Academic Rot

[philunderwood]

Academic Rot

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

The average American, as parent, student and taxpayer, has little idea of the academic rot at so many of our colleges. Save for a tiny handful of the nation's colleges, what distinguishes one college from another is the magnitude of that rot.

One of the best sources of information about our colleges is the New York City-based Manhattan Institute's quarterly Web magazine, Minding the Campus, edited by John Leo, former columnist for U.S. News & World Report.

The magazine's Winter 2010 edition contains an article by Dr. Candace de Russy, former member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY), titled "Hate-America Sociology." De Russy's colleague sent her a copy of a student's exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at an East Coast public college. The professor had given it a perfect score of 100. Here are some of the questions asked and the student's written response:

"Question: How does the United States 'steal' the resources of other (third world) countries?

"Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor that cannot be turned down.

"Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?

"Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning." …

"Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?

"Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. (F)or example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female's expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.

"Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.

"Answer: The belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished."

Out of retaliation fears, de Russy withheld the name and university of her colleague who sent the exam. Teaching students hate-America indoctrination is widespread, as I've documented in the past.

A few years ago, according to UCLA's Bruin Standard, Mary Corey, UCLA history professor, instructed her class, "Capitalism isn't a lie on purpose. It's just a lie." She continued, "(Capitalists) are swine. … They're bastard people."

Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, "The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world."

Professor Andrew Hewitt, chairman of UCLA's Department of Germanic Languages, told his class, "Bush is a moron, a simpleton and an idiot." The professor's opinion of the rest of us: "American consumerism is a very unique thing; I don't think anyone else lusts after money in such a greedy fashion."

An English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey tells his students, "Conservatism champions racism, exploitation and imperialist war."

University officials are aware of this kind of academic rot, but not university trustees who bear the ultimate responsibility for the university's welfare. Trustees are mostly yes-men for the president. Legislators and charitable foundations that pour billions into colleges are unaware as well. Most tragically, parents who cough up thousands in tuition to send their youngsters off to be educated, rather than indoctrinated, are unaware of the academic rot as well.

You say, "Williams, what can be done?" Students should record classroom professorial propaganda and give it wide distribution over the Internet. I've taught for more than 40 years and have routinely invited students to record my lectures so they don't have to be stenographers during class. I have no idea of where those recordings have wound up, but if you find them, you'll hear zero proselytization or discussion of my political and other personal preferences. To do otherwise, I consider to be academic dishonesty.

[philunderwood]

neoneocon.com/2011/04/22/if-youve-been-wondering-why-the-standards-of-writing-have-declined-in-recent-years/

April 22nd, 2011

If you’ve been wondering why the standards of writing have declined in recent years…
…wonder no more. Some time ago, the teaching of writing liberated itself from the surly bonds of clarity, rules, and white oppression (is that redundant?) and escaped to touch the face of diversity and self-expression.

Now, huge numbers of writing teachers are dedicated to those latter two principles, as the agenda at a large conference recently sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (hey, at least they haven’t jettisoned alliteration) demonstrates:

…

anels focused on everything but the written word as traditionally understood. Offerings stressed civic engagement, multi-media, sustainability and “eco-composition,” multilingualism, student self-assessment, student extra-curricular experiences, student “engagement,” cross-disciplinarity, hip-hop, Native American traditions and languages, digital storytelling, “queer rhetorics,” “feminist rhetorics,” “visual rhetorics”—and all the usual ethnic grievance communities: Chicano, African-American, indigenous, etc.

Politics is not just covertly present in almost every aspect of the conference and its workshops, it is overtly present as well. And the politics is, as one might expect, that of the left.

Mary Grabar, author of the piece on the conference, and an English instructor in Atlanta, writes:

My own work duties as an instructor of composition forced me to miss a paper on “Tea Party Rage” on Thursday afternoon. But after sleeping off the headache induced by all the drumming, I was at the Atlanta Marriott to attend the Friday 8:00 a.m. session “’Unrelated Kin’: Building Kin Relationships with Critical Race Theory and Out-Loud Public Literacies in Rhetoric-Composition Studies.” Here again a presumed “critical thinking” was applied against the teacher’s political enemy to engage students in protest “action.” Panelist Jody Ludlow advocated using “critical race theory” to expose what she claims is the promotion of “white privilege under the false veil of fairness,” in the language of Nebraska’s Initiative 424 against affirmative action. But through the example of Ludlow and approximately 95 percent of conference participants, it became clear that one must condemn one’s own “white privilege” to be allowed a place at the CCCC table.

