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.
I might need to retake an English and perhaps a typing course, however.
LOL
I just got through Calculus, although I have one more to go, along with one linear algebra class.....
Then my math requirement is done.
Of course with your GECs, they require you to take world history and stuff like that. Unfortunately the best World History professor ALSO has a 3' X 5' poster of Vladimir Lenin in his office.
So while the guys knows freakin everything about the ancient greeks and Alexander the Great, the guy was a bit whacked out on the political side.
I just ignored most of that part of the class. It helps having a laptop with Texas Hold'em on it :)
bump
I'm trying to be an engineer. I don't notice such things anyway :)
That's my point. When I studied engineering, I didn't notice them, either. It's only when I took the requisite "sociology" and crap like that, during a semester when I took my eye off the ball (didn't get into MIT that time, broke up with girlfriend, grew a beard, put in an earing, bought a guitar, began writing poetry, moved in with an artist...guess I was sort of a slam dunk for the indoctrinators, eh?), that I started writing those socialist-sounding papers. It's amazing how fast your head will fill up with that crap if you're not focused.
Keep your eye on the ball, and you'll be fine.
oh yeah...
It helps that I'm already married and have a pretty steady job :)
I have to keep my eye on the ball. If I don't a lot of bad things start to happen.
you'll be fine.
remember basketweaving or music history?
Those were all electives. Everyone knew electives were just intelectual fun and grade padding.
It is only recently that the radicals of the ivory tower actually taken these fluff elective budgets and diverting them money to radical indoctrination en mass.
What gets me is why are conservative college presidents, deans and professors allowing this indoctrination to take place? Or don't they have enough clout to stop it?
I went to college from 1962 to 1965 and I never read of any such frivolous and stupid courses offered there. My college was extremely serious and routinely flunked out 20 to 25 percent of its freshman classes every year. The trustees were not interested in its students' money.
"its" = "their"
Not always the case. If the classes are not there, or the teachers are not knowledgeable in the areas they are 'teaching', then the 'education' is just a scam to fleece parents of their money.
Now, what are the free-market-capitalist conservatives doing in response? Although it's difficult to compete with the funding that the Federal government can extort from the citizenry and give to these institutions, wouldn't it be logical that this problem also opens up an opportunity to start high-quality/low-politics institutions to compete?
Unfortunately, those who are bent on deconstructing civilization make those fluffy courses mandatory, since no-one with an ounce of sense would bother to take those courses. There, they can identify those who aren't "team players" for a little further attention and investigation. I kid you not.
That sounds like an interesting class. Shame they don't teach that stuff anymore. I suppse they figured that nothing really important happened during that period anyway....
The listed colleges offer an alternative to the liberal status quo, because they allow and encourage conservative students to explore conservative ideas and authors. They offer coursework and scholarship in conservative thought and emphasize principles of smaller government, strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values. Furthermore, they avoid trends in academe by continuing to study Western Civilization instead of straying toward the study of Marxism, feminism, sexuality, postmodernism, and other modern distractions that do not give students a complete understanding of our country, our culture, and its founding principles....
GTBME '81, MSME '85 here.
It was certainly like that then, and I hear the same from some guys I knew through a car forum, that have graduated in the last year.
Glad to hear it confirmed from yet another direction.
May it always be that way.
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