Western Civilization = White Supremacy
New York City school administrators have been taught that pillars of Western Civilization such as objectivity, individualism, and even belief in the written word all are examples of … white supremacy, the New York Post reports.
A slide presentation obtained by the Post from the workshop “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change” includes claims that a belief in an “ultimate truth” (objectivity) leads to a dismissal of “alternate viewpoints or emotions” as “bad” (this is straight out of the critical race theory playbook), and that emphasis on the written word overlooks the “ability to relate to others” and leads to “teaching that there is only ‘one right way’ to do something.”
Other “hallmarks” of white supremacy include a “sense of urgency,” “quantity over quality,” and “perfectionism.” Read more at The College Fix
The Civility Problem
Maybe a few courses on how to create a civil society would help America's so-called "social warriors" learn how to deal with their fellow men and women. Let's start with Amherst College in Massachusetts, where former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was scheduled to address the ongoing issue of free speech on campus. Campus Reform reports that Sessions got a dose of today's SJW tactics when a stinkbomb was set off before he went on stage. Then, a walkout was staged by a gay pride group punctuating the assault on the former A.G. Stinkbombs? What is this, 7th grade?
Studying 'Angry White Males'
The University of Kansas has approved a course called “angry white male studies,” open to all students willing to take a women’s studies course first. The course on white males will explore recent changes in demographics since the 1950s. Republican Congressman Ron Estes took a dim view, arguing that ”KU is offering a class that divides the student population and could pose a TitleIX violation by creating a hostile campus movement based on gender.”
The course will be taught by Christopher Forth, who focuses on gender, fat-shaming, and masculinity.
Erasing White Men from Politics
Believing that courses on American political thought are too fixated on white males, Professor Chad Shomura of the University of Colorado at Denver has solved the problem by banning discussion of white men in his course on the nation’s political thought. This means nothing from Washington, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Rousseau or any of the pre-Obama presidents. Discussion of the Hillary Clinton race for the presidency in 2016 is allowed, but how she managed to lose while apparently “running unopposed” is unclear.
No Free Speech: Heckler Cancels Another Student Meeting
Last week, a group of at least 4 Portland State University police officers stood by and declined to intervene as a heckler with a cowbell single-handedly canceled a College Republicans meeting. This is the second time in 2019 that PSU allowed hecklers or would-be hecklers to shut down campus expression — and the second time the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has demanded the university adhere to its First Amendment obligations. FIRE first wrote to the university Feb. 18 after PSU’s law enforcement unilaterally canceled a meeting of a socialist student group after the founder of the group Patriot Prayer said he would show up.
Be Careful What You Wish For on Social Programs
Nathan Glazer, the last of a group of famous neocon social scientists, died at the age of 95 on January 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. (He resisted the label “neocon.”) Glazer consistently warned that vast government plans to improve the lives of the poor often come to grief or create new problems of their own. “The evaluations of the specifics of the first ten years after the launching of (the War on Poverty) confirm that nothing worked and in particular, nothing in education worked.” He concluded that the family was the key institution to positive social change and that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups. The article here by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute ran in 2011 when President Obama planned an extension of the War on Poverty.
There is a stealth shortening of the academic year as well, where professors schedule in-class final exams on the last week of classes instead of teaching for another week and administering the exam during the official exam period.
It is amazing to read the semester outlines given in the front matter of old (1940s-1960s) textbooks and compare them to the syllabus of equivalent classes today. The volume of material taught per course has declined sharply, in tandem with the decline in quality of teaching/ learning.
I thought 18-year-olds went to college because they valued a higher education. Not just a social credential or a certificate that looks good on a resume’, leading to a rewarding career, but knowledge and understanding, the key to maturity, personal worth, and good citizenship. Harvard was supposed to be one of the best places to begin the life-long search for an educated mind, the ambition for which is a personal goal that must come from within.
Today, Harvard undergraduates not only don’t value their opportunity. They hold their professors and their studies in contempt. Instead of thirsting for knowledge and enlightenment, trying to get the most they can out these irreplaceable four years, they want to cut it short and live a lie, pretending to qualifications they have not earned. What kind of “university” creates, or tolerates, or graduates, such worthless phonies?
Nothing wrong with a Fall break, or any week-long break. The pure waste is the absence of a regular summer session. Having one could cut college time by a year.
Actually given the content in what is being taught, at least in non-STEM courses, it’s quality, or more specifically lack thereof, and the seeming ideologically driven purpose of many, if not most, university level instructors, I’m not so sure shortening the school year is such a bad idea.
Now if they could just figure a way to shorten the career lifespan of administrators to months instead of years we’d be on our way to dramatic improvements in at least the cost of the increasingly irrelevant and worthless degrees universities are granting.
Short of peasants at the gates with torches, pitchforks, tar and feathers, I don’t see it changing much for the better.