course on FRIENDS, that TV show.

Academia is chemistry, biology, math, physics, engineering, history, English, theology, business, medicine, dentistry, and a host of others. The effect has been the dilution of the institution-specific worth of a degree, and instead valuation based on both faculty/department and institution.

The key is to advertise their worthlessness and let demand drop low enough that the departments close up shop or get swallowed up into 'social sciences', with 1-2 course offerings at noncredit level per year (like the rest of the bunk that appears every so often).

[proxy_user]

"....deconstructs Herman Melville and other dead white males, seeking hidden meanings of homosexuality, pederasty and incest."

Melville's meanings aren't very hidden. I had a good chuckle over the 'squeezing out the sperm' chapter of Moby Dick. You don't have to be Freud to figure that one out.

Don't even go into 'Pierre'.....

[Billthedrill]

The notion that graduates of the "Studies" curricula are unemployable is not quite correct. There is a home for them in every Human Relations department of every major company, wherein they may indulge their political enthusiasm by forcing every employee to pay lip service to it. This stuff isn't just a virus in academia, it's a cancer on social relations overall, aided and abetted by complaisant lawyers (see "Critical Legal Studies"), an ACLU that is happily proliferating it and squelching resistance, and especially a Democratic party structured to nurture such grievances in return for votes.

[Kryptonite]

Man that is disturbing. And I was having a nice day today.

If any of my kids want to go to either of my alma maters, I'm gonna have to give 'em a crash course in all the subjects I'm probably not going to want to bring up until absolutely necessary.

[Reactionary]

"I had a good chuckle over the 'squeezing out the sperm' chapter of Moby Dick."

The chapter is entitled a "Squeeze of the Hand" and it has nothing to do with sex.

[Borges]

The homoeroticism in Moby Dick has been noted quite a few times actually. The scene of Queequeg in bed with the narrator in addition ot that chapter mentioned. Critic Leslie Fiedler actually claiemd that the two great american novels (Moby dick, The Adventures of huckleberry Finn) are about the 'unconsumated love of a white male for a non white male'.

[Overtaxed]

There is a home for them in every Human Relations department of every major company, wherein they may indulge their political enthusiasm by forcing every employee to pay lip service to it.

We shot down one of those in Diversity Training the other day....:)

[Reactionary]

"The homoeroticism in Moby Dick has been noted quite a few times actually."

I know. It's standard practice for idiots in universities to cast Melville as homosexual or worse. To justify this claim they use inane references to men sleeping together in the 19th century (it was common), and vague references to the text that have nothing at all to do with the text as it was written.

I prefer to read texts and to try to understand them as they were written. I don't read books with the certain knowledge that I know the author's motives better than he did. Such an approach is insulting to the author, and it displays a typically modern arrogance involving literature.

[Borges]

Isn't that the same 'evidence' they use trying t o cast Lincoln as a homosexual?

Anyway the critical metholodgy used these days and for much of the 20th century is actually to discard the search for authorial intention completely and look only at the text. Freudians of course will say that all sorts of intimations get in the text that the author doesn't intend or is even actively trying to supress. It's not as radical as it sounds. Even if the author claims something means one thing if it isn't justified by what they wrote then it doesn't really have much sway.

[Billthedrill]

Right you are, and the difficulty with this sort of textual analysis is that in English nearly every word you can use in common discourse contains secondary and tertiary meanings that (1) are quite different from the primary, (2) the author is perfectly cognizant of and rejects, and (3) that serve only to subvert, and not to advance, communication. A deconstruction that denies author intent and focuses on this method of textual analysis is a chainsaw given to an idiot.

I've had this argument a lot with certain friends in the Humanities (could you tell?) and the example I use is that when I write "I made my bed" I neither intend to imply that I had sex with an inanimate object nor is it particularly useful on any analytical level to insist that that meaning has any semantic validity, even as a reflection of the sexually-repressed patriarchical society within whose rape continuum I am trapped.

God, this stuff is drivel, isn't it?

[Borges]

Well you're just inserting a penile rhetoric into a vaginal discourse! /women's studies gobbledygook/

But seriously I was taught in Grad School studies of English to not deconstruct for its own sake but only with a goal in mind. Because if you take it to its logical extreme then any and all communication is impossible and attempts to try are just a syntactical shell game.

[sasafras]

Colleges and now businesses promote the mantra of "DIVERSITY", claiming that it improves productivity, development and creativity. But the scientific fact, from sociologists, is that diverisity reduces all of the latter becuase the only diversity that business and schools are pushing is one based on color, gender and sexual preference. True diversity doesnt artifically discriminate, divide or demean by demographic characteristics and encourages open and honest thought and discussion - free thought is something the liberals hate and ban once they are in control. Only liberals view points are valued and encouraged. Liberals are evil.