Posted on 08/02/2006 2:06:53 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
$40,000 numbskulls
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Posted: August 2, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006
Colleges and universities will start their fall semester soon. You might be interested in what parents' and taxpayers' money is going for at far too many "institutions of higher learning."
At Occidental College in Los Angeles, a mandatory course for some freshmen is "The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie." It's a course where professor Elizabeth J. Chin explores ways in "which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film 'The Matrix' as a Marxist critique of capitalism." Johns Hopkins University students can enroll in a course called "Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll in Ancient Egypt." Part of the course includes slide shows of women in ancient Egypt "vomiting on each other," "having intercourse" and "fixing their hair."
Harvard University students can take "Marxist Concepts of Racism," which examines "the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality." You can bet there's no mention of the genocide in Africa and former communist regimes like Yugoslavia. Young America's Foundation and Accuracy in Academia publish lists of courses like these, at many other colleges, that are nothing less than student indoctrination through academic dishonesty.
Parents are paying an average tuition of $21,000, and at some colleges over $40,000, to have their children exposed to anti-Americanism and academic nonsense. According to a 2000 American Council of Trustees and Alumni study, "Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century," not one of the top 50 colleges and universities today requires American history of its graduates.
A survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut gave 81 percent of the seniors a D or F in their knowledge of American history. The students could not identify Valley Forge, or words from the Gettysburg Address, or even the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution. A survey released by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that American adults could more readily identify Simpson cartoon characters than name freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.
The academic dishonesty doesn't end with phony courses and lack of a solid core curriculum; there's grossly fraudulent grading, euphemistically called grade inflation. For example, Harvard's Educational Policy Committee found that some professors award As for average work. A Boston Globe study found that 91 percent of Harvard seniors graduated with honors, that means all As and a few Bs.
I doubt whether these "honor" students could pass a 1950 high-school graduation examination. According to the Department of Education's 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, only 31 percent of college graduates were proficient in prose, only 25 percent proficient in reading documents and 31 percent proficient in math.
Who's to blame for the increasingly sad state of affairs at America's colleges and universities? It's tempting to blame professors and campus administrators, and yes, they share a bit of the blame for shirking their academic duty. But the bulk of the blame rests with trustees, who bear the ultimate responsibility for what goes on at the college.
Unfortunately, trustees know little detail about what goes on at their institutions. Most of them have their time taken up by their non-college obligations. As such, they are simply yes-men who, in making decisions, must rely on information, often incomplete or biased, given to them by the president and the provost.
A good remedy would be for boards of trustees to hire a campus ombudsman and staff that's accountable only to the trustees. During my brief tenure as a trustee of a major East Coast university, I made this suggestion only to be asked by the president whether I trusted him. My response was yes I trusted him, but I wanted verification
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Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
What is not pointed out in this article is that in 1950 the number of high school grads that went on to college was very small. Now, in the age of political correctness, everyone goes on to college and soon to grad school, so they had to lower standards. That's why they have been dumbing down the SAT for years.
I just wonder how many students can fit in these frivolous classes. Any university that has a core curriculum leaves little room for nonsense.
Just to back up Dr Williams: I took a graduate course this spring that was supposed to be about social survey methods. The class was actually a long rant about race, inequality, and the professors obvious distaste for men, white people, and the United States. I took an incomplete, which I frankly plan to never make up. What a waste of $1,000.
My opinion at this point is that college is increasingly useless, except as a hoop to jump through to obtain a piece of paper. In the past 30 years I've watched higher education deterioriate; I'll be very cautious about where my son goes, certainly.
You get out of college what you put into it.
It's a very simple concept.
That is because math has a right answer and many wrong answers.
Part of the problem is that a bachelor's degree has become mandatory for all sorts of jobs that really shouldn't require it. You can understand why companies do this; a degree at least shows the individual is able to function in an absurd hierarchical organization for several years without going howling insane, but it's a lousy reason to start young people out with tens of thousands in debt.
The problem with going to a school with standards is that the better grad schools don't care that you went to a school with standards. They eliminate people on the basis of your GPA. There isn't a place to put in that you went to a very difficult school. Just try to get into an American medical school with a C in a tough Calculus II class when they have hundreds of applicants who got A's in Calculus II.
those involving schmoozing, scamming, and encouraging wanton consumerism to keep other schmoozers and scammers well-employed.
Drink up you hot coeds gone wild at your yearlong Spring Break! You may never be able to run for office after baring your breasts on DVD, but you will be able to get a young couple to pay top dollar for an overpriced condo on NY's east side.
After all it won't be their money they are spending, but what's left of daddy's estate after paying for your Harvard education!
Granted I go to school in Oklahoma where even the dirt is red, but it seems that these courses are not very common here. And most of the anger from the professors isn't directed at America but at the athletic department that T. Boone Pickens so generously gave 165 million.
In college I studied normal stuff like American History from 1750 to 1775, Early 20th Century American Economics, and Beer 101.
However, I'd like to see a course titled: Groucho Marx vs Karl Marx: Who Would Win the Knife Fight.
Another good one would be: How Many Dairy Cows Can Cuba Buy With the $3 Billion Castro has Stashed in Secret Swiss Bank Accounts?
There were junk courses 30 years ago and probably some well before that. These are the courses you used to boost your GPA as long as you could remember all the crap you were being fed in the lectures. In one course back in 1974 we spent 3 weeks on female masturbation techniques. We also got to hear in great detail about the professor's erections and orgasms and his swinging parties. He told us about how healthy it was to experiment and switch partners. The course was not totally anti-male because the prof was male (sort of), but it was about 90% female sexuality and 10% male and there was a lot of negative information about males. It was one of my least favorite courses in college, but I did get an A.
Getting a college education in exchange for serving for Uncle Sam is a good way to go. I have lots of friends who did that, including going through medical school.
Shucks, and I thought most of the anger came after Adam Morrison banked that 3 pointer with 2 seconds left in the "Battle in Seattle".
Sorry...bad joke...I'm sure most of those professors don't watch hoops anyway.
Better that $165M goes to the OSU athletic department than the federal and state governments.
Proof that there is justice in the world:
The people who major in anti-americanism don't get a job. And if they do, they'll be lucky to get a third of what their engineering-major classmates make.
I had a heck of a time hiring an editorial assistant. The candidates with degrees from big-name universities could not pass our easy spelling and grammar test. When I asked why, I learned that journalism classes were not graded on writing ability but on being politically correct. The poor kids who put in their time didn't ask for indoctrination.
I hope there's a rash of students suing their universities for failing to educate them
4-year universities are a rip-off. Young adults should go to a technical or junior college. There are some online colleges, such as Penn Foster, that offer flexible 1-2 year Associate degree programs. An Associate's degree is all one needs. You get hands-on experience and get right into the workplace.
I think you hit the nail on the head. If you're there to get stuffed full of crap, you'll get stuffed full of crap.
On the other hand, I unlearned the crap they pumped in through the ventilators. An though I forgot some of the calculus, but I'm learning that back.
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