Higher Education: Matrix Brainwashing 101
NO you do not need a BA, MA, MBA, JD and PhD!
Dear readers;
It looks like ‘ “The Physical / Spiritual Universal Educational Controlling Matrix” is slowly losing ground as the people are finally waking up to the masquerades! Thanks to the 2012/2013 Scorpius Draconis offering plenty wake up calls to an awakening humanity! Even the bones and spirits of the long gone dead will resurface and with it the undiluted truth and the predicted fate of the UK!!
Yes when educated traditionally educated/accredited doctors endorse drugs it becomes a bit too much for the sensible human being and God’s will allows me to reach more people and their children with the undiluted truth about a regenerative cosmic education.
“The Palm Center has received a $1.35 million grant to study issues related to the integrating of transgender persons into the armed forces”
The scientific community as of today has NO plausible answer to why our soldiers are committing suicide at an incontestable accelerated rate and they want to waste money on finding the responsible gene stimulating sexual behaviours? THEY WILL MAKE IT UP because it does not exist because the controlling educational matrix NEED your money!!
Read WHY our soldiers kills themselves and again GIVE ME THE MONEY for your kids’ psychical welfare and while you are at it, please do not feed NASA matrix by joining 78000 morons planning a future trip to Mars!
I can assure you readers those traditionally educated cosmic unconscious kids fresh from accredited colleges and Universities will never ever get to the golden key to what it means to be human without mastering the secrets of the spiritual Universal Mind. There is no gene responsible for sexual orientation its all buried into the karmic the UCI of each and every human beings. What total waste of time and tax dollars readers…Unless of the scientists stealing my psychological cosmic work are reading and learning from me of course. And this is a given…
OMG! IMAGINE WHAT I COULD DO WITH THIS MONEY READERS? GIVE ME THE MONEY TO OPEN MY ASTROPSYCHOLOGY SCHOOLS AND HELP ME BEAT ‘ “The Physical / Spiritual Universal Educational Controlling Matrix”
The Palm Center should invite me and let me educate them with the $1.35 million grant from your taxes to study issues related to the integrating of transgender persons into the armed forces. Gee I will give them so much more than what they could ever bargain for but what are the chances for me to attend and teach there? This is why I need you because the gene they will make up will only be defeated with a new drugs they will fabricate creating much more problems, more depressions, more panic attacks, many more suicides and the women of the current generation of born OCD will produce much more autistic children in the long run.
HELP ME STOP The Epidemic of autism in the United States
When Joshua Baron works delivering food for a local delicatessen, the customers wouldn’t guess that the man handing them their delectable fare is a law-school graduate. But neither the New York City resident’s undergraduate degree in International Affairs nor his law degree has translated into a career. And while he hasn’t yet passed the bar exam — and hasn’t tried in recent years — he still is qualified to work as a paralegal or in compliance. But not only are employers reluctant to hire attorneys for paralegal positions (they worry that they’ll become licensed and resign), says Baron, “There’s a glut of lawyers.”
While Baron is now pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors and thus no longer pounds the pavement for work as some might, his story is not unique. As the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) tells us in “From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs,”
Colleges and universities are turning out graduates faster than America’s labor markets are creating jobs that traditionally have been reserved for those with degrees. More than one-third of current working graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, and the proportion appears to be rising rapidly. Many of them are better described as “underemployed” rather than “gainfully employed.” Indeed, 60 percent of the increased college graduate population between 1992 and 2008 ended up in these lower skill jobs, raising real questions about the desirability of pushing to increase the proportion of Americans attending and graduating from four year colleges and universities. This, along with other evidence on the negative relationship between government higher education spending and economic growth, suggests we may have significantly “over invested” public funds in colleges and universities.
Ticket to the Good Life?
