Posted on 08/30/2022 7:50:58 AM PDT by karpov
Higher education suffers from a multitude of flaws. University marketing departments habitually over-promise the benefits of their degree programs to unsuspecting high-school students. Mandatory “general education” classes extract sizable tuition fees from students while delivering little discernible benefit in knowledge or critical thinking skills. A student-debt crisis leaves college graduates in the financial hole for decades as they work to pay off degrees of arguably marginal value. An oversaturated job market plagues faculty ranks due to decades of self-serving professors pumping out graduate students with few job openings to employ them. The traditional classroom functions of the university exist in near-perpetual budgetary strain, even as administrative ranks explode and seemingly endless resources are redirected to on-campus amenities such as lazy rivers, rock climbing walls, and luxury dormitories.
Rather than tackling the bad incentive structures that create these problems, much of academia has chosen to place the blame on a poltergeist called “neoliberalism.” A vast and growing academic literature—particularly in the humanities and Critical Theory journals—purports to have identified this ghostly troublemaker on campus. Like the havoc-wreaking spectres of horror films, the neoliberal poltergeist allegedly moved into the university system over the last 30 years and made a mess of things. Higher-education commentators now routinely call for full-blown exorcism rituals to drive “neoliberalism” out of the university system.
But there’s a fundamental problem with this line of attack. Poltergeists aren’t real, and neither is the neoliberal takeover of higher education.
First, “neoliberalism” is as ill-defined as the mischievous spirit itself. The body of supposedly neoliberal tenets is like the labile substance of a ghost, briefly appearing on the ritualist’s call and disappearing again into oblivion by the end of the seance.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
The spirit that invaded higher education is Neocommunism, not Neoliberalism.
Neopaganism is also a problem
This is true, but not because of the theory behind general education, but rather because of the Marxist/green indoctrination instead of instruction in these courses under the present prog faculty.
The purpose of a bachelor's program was, and still should be but isn't, to produce an educated person: someone who, more than having a career skill, is capable of becoming a moral and societal leader. The bulk of college programs, those outside of STEM, medicine, and the law, no longer provide either, which is why most college money is wasted.
Nevertheless, there are still a few of us who take our roles as gen ed profs seriously. When I teach music to nursing students, I am trying to help them understand the heights and depths that can be reached through quality music, and how that can be integrated, not only in their personal lives but in their medical careers as well. My students leave my course not just as nurses but as educated persons, able both to work in the hospital and grow in the concert hall, so that their human lives are worth living. When college gets back to those roots, it will, to coin a phrase, make college great again.
It’s not a poltergeist. It is powers and principalities and rulers of darkness in high places.
We need to use the appropriate weapons in tearing down their strongholds.
Neo subversives.
Well said. The so-called conservatives who think college should be nothing more than a trade school for white collar workers are a major part of how the leftists tookover the academy.
I went to college to learn. I worked through college and never was able to participate in the little party BS and amenities offered. Never had time.
I look back on college and barely made friends. Never got stoned and I guess I missed it?
Interesting that people actually pay for the right to be brainwashed in colleges to get little out of it even though taxes paid for it starting in grammar school with things like third grade sexual orientation. Welcome to liberal education. And don’t forget to close the door to the corral when you come in, sheep.
wy69
Communism. That’s the problem in so-called “academia.”
It is infested with pinkos and perverts.
Communism. That’s the problem in so-called “academia.”
It is infested with pinkos and perverts.
There now exists successive generations of academics in the humanities that are philosophical post modernist Marxists. Critical thinking? Explain to me how they can hold two contradictory philosophies at the same time.
There is a place for humanities or better stated, classical liberal arts. That produces actual critical thinking, not critical theory. They foster the ability to write and articulate. When you combine the ability to think, write and speak with something tangible such as science, engineering and business then you an unstoppable combination in life.
Most of the diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) academics are so ill prepared for the real world that they can only infest colleges and universities, or become baristas at Starbucks.
The Woke aren’t any sort of liberals ... they’re un-American commie trash.
School of Darkness, by Bella Dodd
https://ia800905.us.archive.org/13/items/SchoolOfDarknessBellaDodd/SchoolOfDarkness_Bella_Dodd.pdf
The whole of the academia is entirely devoted to teaching the youth that everything must be viewed through the lens of race, class and gender and nothing else.
The ideal nature of the university was corrupted, and both sides of the political spectrum are as guilty as anyone. The displays of the current leftist hegemony in universities is just a distraction from this.
Easily 70% of universities and colleges could be dispensed with. IF ( a BIG IF ) high schools were as academically demanding as they were a hundred years ago.
The “requirement” for degreed employees is primarily the result of p*ss-poor secondary and high school education.
Marxism is what has taken over higher education.
What the Leftists mean is that universities run themselves like a corporation. And that much is true. But not like a free-market corporation, but rather a fascist corporation. The universities strive for constant, endless, pointless growth, in the same manner that they see the corporations that neoliberalism defends. Hence, they see this poltergeist as “neoliberal.” That they identify growth-seeking with “neoliberalism” is typical of communists who, in the face of corruption, identify greed and lust for power with capitalism. Hence, in Russia, there were never any “bad communists,” there were only capitalist infiltraitors and counter-revolutionaries.
Universities have always depended on the largesse of the larger society. A healthy university recognizes that dependence, is grateful for it, and feels its own esteem through it. “I know I am lovable, because I am loved.” When they do not feel their own self worth, they despise their benefactors for not recognizing their supposed superiority. As they lusted for power, universities have replaced liberal-arts traditions with politically liberal indoctrination. They now fail their general mission, and those who would support their general mission no longer have an appreciation for it. Now, their benefactors give because not in the pursuit of knowledge, but either because they want a highly-skilled workforce (neoliberals) or because they want to support the corrupting socialism/deconstructionism of the universities.
It's why Universities keep lowering their standards for admission - and adding meaningless majors. 'Increasing their product output'... It's nuts.
DC bureaucrats work hand in glove with "the scam on poor students" with useless degree by creating 'programs' that do away with student loans after 12 years. It's why black kids are encouraged to borrow as much as possible... which they do. And when they're older they'll realized they were set up with a useless degree and scammed their fellow taxpayers. For nothing. That's cruel. The Universities play them for easy marks. Cheap cash flow.
The DC 'stupid, angry, kinky and entitled' rather than the 'best and brightest' are destroying our government and the respect government workers once had.
Followed the freerepublic tradition of not reading the article, it seems.
"Neoliberals" as defined, more or less, in the article, could as easily be called cultural conservatives.
The article accurately show academia has been taken over by woke cultural Marxists.
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