Sunday, December 30, 2012

Victor Davis Hanson; An Anatomy of a Most Peculiar Institution

  PJ Media   A Campus-full of Contradictions
"Almost everything about the modern university is a paradox. It has become a sort of industry gone rogue that embraces practices that a Wal-Mart or Halliburton would never get away with. It is exempt from scrutiny in the fashion that the Left ceased talking about renditions or Guantanamo Bay once Barack Obama was elected, or a Code Pink goes after a NRA official in the way it would never disrupt a hearing on Fast and Furious. In other words, the university is one of the great foundations of the Left, and so is immune from the sort of criticism that otherwise is daily leveled against other institutions.
"So let’s take a 10-minute stroll through the campus and learn why costs soar even as students are ever more poorly educated."

Mr. Hanson expounds on each of these next subjects:
The Curriculum:  Many subjects "tend to foster the two most regrettable traits in a young mind — ignorance of the uninformed combined with the arrogance of the zealot."
...."Is there a provost or a dean in America that can say to faculty, “That is not a real course, and so won’t be taught at our real university”? Does the shop foreman let the welder choose his own project?"

Tenure:  ..."How odd that tenure ensured a monolithic faculty, as well as undesirable traits in matters of work habits and comportment."....

Part-time Exploitation: ...."Does Safeway have one check-out clerk that makes $40,000 and another who earns $20,000 in side-by-side aisles, each about the same age, with the same education, experience, and amount of time on the job — the part-time clerk with a solid record while the “tenured” Safeway clerk is a no better employee?"....

Student Loans: ...."and thus they cynically avoid Professor X’s path-breaking class on transgendered renaissance females. "

The Value of a BA Degree:  ..."I am reluctant to make the argument for the humanities on the basis of financial planning, but then the humanities are not quite the humanities of 50 years ago."


Diversity:..."There is no diversity of thought on the vast majority of university campuses. The classes, the administration, the campus culture, the professors — all accept the man-made destructive heating of the planet, the rape of the environment, the toxicity of free market-capitalism, the racist-sexist-homophobic narrative of the U.S. past, the need for unquestioned abortion on demand, gay marriage, legalization of drugs, etc."...
Then Mr. Hanson sums it up thus:
When we read of the world’s great centers of learning, American — and Californian — universities are always at the top: Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, etc. But almost always, on closer examination, this is because of our superior medical schools, business schools, engineering schools, and science and math departments. The liberal arts have piggybacked on the reputation of American professionalism and science, and therefore have not come under the scrutiny that they so richly deserve.
"Lopez:  Who should be a household name but isn't?
Horowitz:  Professors Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, leaders of the WeatherUnderground; convicted torturer and inventor of Kwanzaa, Professor Malauna Karenga; and oh so many others.
Lopez:  What's your goal in naming names?
Horowitz:  I don't "name names," as I am accused of doing by my leftwing antagonists, nor is The Professors a "list." It is a 450-page book and 112,000-word text. More than 100 professors are profiled not by way of identifying 101 individuals but by way of providing a collective profile of a radical cohort on university faculties that has corrupted higher education from coast to coast."
                                                                                     Amazon photo at right.

Low-information Obama voters
All of the above produces all of this:  "College students chant for ‘Karl Marx’ free Obama Phones, “gay rights” abortion and ‘socialism’ in front of White House at Obama"
"Thousands of college students from across Washington D.C. spontaneously gathered in front of the White House to celebrate President Obama’s reelection.

"Those students were among thousands from colleges across Washington, D.C. who spontaneously gathered in front of fences around the north lawn of the White House to celebrate President Obama’s election victory."

Much more on this at We The People, if you have the stomach for it. Language advisory.

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