Riley's Farm Journal: Junior College "Professors"

One of our farm employees (let's call him "Dylan") is a bright, witty young fellow starting in on his general education requirements at a local junior college.

Now, I am quite certain there are many dedicated, fair-minded people in our community college system, but there's a certain brand of pretentious moron you can only find among the non-empirical disciplines in the "junior college" faculty lounge. (You know the type: the sort of people who believe "women's studies" or "sociology" are actual academic disciplines.)

A little background. The instructor (let's call him "Dwight"), began by observing that Playboy really is a very serious magazine, with high journalistic standards. Dwight made sure to remind the students they should avoid the dirty pictures and read the articles, but how, really, are we supposed to process the idea of a public servant who encourages newly-minted adults to stock up on liquor-store fantasy-rags?

Well, let's just skip the weirdness of this too-much-information moment and get to Dylan's assignment: stand up in front of the class and extemporize about good subjects for a magazine article. Dylan began down a nuanced track. His idea was to analyze the use of violence and sex in contemporary movies, to test the hypothesis that lowest-common-denominator material is being used more and more to cover up otherwise tedious plot lines and shallow character development. The idea was getting a lot of nods from Dylan's fellow students, with the consensus forming that the story material in Hollywood was indeed getting weaker and weaker.

Well, Dylan was followed by a female student who said she wanted to write about students who have had babies.

"Teen pregnancy," Dwight, the 'teacher,' responded. "Very topical. Good. Great. Right on."

Having graduated from Stanford, some of my friends ask me why I have such little faith in sending kids off to college. The simple answer is that community colleges, and universities in general, are full of pensioned dolts like Dwight. If you go to college, these days, you not only need to be as smart as your friend, Dylan, you need to be willing to tell the Dwights of the world where to get off.

Anyway, kids: it is not 1910 anymore. Be prepared to acknowledge that the person standing up there in the lecture hall is not, in any sense, a "professor" of truth. He might just be a hairy Marxist cruising for chicks. On your way to your degree, think of your college experience as a track and field event--the high hurdles, where you have to run down the track, jumping over--or knocking down--one idiot after the next.

Yesterday, we attended the funeral of Jill Wood, a long time farm friend and living historian. Jill had staged a pitched battle against cancer for two years, had entered a period of remission, and then faced a sudden and drastic turn for the worse this summer. It was an open service, with friends recalling Jill memories. Almost to a person, everyone remembered her with words like "regal," "poised," "charming," "brilliant," but always "warm," and "kind."

I first met the Wood family on the phone, when they asked me if they could host a 15th century Irish, German, and English military campaign on the farm. They had a renaissance faire background and I was very cautious, because we're a family show, and I never liked the way the Renaissance Faire depicted my heroes--the Puritans of the Bay Colony. (The Puritans were the intellectual heavy-weights of their era, contrary to the tsk-tsk-ing of community college librarians today and some Ren-Faire types bent on a good debauch.)

Something told me the Wood family, and their friends, were different. They followed our rules. They pursued honest living history; they loved the farm, and we became friends. When their child, Susannah was born, they spent less time re-enacting and devoted their time to their daughter. They became homeschoolers. Through the influence of many people the Lord brought into their lives, Jill converted to Christianity and was baptized in a home church service.

At the funeral, a good friend of Jill's, Bridget Honan, recalled their last time together here on the farm. They were dressed in period clothing for our Christmas in the Colonies dinner, and they were up in the cider barn pressing cider on a cold December night. The doors of the barn were opened up and the snow started coming down around them. Bridget smiled at their clothing, and then at Jill and said, "it feels like we're in a story book."

I don't know why that touched me so much, except to say that there are people out there looking for heaven, every day, in small things, and I felt that kindred longing with Jill, for a better world--a paradise we see here on earth from time, in something as fragile as snow flakes and candle-light at Christmas.

Although we will miss Jill, the great consolation is that even in sad news, there is joy.

When someone asserts that sociology isn’t a real academic disciplie, he loses all credibility. The problem is that poisonous, hateful tyrants grabbed control of college sociology, anthropology, and psychology departments in the 1970s and never let go. My alma mater, UMass/Amherst, hired a gaggle of radical feminists hatemongers and they changed the Dept. of Anthropology to the Dept. of Feminist Anthropology, teaching the farthest Left insanity and hatred of men and either driving-out the male professors or cowing the ones that stayed. The department went right down the toilet with the harpies in charge riding it and yelling “Yahoo!” like Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.” (You need to spend a month in the Amherst, MA, area to get a real feel for the insanity of its Marxist politics, hatred of the U.S., and determination to destroy the male sex). The school still hasn’t recovered, with UMass now admitting “liberal arts” students on a strict racial/sexual orientation quota basis. There are still some very good schools at UMass — chemistry, engineering, forestry — but they keep their heads down.

but there's a certain brand of pretentious moron you can only find among the non-empirical disciplines in the "junior college" faculty lounge. (You know the type: the sort of people who believe "women's studies" or "sociology" are actual academic disciplines.)

