Posted on 09/19/2013 3:44:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience.
Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.
The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.
Yet most elsewhere, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.
Tenure -- virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years -- was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded?
Universities have so little job flexibility that campuses cannot fire the incompetent tenured or hire full-time competent newcomers.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
All ruined by Liberals. They turn everything to Shiite. They decide that everybody needs to go to college...so they destroy higher education. They decide that everyone needs to be a home owner...so they destroy the housing market. They decide that American citizenship is the greatest in the world...so they destroy the borders and push for everybody in the world to be come American citizens.
We need to get rid of Liberals...
Liberals live in a fantasy world. They believe the Wizard of Oz. They look at statistics showing that the college educated have better outcomes. They believe it is just the degree, the piece of paper that makes the difference.
Yet, they look at the same stats that show that marriage is best for men, women and children. But, they come to the opposite conclusion. The marriage is just a piece of paper and you don't need it.
Culture matters, but for liberals to admit that is for them to admit failure. There isn't an easy way. The easy way is the hard way. That's what the 20th century liberal prescription proves.
Every institution taken over by the left is inevitably corrupted away from its purpose. The latest is our military.
A very few active duty types at FR have stepped forward and sketched how gender, race, sexuality are increasingly the determining factors for advancement.
Democrats soil institutions. They can’t help it.
In the days since I was at the University of Tennessee (early 60s), America’s institutions of higher learning have become little more then centers for Marxist indoctrination.
As I have said many times on here, Marxist education and Marxist media are the root cause of America’s downfall.
Everyone with a little common sense realizes that not everyone qualifies for college. The most important thing in my opinion to qualify is having the brain for college. Coming from a rich family does not guarantee that you are smart, and being a football player, or basket ball player in high school does not either.
College is there to find a job. It used to be a finishing school for the elite to teach their children, but after WWII that is no longer the case.
I screwed up. I sent my son to college when I should have bought him a McDonalds.
Gone are the days when knowledge could be imparted only through face-to-face contact with a lecturer. Information is now ubiquitous.
The Italian communist Gramsci taught that in order to take over a country or a society, communists first had to take over its “institutions,” by which he meant the media, the education system, the universities, the legal profession/s, voluntary organisations and churches. The Left in this country has taken over all of those very institutions, which are now “leading” us to our doom.
Educators, like lawyers, seek to protect their rice bowls by building barriers against competition. The rationalization for preventing competition is that it protects the public from unqualified practitioners. When the profession thus insulated is also free of a self-cleaning mechanism and is further free of review by any entity outside the profession, a Mandarin class inevitably evolves.
Put another way, if the institution which exists inside these ramparts can rely on funding irrespective of whether or not it fulfills its classic role, it will become corrupt. Before the fall of the wall, the Poles used to say, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The entire Soviet Union disintegrated because there was no cleansing mechanism, no institutional checks or balances which identified and punished error and rewarded virtue and efficiency.
Today, the modern American university is analogous to the Soviet Union. They both contrived himto remove themselves from the marketplace. They both bloated to the point where the Soviet Union disintegrated, falling of its own weight, and our modern American universities are being abandoned by the free market. So long as the federal government pumps money into our universities without respect to producing a product which is accepted by the marketplace, the universities bloat.
It is not coincidental that the universities of today are reminiscent of the Soviet Union in their efforts to protect themselves by restricting free expression, free debate, and, of course, free criticism of the institution itself. The professors and the administrators have created a bubble which is very comfortable and cozy and, not at all incidentally, well-funded. But, Margaret Thatcher's Maxim now comes into play: socialism as grand until you run out of other people's money.
The reckoning cannot be long in coming and when it does it will be cataclysmic rather than gradual, just as happened to the Soviet Union.
Our universities require perestroika and certainly glasnost but are unlikely to reform themselves unless they are financially bankrupted. Obama will no doubt do everything in his power to protect these taxpayer subsidized socialist think tanks. The professors themselves had better start looking over their shoulders because they are likely to go the way of the American physician is going under Obamacare. Obama's siren will be exactly as he seduced the doctors and the insurance companies but his goal is to nationalize everything.
The threat for the health of the professors is their own ideology which is statist and which is reflexively opposed to the free market. They are ideologically predisposed to be seduced by Obama. The more they adhere to their ideology the more they must turn away from the ethos of the University as a oasis of inductive reasoning and revert to the Stalinist model of deductive protectionism and ruthlessly suppress freedom of thought. Thus they make certain their own demise.
The question is: can you change a liberal’s thinking, or do you have to chop off his head?
Eliminate the “College of Education” - home to the bottom 25% percentile idiots.
I prefer a teacher with a real degree and a modicum of intelligence.
Half the kids I think just go nowadays to do the partying. They figure it’s four years of fun and hooliganism before they have to live real lives.
I’ll take “off with his head” for $100, Alex.
These institutions ceased to be centers of learning and education long ago ... long before I attended them myself. Instead, they have come to serve three basic purposes: (1) they are large business enterprises that operate like a large cartel, (2) they are places where marginally competent adults can earn a living while sheltering themselves from the realities of the real business world, and (3) they are a mechanism for diminishing the size of the country's labor pool by keeping young adults out of the work force for an extended period of time.
Once you figure this out you really stop taking them seriously.
Same at the University of Wisconsin - Madion. I went there for a Double - E degree i1966-1970. It started out as a fine institution with every side given the opportunity to express their ideas. But, the left took over and has stiffled any opinions other than their Marxist drivel.
Howdy! I went to UT in the early ‘60s. I remember an enormous construction project that expanded the campus westward to the train tracks, used for frat houses and athletic stuff (i.e. student entertainment stuff).
“Howdy! I went to UT in the early ‘60s. I remember an enormous construction project”
__________________________________________
That sounds a bit later then me.
One mark of my time there was when I was just coming out of Geology class. It was in one of the buildings on the the hill.
I was walking to the blind man’s snack bar when I heard that
JFK had just been shot. Everyone was clustered around his small TV at his snack stand. I then headed on to the frat house to let it all soak in, as it was all that was on TV.
In my home city of Memphis, I had been an active campaigner
against his election.
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