Clearly, a college degree is no longer the surefire ticket to a high-paying job it once was thought to be, and there are many reasons for this. The listing economy is an obvious one, but then there is the law of supply and demand. That is to say, college degrees are far more common than a couple of generations ago and thus don’t hold the cachet they once did. Note here that people in the job market don’t simply compete against some theoretical standard for education, but also against each other. And if, for argument’s sake, 70 percent of people had high-school diplomas and 30 percent college degrees years ago but now 70 percent have college degrees and 30 percent a higher one (this is just a simplified example), the 70 percent is still in the exact same position on paper relative to its competition. So just as they say 60 is the new 40, we have to ask: Is a college degree the new high-school diploma?
This is especially relevant since it has been said that today’s college degree is the educational equivalent of only a 1947 high-school diploma, although with studies evidencing the ignorance of college graduates, rating it even that highly is questionable. The point is, however, that employers can no longer view a college degree as a guarantor of basic knowledge. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa write in their 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses:
Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample [of the study they conducted] did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) performance during the first two years of college. (Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.) While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master.
This explains why a master’s degree is now sometimes required where an undergraduate degree once sufficed: In a dumbed-down system where today’s college equals yesterday’s high school, graduate school is the new college. The result? Americans are paying far more — and attending school far longer — for no better than the same education.
Among the reasons for this cited by Arum and Roksa include the fact that “existing [college] organizational cultures and practices too often do not put a high priority on undergraduate learning,” that students “spend increasing numbers of hours on nonacademic activities,” and “define and understand their college experiences as being focused more on social than on academic development” (that’s an egghead way of saying they want to party hardy). But the reality is that these explanations are the lesser part of the equation.
It’s well known that schools at all levels are currently adrift not just in ignorance but also permissiveness. Where chewing gum and running in the halls were the biggest problems in the 1950s, schools today may have metal detectors and school-shooting protocols, and there is a rash of violence against teachers. Why, New York City has surrendered to the point where it now no longer suspends students who cut class, smoke, or curse — even if they direct their foul tongue at teachers. Even more outrageously, the Obama administration is pressuring localities to administer school punishment based on racial quota for the purposes of equalizing the suspension rates between white and black/Hispanic students. Does any of this serve to cultivate an environment conducive to learning?
Pointing to the Problems
This brings us to a point universally missed when analyzing educational woes, despite it being the most important factor: the lack of discipline and obedience in modern schools. These two qualities are prerequisites for learning for the simple reason that for someone to learn from you, he must first be willing to listen to you. This is why tolerating student disrespect is so destructive. After all, how amenable are you to learning from someone whom you don’t respect? This is, mind you, why society traditionally enjoined youth to respect their elders and everyone to respect God. It’s not that God needs us to bow down to Him or that older folks should have their egos massaged; it’s that man generally won’t take divine law very seriously if he doesn’t show deference to the deity — and, likewise, children won’t take adults’ teaching very seriously if disrespect defines their attitude.
Yet what is witnessed in schools today? To varying degrees they have become babysitting centers, where accountability is lacking and teachers spend a high percentage of their time trying to maintain order and cajole students into listening, leaving instructional time greatly reduced. And how does this relate to college? First, the early-years permissiveness carries over into higher education, with college professors also lacking authority and students having become accustomed to laxity. And this “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree” phenomenon also has another consequence: Just as with language, people learn discipline best when young. If they don’t develop good study habits and a work ethic during their formative years, we shouldn’t be surprised when they’re malformed in college.
Worse still, much of this already narrow instructional window is today devoted to politically correct indoctrination. As the Young America’s Foundation pointed out in “The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses” (12/9/2006), academia has descended into course offerings such as “The Phallus,” “Queer Musicology,” “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration,” “Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism,” “Native American Feminisms,” “Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco,” and “Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” just to name a handful. So maybe Johnny can’t read, but he’s fine with that. He knows that language is a white male homophobic social construct, anyway. (By the way, some of the bizarre courses are offered at Ivy League schools — all for just $55,000 a year.)
