Posted on 03/27/2019 4:12:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last week's column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won't destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus article, titled "What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University."
Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case. Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today's university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.
Students are taught that all cultural values are morally equivalent. That's ludicrous. Here are a few questions for those who make such a claim. Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is currently practiced in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan; is it morally equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limitations placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning. Thieves face the punishment of having their hands severed. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in some countries. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to Western values?
Social justice theory holds the vision that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. The theory holds that by their toxic masculinity, heterosexual white males are oppressors. Among their victims are females, people of color and male and female homosexuals. The world's Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims.
Increasingly, the classics of Western civilization are being ignored. Why? Because they represent the work, almost exclusively, of, "dead white men." Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors are seen as virtuous. The same is true with political history. The U.S. Constitution should be less respected because its writers were white slaveholders. The academics who teach this nonsense to students are grossly ignorant of the struggle over the slavery issue at our 1787 Constitutional Convention.
Professor Salzman concludes his article with the observation that, "Marxist social justice offers all the answers anyone needs, so no inquiry or serious research is required. Be confident that at university your children will learn 'the right side' to be on, if little else." As a result of leftist indoctrination, many college students graduate illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. A survey of employers showed that over 70 percent found college graduates were not well-prepared in skills such as "written communication," "working with numbers/statistics," "critical/analytical thinking" and second-language proficiency.
>The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. One report found that nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV's Judge Judy, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. Such ignorance might explain why these young people are the supporters of today's presidential candidates calling for America to become a socialist nation.
By the way, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. One just has to accept the sanctity of the individual above all else.
Bureaucracy Kills: A Lesson from Rome
Ignorance is bliss. To bureaucrats.
Your last sentence. It’s where we made our mistake. Bentham, Black, all of them. They posited that The Individual was the smallest political unit. They were wrong. A man, a woman, and their child is the smallest political unit. Think about how many of our problems flow from this mistake. Our problem is that our system could never realize this truth because as long as only men voted the effect was the same either way, IOW, it took “female sufferage” for our mistake to be nourished and grown in to a full fledged poison.
If you are fabulously wealthy a degree in Art History can actually be a money maker, I’m told.
Great article by a great man. Thanks.
The brush is too broad. Moreover, ironically the gaps in knowledge that are noted are historical facts. History, biology and psychology are legitimate fields of study. They may be taught abysmally and framed largely for ideological purposes, but that is more a reflection of the attitudes of particular teachers and what they chose to teach and not the subject itself.
They might be "legitimate" fields of study, but on the undergraduate level their real world value is nil. If one goes to the employment office with any of those degrees he will be classified as "unskilled labor."
Our “barbarians” of today are—drum roll—the MUZZIES!
Any of our (cough) ‘leaders’ even recognize this today? None of them in EUrope seem to—only those deemed as “NAZIs” by their ‘intelligencia’, and despised as ‘nationalists’ to boot.
It will be difficult to fight for our side when it is illegal to even mention the name of the enemy.
Agree. This is one fabulous column... Should be required reading at college campuses.
Yes it should. Maybe someone will read this and pass it along to any college students and prospective college students they know.
Pull all of the federal funding!
Add Amherst to the list.
Their value in the labor market is a different issue entirely. In the UK a First in History from Oxford or Cambridge will get you head hunted by Investment Banks and others. Getting a First in Gender Studies from wherever will not unless you have a family connection.
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