Posted on 05/04/2017 5:10:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.
But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.
The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education.
Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university.
But if the recent examples at Berkeley, Claremont, Middlebury and Yale are any indication, there is nothing much left to the idea of a free and civilized exchange of different ideas.
At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely would either be disinvited or have her speech physically disrupted. Campuses often now mimic the political street violence of the late Roman Republic.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
As an active member of the scientific academic community, I can attest that this assertion is not true -- there is no "apart from." The sciences are as rife with PC and fashionable idiocy as all other academic disciplines.
I spend a lot of time at colleges and I would say VDH is understating the problem. Millies are profoundly ignorant and “diseducated.” They’re also extremely intolerant when they care at all.
College is mostly expensive adult daycare.
I have to disagree with his last observation: “Apart from the sciences and the professional schools, campuses are a bubble of unearned self-congratulation — clueless that they...have lost the respect of most Americans.”
In fact most Americans, including most mature, intelligent and reasonable people, still respect colleges and value college degrees. They spare no expense to get their kids into prestigious universities.
I’m afraid that Mr. Hansom has painted too ROSY a picture of American “education”.
The problem has its roots in the abject failure of the lower grades to provide the students with a proper FOUNDATION of knowledge.
Forget college students...how many High School Seniors could pass the 8th grade final exams of a generation or two ago. How many could locaate their home state on a blank map of the USA? How many could put a finger on INDIA using a blank map of the world?
A building built on swamp land will surely sink and an “education” built without a foundation is a scam.
It’s the fault of the schools because they don’t teach history any more.
“They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning......”........
They are nothing more than “brain washing centers” for the receptive youth of today. They should be called “Snow Flake Palaces”
“Mainstream” contemporary childhood works almost like an intentional setup for the regressive mayhem you see at many colleges. Kids no longer grow up in character-building environments where their imaginations are encouraged to develop along healthy lines through real-life adventures and good reading. Instead you typically have something like school + TV + video games + internet in a suburban setting where the former are just plain impractical and in some cases the neighborhood nazis will call the police on you. So the kids get this massive buildup of angst in the absence of any deep knowledge, and college is where TSHTF.
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