And while the above are the most extreme examples, they represent a longstanding problem in education, one that worsens over time. In fact, it’s so longstanding that G.K. Chesterton addressed it in 1910, oh-so-picturesquely putting down the phenomenon inWhat’s Wrong With the World, writing, “Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea.” And this is so because it is not just that modern curricula comprise the latest fashions, but the latest passions.
Since we can’t teach a student everything there is to know in the world, we must pick and choose. But what criteria will we apply? Obviously, we should build curricula on what is most important. Yet this presupposes that there is a yardstick that can be used to judge importance — namely Truth. And this is where the relativism sweeping the West enters the equation. If there is no Truth and everything is relative, we can’t really say that anything is more or less important than anything else. But how then can we choose what to teach from a universe of options? Well, applying reason won’t help us because its role is to determine answers, and we have already concluded that there are no answers to be found (no Truth); thus, with the obviation of reason’s realm — the intellect — there is only one thing left to use as a yardstick: emotion. So you then embrace afrocentrism to make blacks feel better, Latino studies to make Hispanics feel better, and women’s studies to make women feel better. It’s all boiled down to taste, and every taste will be accommodated as long as being sensitive to it makes the thought police feel better (which is why you probably shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for offerings in white studies or men’s studies).
Unfortunately for the hapless students in our effluent-rich educational system, reality doesn’t feel; it dishes out its verdicts without compromise. And one young woman who found this out the hard way is New York University graduate Cortney Munna. After accumulating almost $100,000 in student-loan debt in just four years, she found that her interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies wasn’t exactly the stuff of six-figure salaries. Wrote the New York Times in 2010, “She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating…. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.”
Munna’s case raises some serious questions. First, where were the adults — a guidance counselor, advisor, relative, or someone else — to warn her that an undergraduate women’s studies degree only qualifies one to mount a soapbox? Of course, the college wouldn’t say anything; if it told the truth about its propaganda courses, no one would take them. And businesses — and make no mistake, college is a business — don’t make money by badmouthing their products and turning customers away. Nonetheless, NYU was guilty of academic malpractice not just for having intellectually corrosive courses such as women’s studies, but also for selling students a 100-grand clunker that wouldn’t even get them out of poverty row’s driveway.
But the problem isn’t just caricatured college unsuited to good students; it’s also students unsuited to college. As George Mason University economics Professor Walter Williams wrote last year:
[American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Professor Richard Vedder] says: “The number [of students] going to college exceeds the number capable of mastering higher levels of intellectual inquiry. This leads colleges to alter their mission, watering down the intellectual content of what they do.” Up to 45 percent of incoming freshmen require remedial courses in math, writing or reading. That’s despite the fact that colleges have dumbed down courses so that the students they admit can pass them. Let’s face it; as [fellow AEI scholar Charles] Murray argues, only a modest proportion of our population has the cognitive skills, work discipline, drive, maturity and integrity to master truly higher education.
Of course, this sounds like heresy to modern egalitarian ears. But we do young people no favors by selling them on the “necessity” of a college education — and often saddling them with insurmountable debt — if it serves no legitimate purpose. And speaking of purpose, we can gain more perspective here by understanding that the modern academy long ago strayed from its foundational one.
Attending a university originally had nothing to do with getting a piece of paper that supposedly translated into high-paying job opportunities; it was about expanding your intellectual horizons and learning Truth (in fact, most American universities were founded as explicitly Christian institutions). But how many students today attend school driven merely by a thirst for knowledge or a desire for spiritual growth, as opposed to a lust for money? The problem here isn’t that there is anything wrong with making money per se, but that a place you go to gain job-oriented skills isn’t supposed to be called college but something else: vocational school.