Yeah, I know the type. But they are reliably found not just at community colleges, but throughout higher ed. That includes the axis of evil (Harvard, Yale, Columbia...).

“...There are still some very good schools at UMass — chemistry, engineering, forestry — but they keep their heads down.”

That is indeed the problem. I cannot understand why the science and engineering schools do not demand to be separated from the clown schools. And indeed, they have now become clown schools. When I embarked on my science education, I respected the “other side”, because they were still hanging on to the vestiges of a rigorous academic education.

This is no longer true. I feel sorry for the real talents that pursue political “science”, etc. Your disciplines have been thoroughly polluted by marshmallow intellect buffoons.

These professors also inundate local newspapers and blogs with their editorializing. I’ve met a few of these. You can always tell a state college man but you can’t tell him anything. A little variation of the Yale saying.

When someone asserts that sociology isn’t a real academic disciplie, he loses all credibility.

Wasn't Karl Marx the father of modern sociology? I'm sure there are reasonable folks having a go at sociology--somewhere--but some of these kids are being force to take 18 units of women's studies for goodness sake. We had a young friend of the family who did a dissertation on why certain ethnic groups weren't availing themselves of government handouts. Do we really need to train more of these types?

Personally, I find this offensive, but maybe that’s because I teach at a community college. While my fellow adjuncts tend to be liberal and I don’t agree with them, they are also competent teachers. Surprisingly so. I think community colleges in particular are excellent because Johnny gets to live at home and discuss what he’s learning at the dinner table. Parents can at least have a balancing effect if the professor is off-base. You are just as likely, if not more so, to get the academic absurdities at expensive 4-year colleges.

......I cannot understand why the science and engineering schools do not demand to be separated from the clown schools. .....

It was forced on them when the need to increase the enrollment of women was pushed.

There needs to be something for the engineering flunkouts to study.

Good for you. Hang in there. But don’t be afraid to call your liberal colleagues idiots from time to time—since that’s what they are.

Would you agree, it’s a little unseemly for a public servant to be hawking Playboy and taking such overtly political reactions to student ideas? The young student was effectively being called an idiot for wanting to critique Hollywood. Why whouldn’t the writer be free to call his professor a moron?

I agree with you in part. I got a far better education in business at my community college than I did at the university I later transferred to. The CC teachers were often part time and also had real jobs in their field, while the university professors were so far removed from the business world that they had lost all vestiges of contemporary revelance.

For that reason, plus the fact that it’s a lot cheaper, my daughter just began CC. She was taking a history 1770-1877 class in which the dolt teaching it began by saying tat teh founding father disappeared after the revolution and thus sucked. (his terminology) He spent the next class teaching that GW Bush bought his way out of Vietnam, and telling how much he hates his kid and his wife. My daughter, realizing that Vietnam was not in 1770-1877 dropped the class in favor of a different history class with a different instructor.

I will add my two cents. I taught accounting/business part-time at a community college. As a free-market, conservative, I felt it part of my duty to share my knowledge. I was shocked at how liberal most of the teachers were. It was the part-timers like me that provided some balance to the liberal view. Students respected our view since they saw that we were the more successful ones, teaching as a service rather than relying on the puny paycheck.

So my point, while community colleges have these part-timers, most universities do not. The real issue is the liberal bias at these institutions. It is even more of an issue since these students live away from home and are not able to be de-programmed by their parents on a daily basis. By the time they come home on a break they may be too far indoctrinated. If I were a parent, I would be very wary of sending a child to any university.

She’s going to follow my path. I went to a univesrity, but I enrolled at 20, not 18. Most kids that age are too “full of mush” to understand the difference between indoctrination and teaching. I registered too late and got stuck in a freshman dorm. What a joke. I got out of the dorms and moved off campus as soon as possible.

That’s really awful. However, it could happen at a four-year college too. There, you get teachers with the proper degree (although not necessarily), but you’re more likely to get a real attitude. A lot of professors these days get Ed.D. degrees to teach, but have the same discipline degree as the CC adjuncts. I had some wonderful history teachers at our local CC. And the geography prof there was among the best professors I’ve ever had in my life (and I got undergrad/grad at a school with an excellent reputation). You can’t go anywhere these days and count on getting all good professors.

I would never call anyone with control over my grade a moron. However, wherever you go, there are good teachers and bad ones. As a student, part of your education becomes learning when to keep your mouth shut and when to fight back.

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September 14, 2008 10:07 AM