The entire article makes for depressing reading. It’s not that this sort of thing was previously unknown; anyone who follows education (and anyone who has read Allan Bloom’s over-twenty-year-old work The Closing of the American Mind) is well aware that these trends have been going on for decades. But the extent of the claptrap, the details of the indoctrination, and the dominance of this sort of approach are still sobering and shocking to read.

A personal note about teaching on the elementary (rather than college) level: I received a very old-fashioned education, even for its time (50s and 60s), in the public schools of New York City. My teachers were uniformly old, and they taught writing and grammar as it was taught at the turn of the century (the twentieth, that is).

We diagrammed sentences till the cows came home. The teachers were tough and it was boring. Rules were rules. Self-esteem was something to be laboriously earned through performance. And diversity merely furnished the ingredients for the soupy melting pot out of which an American identity would be forged.

But by the time I had grown up and was a parent myself, there were rumblings of a kinder, gentler education. At the time it took the form of what was called invented spelling.

The idea was that children would do better at writing if their natural urge to express themselves was not bogged down by such extraneous baggage as rules, at least at the beginning. Later on, precision would come. But in the beginning it was all about freedom and feeling good about oneself and the writing process.

I never bought it. Somehow, generations earlier had managed to learn how to write properly without being unduly stifled. Why encourage bad habits? It seemed logical to suppose that, if children continually practice poor spelling and grammar, it will become more entrenched, and research bears up the fact that traditional spelling instruction is better.

Spelling is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Far more important is the neglect of the classics, the demonization of the old dead white men (and a few women) who wrote so many of them, and the elevation of diversity for diversity’s sake. Those trends seem to be going stronger than ever, and have borne political fruit.

Neo-Neocon

[philunderwood]

The ‘Education’ Mantra

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

One of the sad and dangerous signs of our times is how many people are enthralled by words, without bothering to look at the realities behind those words.

One of those words that many people seldom look behind is "education." But education can cover anything from courses on nuclear physics to courses on baton twirling.

Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school.

We don't have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.

When it comes to postgraduate study in tough fields like math and science, you often find foreign students at American universities receiving more of such degrees than do Americans.

A recent headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education said: "Master's in English: Will Mow Lawns." It featured a man with that degree who has gone into the landscaping business because there is no great demand for people with Master's degrees in English.

Too many of the people coming out of even our most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters.

Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, without ever learning anything about science, mathematics, economics or anything else that would make them either a productive contributor to the economy or an informed voter who can see through political rhetoric.

On the contrary, people with such "education" are often more susceptible to demagoguery than the population at large. Nor is this a situation peculiar to America. In countries around the world, people with degrees in soft subjects have been sources of political unrest, instability and even mass violence.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. A scholarly history of 19th century Prague referred to "the well-educated but underemployed" Czech young men who promoted ethnic polarization there-- a polarization that not only continued, but escalated, in the 20th century to produce bitter tragedies for both Czechs and Germans.

In other central European countries, between the two World Wars a rising class of newly educated young people bitterly resented having to compete with better qualified Jews in the universities and with Jews already established in business and the professions. Anti-Semitic policies and violence were the result.

It was much the same story in Asia, where successful minorities like the Chinese in Malaysia were resented by newly educated Malays without either the educational or business skills to compete with them. These Malaysians demanded-- and got-- heavily discriminatory laws and policies against the Chinese.

Similar situations developed at various times in Nigeria, Romania, Sri Lanka, Hungary and India, among other places.

Many Third World countries have turned out so many people with diplomas, but without meaningful skills, that "the educated unemployed" became a cliche among people who study such countries. This has not only become a personal problem for those individuals who have been educated, or half-educated, without acquiring any ability to fulfill their rising expectations, it has become a major economic and political problem for these countries.

Such people have proven to be ideal targets for demagogues promoting polarization and strife. We in the United States are still in the early stages of that process. But you need only visit campuses where whole departments feature soft courses preaching a sense of victimhood and resentment, and see the consequences in racial and ethnic polarization on campus.

There are too many other soft courses that allow students to spend years in college without becoming educated in any real sense.

We don't need more government "investment" to produce more of such "education." Lofty words like "investment" should not blind us to the ugly reality of political porkbarrel spending.

[philunderwood]

Copying and pasting wouldn’t do this justice:

biggovernment.com/pchristofanelli/2011/05/09/introduction-to-labor-studies-my-first-hand-account/