And universities today have become outrageously expensive, window-dressing-replete vocational schools that often teach well only what students need not — and often should not — know. Of course, it’s a great deal for academia. Where their “market” was once confined to the elite, now their business is a “must” for everyone; what the young once got from a high-school education, which doesn’t require a direct, out-of-pocket expenditure from a student’s family, he now can acquire only if he dishes out tens of thousands of dollars for the new “higher” high-school education. Some would call this a racket. But there is a better way.
Alternative Tracks
In saner times, a person who needed a profession would become an apprentice and learn on the job, through practical experience and tutelage. And this system could be applied to white collar fields just as it has been to the trades. How would it work? Simple: A corporation would provide a young person on-the-job training and a small salary, which would increase upon the training’s completion and be commensurate with demonstrated competence. In return, the individual would have agreed to work for the company for a certain number of years. This system would be far more efficient. No more digging a hole of debt with degree ambitions. And if AT&T or IBM provided the employee’s education, would they be as likely to waste time and money on “Gay and Lesbian Studies,” “Ethnic Studies,” afrocentrism, or courses in pornography? The reality is also that if you removed the hamburger helper (and poison pill) and distilled the educational process down to the truly job-relevant, the necessary knowledge and training for many vocations could be provided in six months. The downside? Students would miss what only college can provide: drunken frat parties, hazing, sexual-escapade opportunities, and indoctrination with the dogma of the day.
So given all the ins and outs of education and the difficult job market, how should a high-school junior or senior proceed? Here are some guidelines that may help parents and students make better decisions:
First ask, “What are my goals?” If you aspire only to make a good living, this will narrow down your choices. Determine where your gifts lie and how they can best be monetized, and understand that you may have to sacrifice doing what you like in favor of what’s realistic. And discover what job prospects come with a given undergraduate degree; note here that corporations generally don’t advertise for philosophers or urban studies majors (money can only be made in such fields teaching at a college, and usually a Ph.D. is required). Then find out what the competition is like. As to this, Reuters reports, “25 percent of students hope to work in a career with computers or the Internet. The next most popular fields of interest include business (16 percent); engineering (15 percent); healthcare, defined as doctors, nurses, assistants and technicians (15 percent); and the entertainment/arts field, defined as actor, musician, TV anchor, reporter and producer (15 percent).”
Of course, you may, to paraphrase the old saying, want to find a job you love so that you’ll never work a day in your life. This is fine, but, again, be realistic. If the prospects for making money are slim to none, you won’t want to take on debt that’ll make you a microcosm of the federal government. Remember here that if something really is a labor of love, you can study it to your heart’s content on the Internet. Sure, it will perhaps just be an avocation, but if the field isn’t very marketable, that’s what it may end up being even with a degree. And don’t end up paying $100,000 for an avocation.
Consider the skilled trades. Okay, they don’t sound as cool as video-game developer, but the pay and benefits are quite good; becoming qualified in them doesn’t require four years extra schooling and a large investment of money; and, quite significantly, skilled tradesmen are in demand. As Reuters also reports, “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2014 the U.S. will need 29 percent more HVACR [Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration] and 21 percent more plumbing technicians, a total of more than 100,000 skilled workers in the job pool. Among the 500,000 plumbers in the United States alone, the demand is expected to grow 10 percent by 2016, [sic] however, due to an aging generation of skilled professionals, more than a third of all plumbers — or approximately 167,000 workers — will be exiting the workforce.” Moreover, note that the aforementioned trades-targeted apprenticeship programs available are widespread and offer paid on-the-job training, so you can be compensated as you become qualified for a guaranteed job, as opposed to paying a college for what may be pipe-dream promises. And while the skilled trades don’t seem romantic, they don’t offer the romance of poverty, either. Don’t forget the old joke about the attorney who, after receiving a $200 bill for 25 minutes plumbing work and complaining that he was a famous trial lawyer and didn’t make that much, was told by the plumber, “Neither did I when I was a lawyer.”
If you do attend college, don’t marry the idea of the “peerless” Ivy League education and pay for unfounded reputation. Many schools offer equivalent programs at lower costs. There even are still some colleges that provide highly rigorous educations without the politically correct orthodoxy, such as the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Lastly, think outside the box. College has become a rite of passage and, insofar as it has betrayed its original purpose, should be read its last rites. And it may or may not be for you. If it isn’t, you don’t want to attend and then end up like the cable technician whom CCAP writer Christopher Matgouranis spoke with during cable installation at his sister’s college apartment. As Matgouranis wrote, “This individual had graduated with a bachelor’s degree several years prior but was now just setting up cable television for college students.”
There is a somewhat apocryphal saying that goes, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” Don’t let it interfere with your prospects for a life unfettered by insurmountable debt, either. The financial future you save may be your own.
Higher Education: Brainwashing 101
Written by Jack Kenny
The communists controlled their education system and the Nazi’s did the same. Here in the US the socialists control our education system—there are exceptions in higher ed but not many. Like Hillsdale College and a handful of others
“Language is the source of misunderstanding,” said the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery. But a confusion of tongues was not the cause of Abigail Beardsley’s consternation over what she was expected to learn in a French language course she took at Penn State University in the spring of 2007. Described in the college catalogue as a course in French language and culture, it inexplicably included a viewing of the Michael Moore film, Sicko, an English-language “documentary” about inadequacies of the healthcare system in the United States and a paean to the state-run medical care in other lands. The following semester, Beardsley addressed a formal complaint to the chairman of the university’s French Department about the insertion of a movie about the American practice of medicine in a course that, she wrote, was supposed to be about “real-life language use, the integration of language and culture and the development of the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing.” In other words, an academic exercise.
Yet the professor “took valuable class time” for the Moore film, which the student described as “an attack on the free market health care system in the United States and an endorsement of socialized medicine in England, Canada, France and Communist Cuba.” She went on to point out the absence of any “critical evaluation of the film” or contrary views of socialized medicine presented by the professor that might have been useful to students in forming their own opinions on the subject. That, she noted, was contrary to a university policy requiring instructors to provide students with “access to those materials which they need to think intelligently.” The same policy, Beardsley noted, instructed professors “not to introduce controversial materials that are irrelevant to the class subject and outside their area of expertise.”
The department chairman dismissed her appeal and backed the professor’s decision to make the viewing of a film attacking the American healthcare system a component of a French language course. The student’s complaint and its rejection were related inIndoctrination U by David Horowitz, who has documented what he describes as “the widespread acceptance of political agitation as a suitable form of classroom instruction.” The problem is not just professors preaching their mostly liberal or “progressive” political views as a substitute for academic instruction, even in courses whose subject matter bears no realistic connection to those political opinions. It is also the fact that little to no room is allowed for different, much less opposing, viewpoints, as Beardsley noted in her letter.
No Discussion Allowed
“Ideas deemed ‘reactionary’ and ‘politically incorrect’ are shut down by ‘speech codes’ and collective disapproval” by those who regard teaching as “a partisan activity and the university as a platform from which they hope to change the world,” Horowitz wrote. “Ideas that oppose left-wing orthodoxy — opposition to racial preferences, belief in innate differences between men and women, or, more recently, support for America’s war in Iraq — are regarded as morally unacceptable or simply indecent. The proponents of such ideas are regarded as deviants from the academic norm, to be marginalized or shunned.” Professors, meanwhile, increasingly use their classrooms as forums in which to preach their often passionately held views to a virtually captive audience, frequently on matters far outside their areas of expertise. Horowitz, who claimed to have interviewed hundreds of students at dozens of colleges and universities on the subject, wrote: “In the course of the interviews, I rarely encountered a student who had not been subject to such in-class abuse.”
Yet in many schools the indoctrination begins well before the incoming freshmen enter their first college classes. Orientation programs are often another name for indoctrination into a “progressive” worldview that requires the student to drop as mental contraband any allegedly racist, reactionary, chauvinistic, or “homophobic” views he or she may have contracted like a communicable disease in a home, school, or church environment. One freshman orientation program that has been adopted at nearly 100 colleges and universities is called the “tunnel of oppression” that the new students must traverse, as they learn about the evils of “white privilege” and sit through lectures informing them that they are part of a “rape culture.” “Resident advisers” are hired to help the students work their way to such pre-ordained conclusions as the certainty that religious parents hate their “gay” children and university campuses are inhospitable to Muslims. The resident adviser must first himself or herself be immersed in the race-conscious, feminist, class-warfare ideology. A former “RA” at DePauw University in Indiana described the regimentation she experienced to Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a non-profit organization fighting restrictions on the freedom of speech and the efforts at thought control in schools.
The prospective RA’s were instructed never to think of themselves as merely people, but were to regard themselves, first and foremost, according to their respective classifications: “black” or “white” or “Asian” or “heterosexual” or “queer.” They were required to speak in bigoted stereotypes while being told that was what they were really thinking “deep down.”
“For all we hear about faculty ideological or political bias,” wrote Shibley, “campus administrators are often worse when it comes to brainwashing students.” A radical feminist agenda has permeated the culture of colleges and universities, large and small, in the East and West, and in the heartland of America. In the fall of 2010, Hamilton College in New York required all male freshman students to attend a “She Fears You” presentation to make them aware of the “rape culture” of which they were allegedly a part and of the need to change their “rape supportive” beliefs and attitudes.
“Did Hamilton warn incoming female students of the campus ‘rape culture’ before it took their tuition?” wrote Shibley. “I doubt it. But publicity did force administrators to make the seminar optional — just minutes before it started.”
Freshman orientation as practiced at the University of Delaware also came to the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The very fact that the university labeled its orientation a “treatment” program suggested it was an exercise in the type of mental hygiene that might fairly be described as “brainwashing.” The “educational” materials used in the “treatment” of the new arrivals on campus included a glossary that defined racism as a term that “applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.)” Non-racist, on the other hand, was officially a “non term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism.” Through required attendance at lectures and one-on-one meetings with residence assistants, students learned what views were acceptable (or mandatory) on matters of “social justice” and a “sustainable” environment. (One program urged students to commit to reducing their ecological “footprint” by 20 percent.) The code of political correctness even covered door decorations in the dormitories.
Students were evaluated on how they responded to the “treatment,” with the residence assistants providing written reports to school administrators on the “best” and the “worst” students in the one-on-one sessions. Among the “worst” was a student who complained of having “diversity shoved down [her] throat” and who responded to the question “When did you discover your sexual identity?” with a crisp: “That is none of your damn business.” Another who questioned why the university needed to “force all this diversity stuff” on the students was also labeled one of the “worst.”
In a strongly worded letter to the university president, Samantha Harris, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy, questioned the University of Delaware’s commitment to education, as opposed to indoctrination:
The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of “treatment” for their incorrect attitudes reveals the university’s utter lack of respect both for its students and for the fundamental right to freedom of conscience. And the university’s definition of learning not as a process of acquiring knowledge or technical skill, but rather as the attainment of specific attitudinal or behavioral changes, represents a distorted idea of “education” that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp than with an American institution of higher education. [Emphasis in original.]
The university formally dropped its “treatment” program after the FIRE protest brought publicity, but a series of Residential Curriculum Institutes, based on the Delaware program, has spread onto campuses throughout the country.
Composition of College Classes
Beyond orientation programs, curriculum is another area in which higher education has undergone radical change, as an English professor at a large Midwestern university sadly told The New American. Even a basic freshman course such as English Composition has long ceased to have anything to do with grammar, punctuation, or sentence structure, he said — the type of things a student might be expected to master in learning to write well. English courses and the social sciences are joined together in a program called Connect, in which each course must address three signature issues: sustainability (environmentalism), civic engagement (political activism), and intercultural engagement (multiculturalism).
“Everything from Theater to Philosophy to History to English has, in effect, become sociology,” the professor said. “Teaching subject matter has become less important than teaching a very political perspective.” Regardless of what subject and in which department students are studying, “they get taught the same thing over and over: a radical critique of the entire American social structure, an indictment of capitalism, anti-Christian propaganda, and collectivism over individuality…. It all comes down to race, class and gender. And sexuality, now that they are pushing, in a radical way, homosexuality.”
A strict requirement of “sensitivity” and a heavy emphasis on multiculturalism have combined to create an environment in which “the only culture we’re ever allowed to criticize is our own,” the professor said. He cited as an example the “Jesus Stomp” instructor at Florida Atlantic University, who, as part of an Intercultural Communications course, instructed his students to write the name “Jesus” on a piece of paper and then step on it. In the uproar that followed, the instructor, Deandre Poole, received threats and was placed on paid administrative leave by the university. He has been reinstated to teach classes this summer and fall, but has been limited to online courses for security reasons, said Heather Coltman, the interim dean at the university’s College of Arts and Letters. The school will decide in December if Poole will be welcomed back into the classroom for next year’s spring semester, Coltman said.
“You would never in a million years see anyone do that with the name Mohammed. You couldn’t do that with Hillary Clinton’s name. You couldn’t do that with nearly any other name, or you’d be fired,” said the English professor, who preferred not to be identified because he does not yet have tenure in his present job. Tenure isn’t really a protection of academic freedom, he maintains, but is a means of weeding out professors who are not “ideologically pure enough” to remain on the faculty. “There’s a reason why I’ve taught at seven different universities in 20 years,” he said.
Yet for all the emphasis institutions of higher learning place on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and on race-based courses and Women’s Studies programs, courses not being taught at many colleges and universities are conspicuous by their absence. Last fall the California Association of Scholars issued a report to the regents of the University of California sharply critical of the number of traditional course requirements that have been dropped from the curricula at the various campuses of the statewide university. Entitled “A Crisis of Competence,” the report attributes the deletions to what is described in the subtitle as “The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.”
Among the glaring omissions detailed by the scholars is the fact that none of the nine general campuses in the university system requires students to study the history of the United States or of Western civilization. English majors on some campuses may graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. Students in political science programs get diplomas without a course in American politics. The omissions are not the result of accident or neglect. A study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found more faculty members believe they should teach students to be agents of social change than believe it is important to teach the classics of Western civilization.
The leftward tilt of college and university faculties is nothing new. Numerous studies in recent decades have shown an overwhelming majority of college professors to be left-liberal in ideology and Democratic in party affiliation. But increasingly they seem to be no longer convinced of the need to make any genuine effort at, or pretense of, refraining from making their personal political and social ideals the content of classroom instruction. The school administrators, the California report concludes, “far from performing their role as the university’s quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards.”
At a time when college education costs upwards of $45,000 a year at private institutions and tens of thousands at most state-sponsored universities, the emphasis on racial and cultural diversity and advocacy of social change has come at the expense of academic achievement. “Far too many” students, the California report said, have not learned to write effectively or to read “a reasonably complex book.” Students and their parents, in other words, are paying more and getting less in genuine education.
Yet despite tuition costs that have risen dramatically higher than inflation for three decades, the spending spree in higher education continues, aided and abetted by federal expenditures for research, Pell Grants, and student loans. Much of the spending goes into hiring more administrators to run more diversity programs. Officials at the University of California’s San Diego campus, for example, created a new position called “vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion,” despite a large number of “diversitycrats” already on the school’s administrative payroll. The money for the new vice chancellorship, wrote columnist Michael Barone, “could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.” The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Barone noted, saved some money by consolidating two science departments, while increasing spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
Mainly Conservative Controls
While ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic diversity appears to be prized at the nation’s schools of higher learning, intellectual diversity is something to be silenced where it can’t be eliminated altogether.
Not all too surprisingly, given the controls on free speech that universities now favor, the suppression of free speech on campus is not only aimed at silencing conservative thought. In Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, author Greg Lukianoff begins by recounting the ordeal of a student, Hayden Barnes, who had been expelled from Valdosta State University in Georgia for protesting, on Facebook and in a letter to the editor of the student newspaper, the university’s decision to spend $30 million on the construction of two parking garages. In the student’s environmentalist crusade against the garages and the automobiles it would house, he invoked what Lukianoff describes as “the classic liberal fight song, ‘No Blood for Oil.’” After Lukianoff, an attorney and the president of FIRE, launched a publicity campaign and finally a legal action to have the expulsion overturned, the university’s Board of Regents reversed the decision and offered readmission to Barnes, who, by that time, was completing his education at another institution.
But Lukianoff, who describes himself as a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat, acknowledges that it is conservative-minded students who are most directly affected by the emphasis on “speech codes” and political correctness on college campuses. “While many attempts at censorship are apolitical,” he notes, “you are far more likely to get in trouble on campus for opposing, for example, affirmative action, gay marriage and abortion rights, than you are for supporting them.”
Lukianoff acknowledges being once “hissed at” during a libertarian student conference for being a Democrat, but notes “it is far more common that I am vilified as an evil conservative for defending free speech on campus,” a reaction he has found to be both commonplace and odd. “Isn’t freedom of speech quintessentially a liberal issue?” he asks.
The problem is not new, but it has grown dramatically worse since a young William F. Buckley described the anti-free market, anti-religion intellectual environment at his Ivy League university in God and Man at Yale, way back in 1950. Many parents and students opposed to the indoctrination routinely imposed at so many colleges and universities are nonetheless paying the increasingly expensive piper for educational tunes hostile to their own deeply held values and traditions. Those of a conservative or libertarian persuasion can find alternatives in mostly small, conservative and/or religious colleges and universities. But the nation should be able to expect more from secular, “mainstream” establishments of higher education than to find them as enclaves of a rigid ideological regimentation.
Speech codes that punish students for comments that may offend or provoke a protected race, ethnic group, gender, or persons of a different “sexual orientation” stifle not only speech but thought, preventing the free exchange of ideas in a climate hospitable to debate. As George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley has noted, the nation has gone far beyond the famous dictum of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that the freedom of speech does not confer upon anyone the right to falsely cry fire in a theater. “Our entire society is being treated as a crowded theater,” wrote Turley, “and talking about whole subjects is now akin to shouting fire.”
The once-proud liberal notion of a “values-free” education has long since given way to an educational regime that imposes values that are hostile to freedom, faith, and morality and intolerant of opposing points of view that have the potential of stimulating serious debate about the reigning tenets of a “progressive” creed and ideology. A 2010 survey of 24,000 students by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found only 30 percent of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement: “It is safe to have unpopular views on campus.” More telling, perhaps, is the fact that only 16.7 percent of faculty members registered a strong agreement with that statement. Higher education in recent decades has become dramatically higher in cost, but remarkably lower in the standards it upholds as a university’s ideal. The late Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, was no doubt being facetious when he said that the three-fold purpose of the university was to “provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” Or perhaps he was exaggerating only a bit.
Some economists claim that the rapidly rising costs of college education, propped up by government grants and subsidized loans, have created an economic bubble in the higher education market that will soon burst as the housing bubble did in 2008. Perhaps economic realities will succeed where concern for fairness and decency has failed in focusing minds of professional educators and laymen alike on the meaning and purpose of higher education. Aspiring students in the not-too-distant future may find the doors locked at one or more of our most prestigious universities, with a sign on the lawn in front of the administration building telling the sad story: “Gone out of business. Didn’t know what our business was.”
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